medieval citizenships
jamie taylor (Bryn Mawr College)

  

This thread asks how the Middle Ages understood citizenship.  Whereas contemporary citizenship is an accident of birth, medieval citizenship could be conferred in a range of ways:  via inheritance; via guild sponsorship; and via purchase.  Legal theorists such as John of Paris, Marsilius of Padua, and John Fortescue metabolized Aristotelian models of citizenship to determine who should and should not receive rights, freedoms, and protections from the state.  Theologians such as Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas imagined citizens within a spiritual community that exceeded terrestrial constraints to formulate global religious subjectivities via civic vocabularies.

This thread seeks to explore how citizenship was produced, policed, and challenged in a wide range of discourses, including legal, theological, philosophical, and literary.  In doing so, it explores the ongoing negotiations about human rights, freedom, privacy, and consent as contemporary and medieval concerns alike 

 

Below, I propose two panels under this sub-theme:

Global Citizenship

This panel asks if there are medieval versions of contemporary gestures toward “global citizenship.”  The phrase “global citizen” relies on cosmopolitan fantasies of rights and subjectivities that are not bounded by national, linguistic, cultural or religious borders.  Global citizenship suggests a political ethics of inclusion even as it flattens out difference in a tacit ideal of racial, cultural, and class normativity.  What are the medieval roots of contemporary global citizenship?  How might we understand a peculiarly medieval form of it?  

Papers might examine citizenship during pilgrimage; Crusader subjectivities; the relationship between territory and citizenship; imperialism and citizenship; refugee subjectivities; indigeneity and colonialism; nomadism and citizenship.

 

Citizenship, Gender, and Sexuality

This panel examines the overlaps and frictions between citizenship, gender, and sexuality.  In what ways are gender and/or sexuality conceptualized as barriers to citizenship?  What were the debates and challenges around citizenship and gender, and where did they occur?  How did medieval texts imagine alternative forms of citizenship? 

Papers might examine wifehood and citizenship; legal and political structures of consent and privacy; trans subjectivities and citizenship; queer citizenship; monastic citizenship.

 

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