Omnia permixta sunt: Where's the Border?

Abstract

Current scholarly interest in borders and frontiers takes many forms, sometimes applying anachronistic standards to medieval conceptions and practices. This essay reviews much of the recent scholarship, beginning with a review of Lucien Febvre's famous article of 1928, and then considering Roman and early European concepts of edged space, emphasising the re gional character of medieval borders, the divisions of kingdoms and politi cally subordinate spaces, and concluding with a critique of treating medieval conceptions of space symbolically, arguing instead that medieval rulers may have extrapolated local awareness of borders to the larger political frontiers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.