Imagined Communities Constructing Collective Identities In Medieval Europe

Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities in Medieval Europe offers a series of studies focusing on how perceptions of community, its shared history and imagined present, created a collective identity in medieval societies.

This volume offers a fascinating insight into the continuities and discontinuities in the formation of identities in the Low Countries and its neighbouring countries. It is an important contribution to the ongoing debates about national and other identities.

This holistic study demonstrates the interconnected nature of early medieval origin legends and traces their growth over time.

This volume contains work by scholars actively publishing on origin legends across early medieval western Europe, from the fall of Rome to the high Middle Ages. Its thematic structure creates dialogue between texts and regions traditionally studied in isolation.

The eleven essays included in this collective volume examine a range of textual genres produced by Christians and Muslims throughout the Mediterranean, including materials from the Corpus Islamolatinum, Christian propaganda and polemical works targeting Muslims and Jews, Inquisition records, and Christian and Muslim sermons. Despite the diversity of the works under consideration and the variety of methodological and disciplinary approaches employed in their analysis, the volume is bound together by the common goals of exploring the propaganda strategies premodern authors deployed for specific aims, be it the unification of religious, cultural, and political groups through discourses of self-representation, or the invention of the political, cultural, religious, or gendered other. Many of the essays offer critical re-readings of works that are obscure or have never been studied, while others shed new light on the cultural and textual interactions between Christians, Muslims and Jews. The volume is divided into four sections, the first of which is comprised of three chapters on the Corpus Islamolatinum that furnish new evidence showing the important role this “encyclopedia” played in spreading knowledge about Islam and contributing to the creation of propaganda and polemics against Islam among European intellectual circles. The chapters in section two offer novel interpretations of the hermeneutical strategies underlying the composition of polemical works such as the lives of Muhammad and Pedro de la Cavalleria’s Zelus Christi. The essays in section three identify some common hermeneutical strategies in the use of anti-Jewish and anti-Islamic arguments to polemicize against religious others or edify Christians and illuminate intertextual relations between authors and genres (disputatio and praedicatio). Finally, section four introduces the gender perspective: the genered nature of the accusations of Judaizing in the analysis of the transcripts of the inquisitorial court of three sisters who were tried in Barcelona in 1496, on the one hand, and two studies that explore the constructions of identities and gender relations reflected in various Islamic sources from opposite ends of the Mediterranean. They offer glimpses of women as subject (s) and as object (s) of preaching and show how such texts can reify or subvert traditional binary gender roles.

An examination of how regional identities are reflected in texts from medieval England.

Vernacular writers of late medieval England were engaged in global conversations about orthodoxy and heresy. Entering these conversations with a developing vernacular required lexical innovation. The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature examines the way in which these writers complemented seemingly straightforward terms, like heretic, with a range of synonyms that complicated the definitions of both those words and orthodoxy itself. This text proposes four specific terms that become collated with heretic in the parlance of medieval English writers of the 14th and 15th centuries: jangler, Jew, Saracen, and witch. These four labels are especially important insofar as they represent the way in which medieval Christianity appropriated and subverted marginalized or vulnerable identities to promote a false image of unassailable authority.

Teresa Pac provides a much-needed contribution to the discussion on shared culture as foundational to societal survival. Through the examination of common culture as a process in medieval Kraków, Poznań, and Lublin, Pac challenges the ideology of difference—institutional, religious, ethnic, and nationalistic. Similarly, Pac maintains, twenty-first century Polish leaders utilize anachronistic approaches in the invention of Polish Catholic identity to counteract the country’s increasing ethnic and religious diversity. As in the medieval period, contemporary Polish political and social elites subscribe to the European Union’s ideology of difference, legitimized by a European Christian heritage, and its intended basis for discrimination against non-Christians and non-white individuals under the auspices of democratic values and minority rights, among which Muslims are a significant target.