Social Science Research Council

"Boundary Crossing, Boundary Making: Christian-Islamic Interaction in the Western Mediterranean (12^th - 14^th c.)"

My current project equally reflects my love for the novels of Amin Maalouf and Amitav Ghosh, as well as my course of study at Princeton. My research focuses on Christian-Islamic interaction in the Western Mediterranean during a critical period of interfaith relations, the twelfth to early fourteenth centuries. I begin with a seeming contradiction in the historiography of these Mediterranean encounters. On the one hand, scholars see the Mediterranean as a violent boundary, a zone of conflict and crusade, where Muslim and Christian are neatly defined. On the other hand, it is represented as a peaceful and utopian frontier, where merchants and scholars blur the boundaries between Muslim and Christian. I hope to offer a productive critique of both the hostile and utopian visions of the Mediterranean in order to rethink the dynamics of interfaith relations. My dissertation focuses primarily on individuals that transgressed political and religious allegiances as well as confused peace and violence: mercenaries, smugglers, and pirates. I study not only the social reality of their religious and political identities but also state and religious responses to these "boundary-crossers." I argue that efforts to regulate these individuals were central to the articulation of religious and political boundaries in the thirteenth century. But more precisely and surprisingly, I argue that boundaries arose not despite or against these transgressors but through and around them. These boundary-crossers were also boundary-makers. For this project, I will be working primarly in the Crown of Aragon Archive in Barcelona, Spain but also consulting the Cathedral Archives of Barcelona and the National Archives in Madrid. I currently hold a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to Spain and will begin my SSRC Fellowship in January, 2005.