Strangers at the Gate! Multidisciplinary Explorations of Communities, Borders, and Othering in Medieval Western Europe: (21 Explorations in Medieval Culture)

This volume showcases a range of different approaches to strangers and strangeness across medieval western Europe. It focuses on how communities responded to the arrival of strangers and to different ways in which individuals and groups were constructed as estranged. Further, it reflects on different forms of border-crossing, from lived experience to literary imagination and from specific journeys in precise contexts to the conceptualisation of the shift from life to death. In the range of its contributions – applying linguistic, historical, archaeological, architectural, archival, literary, and theological analyses – it seeks to bring together disciplines and geographical areas of study that are too often strangers to one another in medieval studies. Contributors are Sherif Abdelkarim, Anna Adamska, Adrien Carbonnet, Wim De Clercq, Florian Dolberg, Joshua S. Easterling, Susan Irvine, Marco Mostert, Richard North, James Plumtree, Euan McCartney Robson, Beatrice Saletti, Simon C. Thomson and Gerben Verbrugghe.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements List of Figures and Tables Notes on Contributors Introduction: Fearing, Facing, and Being a Stranger  S.C. Thomson 1 Studying Communication in the Margins of Medieval Society  Marco Mostert 2 HITting on Migration in the Murky Middle Ages: Advocating an Interdisciplinary Approach  A Case Study in Old English/Old Norse Language Contact  Florian Dolberg 3 The Language of the Mute Strangers: The Ambivalent Position of the German Language in the Late Medieval Polish Kingdom  Anna Adamska 4 How Foreigners Entered Italian Cities in the Fifteenth Century: The Case of Bologna  Beatrice Saletti 5 Little Flanders Beyond Wales: The Historical Context of Flemish Settlement Landscapes in South Pembrokeshire  Gerben Verbrugghe and Wim De Clercq 6 Repopulating the City with Strangers: The Forced Colonization of Arras by the King of France Louis XI (1479–1484)  Adrien Carbonnet 7 Strangers in the Cathedral: Place, Landscape and Nostalgia in Symeon of Durham’s Libellus de Exordio  Euan McCartney Robson 8 Resident Stranger: Sæmundr in the Ashkenaz  Richard North 9 The Perils of Medieval Bridges: Gregory, Grendel and Gawain  Susan Irvine 10 Strange Confessions: Salvation and Prayers for the Dead in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogue on Miracles  Joshua S. Easterling 11 Placing the Green Children of Woolpit  James Plumtree 12 Afterword  Sherif Abdelkarim Bibliography Index

About the Author :
S.C. Thomson, Ph.D. (2017), is Senior Lecturer in Medieval English Language and Literature at Heinrich-Heine-Universität in Düsseldorf. He has published on Old English manuscripts and poetry, on stories and imagery in the English reign of Cnut, and on the medievalist novel The Mere Wife, and has edited volumes on sensory perception and on storytelling in medieval western Europe.