Session Abstract

Margins, Boundaries, and Transgressions: Chameleons, Duelists, and Gypsies in Early Modern England

Energized by recent scholarship that focuses on the meeting places of subfields, this panel offers three papers on early modern England that explore the intersections of social, cultural and legal history. Following the theme of ‘Lives, Places, Stories,’ it examines the predicaments, narratives, and explanations of people coping with moral, ethnic and religious tensions. The participants are seasoned scholars at universities in the north, south, east, west and midwest of North America. The panel is co-sponsored by the North American Conference on British Studies.

The three papers demonstrate the evolution of the field of English history within a wider geographical and historiographical context.  Clare Schen (SUNY Buffalo) discusses the problems of religious converts and renegades, voyagers and captives, on the margins of Islam and Christianity. Krista Kesselring (Dalhousie) examines the legality and morality of dueling to death within the late-Renaissance aristocracy. David Cressy (Ohio State) studies Gypsies as newcomers to England, part of a European diaspora, and traces the legal, social and cultural responses to their alleged deviance. Together they address comparative themes of honor, masculinity, violence, transgression, religious allegiance, and ethnic or social identity that have become central to early modern studies. They show how the English experience took shape from the expanding world of travel, migration, and the diffusion of cultural practices. The panel will provide a rounded view of the legal, social, cultural, and political perspectives that molded identity and judged the severity of transgressions. Our chair is Linda Pollock (Tulane), and commentator Susan Amussen (University of California, Merced).

The concept of ‘margins,’ though not unchallenged, has proven useful in historical analysis. Some scholars have embraced the spatial metaphor to identify sites of repression that became sites of resistance, creativity, or change. Others have used the margins to illuminate the center, treating them as points of entry to understand the broader society with which they co-exist. Others yet have studied the margins and their inhabitants in an effort to celebrate difference and to write a more inclusive history.

Our panelists are aware of the potential conceptual problems of margins, boundaries and transgressions. In some hands, difference becomes reified; in others, it dissolves into nothingness. Margins prove to be flexible, boundaries are permeable, and transgressions present a moving target based on context and perspective. Apostates, duelists, and Gypsies were all, in some settings, marginalized, but could also be tolerated or even praised.

Collectively, the papers in this panel examine ways in which notions of deviance, sinfulness and criminality were culturally constructed and inherently unstable.  They raise questions, introduce evidence, and illuminate a range of experiences long elided from historical accounts. We hope that they may serve as a model and a stimulus for new work in early modern history.