HomeTelling and Thinking Marginality in the Middle Ages

Telling and Thinking Marginality in the Middle Ages

Dire et penser la marginalité au Moyen Âge

Marginalität im Mittelalter: Ausdrucksformen und Deutungen

Dire e pensare la marginalità nel Medioevo

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Published on Tuesday, February 24, 2026

Abstract

The annual study days organized by the Jeunes Chercheur·euses Médiévistes (JCM) will be held this year on the 12th and 13th of March 2026 at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Approached from an interdisciplinary perspective, the conference will be devoted to the theme of marginality in the Middle Ages.

Announcement

Argument

The annual Study Days organized by the Jeunes Chercheur·euses Médiévistes (JCM) will be held this year on the 12th and 13th of March 2026 at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Approached from an interdisciplinary perspective, the conference will be devoted to the theme of marginality in the Middle Ages.

In English, the word margin originally meant “An edge, a border” (attested from 1382). A few years later, it acquired the specific sense of the “The space on a page, etc., between its extreme edge and the main body of written or printed matter” (OED, “margin”), and by the sixteenth century, in adjectival form, it came to signify that which “Written or printed in the margin of a page” (OED, “marginal”). The word marginality is a derivative of marginal coined in the first half of the twentieth century (c. 1908) to convey additional notions, most notably that of social anomaly. This terminological development invites us to reflect on a complex phenomenon whose reality remains elusive. Beggars, prostitutes, lepers, beguines, and vagabonds, among others, constitute a population that is difficult to define : at once dependent on and excluded from the rest of society, they occupied the margins of certain social norms. But which norms are at stake, and which forms of marginality are we speaking about ? How can this modern, and knowingly anachronistic, concept be mobilized in the study of the medieval period ?

Social Margins

To address these questions, we would first like to consider social margins. This includes examining the place and status of “suffering” or “different” bodies (Delattre 2018), such as lepers and the disabled, within medieval societies. Individuals marginalized because of their religion or occupation also fall within this scope. Certain trades were notoriously deemed vile or disreputable : for instance, those associated with cleaning (sweepers, laundresses), those in contact with blood (butchers, surgeons, gravediggers), or activities judged morally reprehensible (prostitutes, actors, usurers, moneylenders) (Zaremska 2004 : 639–640). Similarly, religious practices, rites, and cults could foster processes of marginalization, sectarianism, or even conflict—or, conversely, promote integration (Montesano 2021 : 17). How were religious belief and practice addressed in the literary sphere ? While Christian theological writings tended toward adversarial and marginalizing views of religious alterity, evidence of tolerance and inclusivity also exists, as exemplified, among others, by the famous novella I.3 of Boccaccio’s Decameron.

The phenomenon of marginalization could also be linked to social gender (Klapisch-Zuber 2004). Recent studies have highlighted the potential emancipation of women, through examples such as the beguines or women writers (Bartoli, Manzoli, Tonelli 2023 ; Bartoli, Garbini, Manzoli 2024 ; Howes 2024). Women, often excluded from male-dominated spaces, devised gendered strategies to access them and thus step out of the margins : cross-dressing in the case of certain saints (Maillet 2020), or the adoption of a “masculinizing” style by the trobairitz (LeNan 2021). The common feature of these strategies was the masking of female social identity by performing masculinity— effectively becoming “men” in the eyes of society. Men, too, could be socially excluded. Those who strayed too far from prevailing norms of hegemonic masculinity (McNamara 1994) risked marginalization : the “effeminate,” for instance, or “sodomites” (Mills 2012). Depending on their social class, men were expected to conform to a codified masculinity in order to avoid marginalization. What do the sources reveal about the strategies adopted by those who deviated from these norms ?

Spaces of the Margin

The margin is peculiar in that it is at once included in and excluded from the entity it frames. We wish to explore how such threshold spaces functioned as intermediaries between a work, a place, an object, and the wider world. To what extent does spatial positioning—in the margins, in the periphery—reflects the meaning or value attributed to marginal elements like social groups, objects, places, or artifacts (Camille 1992) ?

Urban planning too can illuminate the discriminations exercised against marginalized populations. Prostitutes and lepers for instance are concrete examples of social groups simultaneously excluded from and integrated into urban space. Prostitutes might be forced to live outside city walls (extramuros) or confined within brothels inside them (intramuros), with both arrangements sometimes coexisting (Roby 2016 : 136–137). Lepers, for sanitary reasons, were likewise housed extramuros, yet this location allowed them to remain connected to urban populations, benefiting both from commercial exchanges and from alms, since they were regarded as privileged intercessors in the quest for salvation (Brenner 2010 ; Le Blévec 2008).

At the borders of principalities or kingdoms in both the West and the Latin East, noble lineages established in the marches exemplify the tension between opportunities and constraints. The so- called “nobility of the Marches” was caught between loyalty to the prince and the multiplication of external ties, between the pursuit of dynastic autonomy and the necessity of assimilation to political and cultural contexts (Paviot & al. 2017 ; Chevalier & Ortega 2017). Fortifications, walls, and borders not only defended enclosed spaces but also served to map social conceptions (Frontières 2021). The same holds true for perceptions of the world’s limits. Travel narratives such as The Book of John Mandeville or, later, Marco Polo’s Description of the World, alongside visual representations (e.g., the thirteenth-century rose window of Lausanne Cathedral), bear witness to medieval engagements with alterity and the unknown (Girinon & Lejosne 2024 ; Josserand & Jerzy 2017).

Another marginal space lies within the codex itself. The marginalia of illuminated manuscripts (13th– 15th c.), often populated by fantastic and sometimes obscene creatures, scenes, or objects (Wirth 2008), are deeply tied to their context of appearance. Their study highlights the interaction between the text and its periphery. Two (non-exhaustive) approaches can be adopted : liminal spaces— margins and borders—may be studied through the lens of aesthetic ornamentation (ornatus, Bonne 1996) ; alternatively, elements cohabiting with the text may be analyzed in narratological terms as paratext (Brown-Grant et al. 2019 ; Stout 2021). Furthermore, while glosses might appear excluded from the text, they can nevertheless interact with it, as seen in the transmission of the Eschés amoureux and its prose commentary by Évrart de Conty, Livre des eschez amoureux moralisés (Mussou 2006).

Margins as Interstices

The margin may also be envisaged as an in-between space, inscribed within the interstices of a homogeneous whole, without constituting a radical alterity. According to Foucault, the medieval conception of localized space emerged through a general hierarchy articulated along multiple criteria—sacred/profane, open/closed, urban/rural, celestial/terrestrial (Foucault 1967). This hierarchy generated overlaps and produced “other spaces” that might be termed marginal and that he called heterotopias (cemeteries, theaters, gardens, libraries, barracks, fairs, harems).

Certain groups formed beyond fixed spaces, in shifting “non-places” : roving bands of mercenaries, armies on campaign, itinerant merchants and artists, or pilgrim groups establishing temporary communities outside established structures. Within urbanized zones, interstices also existed as tolerated but unrecognized sites—the edges of roads, traveling theaters, surgeons’ wagons, preachers’ pulpits—where marginal presence escaped official logics while nonetheless participating in broader social dynamics (Lefebvre 1974). Such interstices could also serve as grounds for resistance against established structures : in this case, they were not endured but actively appropriated. This was the case, for instance, with so-called dissident religious communities (Waldensians, Dolcinians, Cathar Perfecti, Hussites, etc.), who promoted alternative ways of life.

The interstice could also bear an identity function, designating the conditions of those who belonged fully neither to one world nor to another—migrants, mixed-heritage individuals, gender or religious minorities, slaves—whether this situation was imposed (ghettos, barracks), organized (guild districts), or organic (ethnic or religious communities ; Conesa Soriano & Pilorget 2016). Conversely, it could produce de-individualization and function as what Augé termed a “Non-Lieu” (Augé 1992). Interstitial spaces could also act as catalysts of encounter and cultural hybridity—a “Third Space”—allowing identities to reinvent themselves beyond binary oppositions (Bhabha 1994). In this sense, they were loci of production and innovation, laboratories for social, cultural, and political experimentation. For Deleuze (1995), the interstitial space was privileged as a site of generation and creation. Literature and art, in turn, embody this displacement ; as Blanchot observed, they “transcend the present place and moment to situate themselves at the world’s periphery” (1997 : 326).

Programme

Jeudi 12 mars

13:30 Accueil 

14:00 Introduction

SESSION I : Le laid, la brute et le mendiant : représentations littéraires des marges

  • 14:30 Hugo Tullii (Université de Neuchâtel)
    « Barbe ou menton ; elle me fait trambler. ». Revendication de la marginalité par l’érotisation de la laideur à la fin du Moyen Âge
  • 15:05 Tilleane Charavel (Université de Lausanne)
    Conscience présente de la marginalité : Girart de Roussillon, Wien, ÖNB, Cod.2549

15:40 Pause

  • 16:00 Smilla Steiner (Université de Lausanne)
    La poésie de William Dunbar (XVe-XVIe s.) comme outil pour faire émerger les voix oubliées dans James IV : Queen of the Fight (2022) de Rona Munro
  • 16:35 Camille Rivoire (Université de Toulon)
    Marges et marginalités du Mystère de la Passion de Jésus-Christ, ms. Paris, BnF, nouv. acq. fr. 28471

17:10 Pause

  • 18:00 Conférence plénière: Prof. Marina Montesano (Università degli Studi di Messina)
    Marginality and Otherness. Themes, Problems, Representations

Vendredi 13 mars

9:00 Accueil

SESSION II : Faire la marge: élaboration et stratégies

  • 9:15 Tom Oubelkhir (Université Lyon 2 Lumière et Université de Lausanne)
    Renvoyer l’Islam des marges aux marges de la mémoire : le chiisme syrien dans la chronique Ḍayl Tārīḫ Dimašq (Continuation de l’histoire de Damas : 1048-1160) d’Ibn al-Qalānisī.
  • 9:50 Livia Bausi (Università degli Studi di Firenze)
    Luoghi di culto condivisi come interstizi nel Medio Oriente medievale 
  • 10:25 Milan Herlth (Universität Zürich)
    Damit das man die erkenn den man solichs almosen geben sol: Zur Konstruktion der ‘Hausarmen’ in Freiburg i.Ü. im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert

11:00 Pause

SESSION III : Marges Concrètes - sur la page, sur le mur 

  • 11:20 Denise Ugliano (Università degli Studi di Napoli)
    Paratextes et émotions dans les marges des manuscrits napolitains de Sénèque le tragique
  • 11:55 Anna Adashinskaya (University of Thessaly, Volos)
    Graffiti in Moldavian Painted Churches (16th–18th c.): Marginal Texts on the Margins of Images

12:30 Repas

SESSION IV : Lunettes marginales: relire texte et histoire au prisme de la marginalité

  • 14:10 Morgane Leclerc (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 et Université de Lille)
    Dire et penser un espace de la marge : pour une approche géopoétique des îles médiévales 
  • 14:45 Priscilla Benke (Université Caen Normandie)
    Repenser la société médiévale par la lecture d’un poème « en marge » : le Dittamondo de Fazio degli Uberti
  • 15:20 Letizia Nuscis (Università degli Studi di Teramo)
    Gostanza di Vanni Bonaccorsi : marginalità e azione in una disputa ereditaria trescentesca

15:55 Conclusion
16:15 Fin

 

Places

  • Bâtiment Miséricorde 8, salle 0101 et Miséricorde 10, salle 01.13 - Rue de Rome 6 & 8
    Fribourg, Switzerland (1700)

Event attendance modalities

Hybrid event (on site and online)


Date(s)

  • Thursday, March 12, 2026
  • Friday, March 13, 2026

Keywords

  • jcm, marginalité, interdisciplinarité

Contact(s)

  • Comité d'Organisation des JCM26
    courriel : jcm [dot] unifr [at] gmail [dot] com

Information source

  • Bastien Racca
    courriel : jcm [dot] unifr [at] gmail [dot] com

License

CC0-1.0 This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.

To cite this announcement

« Telling and Thinking Marginality in the Middle Ages », Study days, Calenda, Published on Tuesday, February 24, 2026, https://doi.org/10.58079/15rea

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