Of Strangers and Foreigners (late Antiquity-Middle Ages)

The essays contained in this volume comprise the text of the papers which were presented at a symposium held at the University of California at Berkeley under the auspices of the Robbins Religious & Civil Law Collection. This symposium was part of a series of conferences sponsored by a multi-national, interdisciplinary group entitled "Die Reaktion der Normalen," created in 1987, whose area of focus is the history of normality in the Middle Ages. In these essays, attention is focused upon the diverse categories of persons whose condition, bearing or behavior differed from the accepted social norm. For the jurist, the history of deviant behavior often takes the form of a history of the application of discriminatory rules & interdictions against specific social groups. At these symposia, the close collaboration between historians & legal experts, specialists in the history of Byzantium or the medieval Occident, resulted in a better understanding of the relationship between social practices & legal norms whose cultural function extends beyond the narrow frame of a system of positive law.