Crossing Boundaries: Issues of Cultural and Individual Identities in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

The essays presented here cover a range of topics and periods and testify to the breadth and depth of “boundaries” as a concept. The concept’s origins are located in the work of ethnographers, whose most cogent representative is Fredrik Barth. In his seminal work Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, a collection of articles by Barth and others published in 1967, he shifted the scholarly discussion about ethnicity away from particular attributes that define ethnic groups to the boundaries that separate them from another. Boundaries were less significant for what they enclosed than for their very nature and purpose. The disciplines that make most use of the concept of “crossing boundaries” are the youngest, such as feminist and gender studies or, more generally, cultural studies.
The first section of the collection consists of literary approaches to boundaries, ranging widely in subject matter from Norman drama to sixteenth-century goodnight ballads. In the second part, the concept of boundaries is brought to bear on the existentia1 plight of Byzantine refugees, Marian devotion in Milanese music, witch hunters’ manuals and finally strangers in Tudors England. In every case, literary texts come into play, but most of these authors seek to apply the concept of transgression and boundaries to their texts in different ways. Individually and as a group, the essays contribute fresh insights into wel1-known and some less familiar works of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.