Brown, Meg Lota, ed. Marginal Figures in the Global Middle Ages and the Renaissance

What were the margins of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance?This is a question that this volume does not seek to answer.The purpose of the essays, as presented in the introduction, is to "interrogate" the motives of marginalization to demonstrate the connections between past and present as well as the ways in which marginalization produces resistance.This expansive undertaking facilitates the range of topics addressed in the ten chapters within the volume, but ultimately elides the complexity of marginality as an interdisciplinary methodological approach.Arnaud Zimmern's opening chapter adheres most closely to the goals set out in the introduction.Zimmern mines a wealth of examples of the use (and misuse, as he argues) of Donne's famous "No man is an island" between 2001 and the present.Zimmern highlights how Donne's Devotions have been interpreted in service of globalization, before reorienting Donne's text within the context of his liturgical framework.In doing so, he recentres Donne's conception of humanity as defined in relation to the Church of England.Like Zimmern, Lindsay Weiler-Leon demonstrates how the identity of marginal figures may slip based on perspective.In her chapter, Weiler-Leon discusses the travel accounts of the seventeenth-century Englishmen Anthony and Robert Sherley and analyzes how Eurocentric biases led to misunderstandings of Ottoman and Safavid women when measured against European women.Weiler-Leon's argument, that the perception of European travellers was connected to the way in which self-fashioning was deployed in service of societal advancement, adds new layers to analyses of both Orientalism and self-fashioning.Paul Hartle similarly addresses the effects and levels of mutual understanding that result from cultural encounters in seventeenth-century Japan in his chapter.Rather than claiming a single result of connection, however, Hartle argues for a multiplicity of meetings and meanings, situating his chapter as the beginning of a larger research project on this moment of contact between Japan and Britain.Unlike the previous three authors, who write from the centre looking out to the margins, James W. Fuerst unpacks how encounters between colonizers and colonized could be recorded and shaped from the perspective of the

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