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

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.

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.