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Rethinking medieval margins and marginality: edited by Ann E. Zimo, Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher, Kathryn Ryerson, Debra Blumenthal, London and New York, Routledge, 2020, 272 pp., $48.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780367439569
For a serious academic work, this book is very enjoyable and can be said to have appeal beyond its expected academic readership. It takes analytical categories used to understand the present and looks at how they were applied in the past and how Medieval people, primarily but not exclusively in Europe, understood them. Specifically, the book is about how our current perceptions of marginality and the categories of people within it do match with the actual dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in Medieval times. It developed out of a 2016 panel on Marginality during the 22nd Arizona for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Conference. According to the authors, the panel was lively, and they concluded that today’s scholars may be reading marginality into what is a far more complicated picture. Duplicating to some extent the race/gender/class categories of contemporary critical social science, the book is organized around the marginalities of race, geography, gender, the law and the body. Lori De Lucia begins the regular chapters of the book with a deep discussion of the economic relationships between Borno, a state in the Sahel, and Palermo. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 forced Palermo to find new sources of slaves, and it turned to more direct relations with the Sahel through Tripoli. Drawing upon earlier delineations that used colour as an indication of status in North Africa, Palermo (and Valencia) minted the association of Blackness with enslavement in a European context. De Lucia explains exactly how this process took place and provides the reader with a deep awareness of the extent of this process (29–47). In contrast with enslaved Africans, the Mongols of the 13th century presented a clear threat to both Europe and the Middle East. Sierra Lomuto addresses how the Latin Catholic world saw the Mongols (48–65). The sources used to reconstruct the picture are those of travelers who interacted with the Mongols, often ascribing fantastic and surreal characteristics to them in order to other and dehumanize them, but at the same time attempt to bring the Mongols into the Christian fold.