In 2017, amid an alarming increase in white supremacist violence in Europe and North America, the annual International Medieval Congress (IMC) at the University of Leeds featured “Otherness” as its core theme. It ended up offering a series of unintended “teachable moments” about otherizing’s pervasiveness, even among scholars dedicated to better understanding its nature and reducing its negative impacts. As the Chronicle of Higher Education article that summarized some of the issues indicated, [1] concerns about the conference’s approach, particularly with regard to the overrepresentation of white male plenary speakers and the marginalization of relevant research by medievalists of color, were raised in advance, but from the opening keynote it became clear that the message had not been heard. [2] Not only were all the speakers white European males, but the introduction began with an offensive remark regarding racial identity. The problems multiplied from there and the expressions of outrage took many forms, resulting in a petitioned apology from IMC organizers as well as a thoughtful response from the scholarly organization Medievalists of Color. [3]
The disparaging distortion of essential work in the field in the introduction to “Otherness” in the Middle Ages, edited by Hans-Werner Goetz and Ian Wood, indicates ongoing defensiveness regarding the criticisms of the conference, although it does not directly reference them. It tries to dismiss the ever-growing body of medieval scholarship that draws on race and postcolonial studies with empty claims, including the implication it lacks originality, since “all this has long before been recognized before [sic] by medievalists,” while simultaneously denying race’s relevance, insisting “[i]t is not by chance that medieval Latin did not even have a word for ‘race’”(18), despite multiple applicable words, the most significant being gens, and despite the obvious fallacies inherent in denying medieval realities on the basis of modern terms. English, let alone Latin, did not have the wordsexism until the 1960s, and while Latin does have religio, the modern and medieval meanings of religion vastly diverge, as Nikolas Jaspert acknowledges in his essay. The introduction also makes deeply problematic statements about areas outside of the authors’ expertise, such as the unsupported and uncontextualized assertion that the Holocaust “did certainly not derive from religious reasons (and in fact many of the murdered ‘Jews’ were emancipated Christians)” (emphasis in the original, 22). Its antagonistic attitude undermines its overview of “Otherness” and of the eighteen featured essays, which were all presented at the 2017 IMC conference.
These essays are arranged alphabetically by author’s last name, except for Jaspert’s, which follows the introduction due to its “explicit methodological concerns” (29). The lack of thematic organization, frequent typos, inconsistency in capitalizing the book’s central concept (“Other/Otherness”), and repeated duplications in bibliographies (e.g., Edward Said’s Orientalism appears in four) suggest limited editorial attention beyond the introduction itself. Their biographical information indicates that eighteen of the twenty contributors are European academics, with one American (Ralph W. Mathisen) and one Japanese scholar (Yu Onuma). Their essays almost without exception center on medieval Europe, although Onuma’s considers views of Indians in medieval European literature and Eduardo Manzano Moreno examines attitudes towards Otherness in early Islam, including in the Middle East and North Africa as well as Europe. Despite the introduction’s warnings against “hypermodernism” (26), a few do connect the subject with contemporary issues and all enhance understanding of Otherness on some level.
After Jaspert’s essay on the Mediterranean, Martin Borýsek explores the vibrant diversity of medieval and early modern Jewish communities in Corfu, Crete, and Morocco and the ways in which they othered non-Jews as well as Jews. Clemens Gantner next considers “the dynamic concepts of Othering and Sameing” in ninth-century Italian portrayals of Franks and Byzantines (93). Sophie Gruber expands upon one of Gantner’s core texts, the Historia Langobardorum Beneventanorum by Erchempert, a monk of Montecassino, which “reveals that identities were permanently in the making” (134). In one of the collection’s strongest essays, Sylvia Huot analyzes gender and sexuality identity crises in medieval French Ovidian narratives, including Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea, which insist on “compulsory heterosexuality: a trait so thoroughly naturalized and so essential that gender itself may shift in order to preserve sexual difference within a couple” (146).
Astrid Kelser compares anti-Judaism in the works of Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas, and finds Aquinas to be the most overtly hostile in his own words and exhortations to others’ deeds; Bernard condemns Judaism itself but instructs Christians not to harm Jews, while Abelard represents a less explicit anti-Judaism than both, but implies that Judaism is less valid than paganism, let alone Christianity. A fascinating array of individuals appears in Nike Koutrakou’s essay on Byzantine monasticism, several of whom get discussed at length in Roland Betancourt’s Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender and Race in the Middle Ages (2020), which offers indispensable insights regarding the issues in Koutrakou’s contribution, yet which she does not draw on, despite as or more recent publications appearing in her bibliography. Fabian Kümmeler investigates internal Otherness on a relatively homogenous Dalmatian island, where herders became suspect due to “the conflicting dynamics of the triangular antagonism between pastoralism, agriculture, and governance” (230).
Two essays on Muslims follow, Eduardo Manzano Moreno’s on early Islamic openness to assimilating a range of Others and Patrick S. Marschner’s on the ways in which Iberian Christians drew on the Bible to portray Muslims as God’s punishment upon them, identifying themselves as God’s Chosen People. Later in the collection, Tiago João Queimada e Silva analyzes how Muslims, an ongoing hated “Archother,” both united fourteenth-century Portuguese Catholic royalty and aristocracy and became a temporary ally in their internal power struggles. Relatedly, Felicitas Schmieder explores mappae mundi’s portraits of the world, noting that the fifteenth-century Velletri or Borgia map represents Asia as friendlier to European Christians than Africa and suggests that the formerly hated Mongols had come to be seen as potential allies in European battles against Muslims, even though they had converted to Islam themselves.
Three essays center Scandinavia, two of them specifically focusing on the law: Miriam Tveit’s on the “nearly invisible” treatment of the Sámi in Scandinavian law (437), the collection’s final essay; Roland Scheel’s on representations of the Viking Age in Christian Scandinavian legal texts; and Meghan Mattsson McGinnis’s exploration of the Viking Otherworld. More so than any other essay in the collection, Mattsson McGinnis’s draws on material culture, noting, “Archaeologists increasingly understand identity as both intersectional and situational, with each individual carrying an array of social identities that can be varyingly activated in different ways and to different degrees during the various encounters of their everyday life” (292). The dead complicate constructions of Otherness in profoundly meaningful ways: our beloved kin yet also abhorrent and at times terrifying, representing our own eventual deaths, with rituals taming them “from a potentially dangerous ghost into an ancestor” (307). Scheel points out that though Scandinavians came to see law and order as distinctively Christian ideals, later medieval texts saw the Viking past as both same and Other, depending on the context. Similarly, as Tveit shows, the Sámi were “the ‘other’ within, both familiar and alien” (451), associated with sorcery and a suspicious and nomadic affinity with nature and pressured by other Scandinavians to convert to Christianity.
In the three remaining essays, Mathisen challenges assumptions about “barbarians,” arguing that they were integral, not antithetical, to the Roman world and interpreting the frontier “more as a highway than a barrier to cultural interaction” (277); Onuma analyzes how medieval Europeans used Indian philosophers as virtuous exemplars to criticize their own society, “bringing the Other and the Self together, while paradoxically setting the two apart” (335); and Maria Portmann examines artistic representations of “good” Jews, like prophets and patriarchs, and “bad Jews, who wear a headdress or a round badge” (362), in Toledo’s cathedral on the site of a former mosque in the late fourteenth century.
The essays cover an interesting range of contexts, but not enough to support the introduction’s claim that “this volume is so far the most comprehensive attempt to tackle this huge problem concerning the Middle Ages. So it will hopefully stimulate a vivid discussion” (31). The conference stimulated abundant discussion, however, with which the volume regrettably does not engage, apart from the introduction’s misrepresentations of scholarship that draws on race and postcolonial studies. Thoughtful consideration of the criticisms directed at the conference and their impact on the perspectives of those most directly involved might have enhanced the volume. Instead, the introduction’s reactionary rejection makes its closing line especially ironic: “May reflection on ‘Otherness’ help to bring people together in a world that seems to be tending more and more towards egotism and isolation” (31). Similarly, apart from a brief reference on the back cover, the volume doesn’t define IMC, simply using the initialism and assuming readers’ familiarity; and the €125/$157 price tag further indicates that Otherness might be its focus, but inclusion and equity are not its goals.
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Notes:
1. Available (login required) at https://www.chronicle.com/article/medievalists-recoiling-from-white-supremacy-try-to-diversify-the-field/.
2. Available at https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/imcarchive/2017/sessions/1/.
3. Petitioned apology available at https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/imc-otherness. Response available at https://medievalistsofcolor.com/statements/on-race-and-medieval-studies/.