Roberta Morosini
Professor of Italian, Wake Forest University
In Paradiso XIX Dante revolutionarily defines the Orient as the place that simply was not reached by the word of God, and not a space of diversity, filled with monsters. What do cultural exchanges have to do with the space of periphery? Medieval maps visualize the periphery and how the center naturally determines what becomes the modern negative connotation of what stays at the margin as a space of dehumanization and deterioration. I argue that following the crossings of merchants, medieval writers proved that the notion of periphery shifted. With the expansion of trade and Italian merchants traveling to the East and all over the West, the Mediterranean became a political and economic space of exchanges, but we read of women kidnapped, sold, exchanged as merchandise, women who suppress their identity in order to survive in a different culture, dressed as men or black minstrels to survive their crossings of the cultural and spatial boundaries of the periphery, the question I ask here is: were there any cultural exchanges? Finally, this paper addresses the theme of the conference in cartographic terms, considering the strict relation between texts and maps, where the geo-critical notions of “transgression” and “location” aim at provoking a scholarly discussion about cultural spaces of diversity, and ultimately draw attention to aspects of cultural appropriation, slavery and violence in and of the Medieval Mediterranean.