Contacts | Programme | Registration | Getting here
Understanding people with ambiguous or marginal identities (in spatial and/or social terms) has emerged as a growing research theme in medieval and post-medieval archaeology and related disciplines over recent years. The liminal zones occupied by such people often had a special place in the medieval and early modern conception of the world. For example, the forests, moors, marshes, heaths and mountains were commonly feared and respected as special places - often the haunts of evil-doers and the realm of malevolent supernatural beings. Even so, the resources they provided were important to medieval and post-medieval people and they were commonly exploited.
The archaeological and historical evidence suggests that the kinds of people who occupied these regions – for example the adolescent girls working as shepherds, the drovers, the miners, the criminals, the squatters on heathland – were made marginal in social life and sometimes also in death during the middle ages and later.
Many European landscapes conceal a wealth of places created by these people: shielings and shepherds’ shelters, farmsteads and small hamlets, drove roads, mines and quarries, fairs and periodic markets, burial grounds, holy wells and other minor religious foci. They provide an exceptional resource for understanding the lives of people on the margins.
This 1-day symposium will explore the lives of these marginal people from a
range of perspectives. A selection of papers will be presented by scholars of
the medieval and later periods on Britain, Ireland, Europe and the Mediterranean
region.