The "foreigner" in Přemyslid Bohemia . Some reflections on the depiction of foreigners in medieval sources
Abstrakt
The medieval perception of the foreigner and the "other" was not an isolated phenomenon, but part of a broader image of the ideological and real worlds, in which people who did not come from a different country but represented some social, cultural and other differences could be regarded as "foreign". This is not a surprising discovery, but a logical consequence of the structure of medieval society.
Thus we can assume that the more "social bubbles" and hence imagined "boundaries" there are in society, the bigger the collection of people, phenomena etc. which in some circumstances may be regarded as "foreign". However, this brief reflection is not aimed at refining the definition of the "foreigner" in medieval Bohemian sources or at providing further evidence of the multifaceted nature of the concept.
It focuses only on the question of whether and how the issue of the "foreigners" is reflected also in other thematic areas of modern medieval studies. Using several source examples, the author seeks to demonstrate how the phenomenon of the "foreigner" can in some circumstances be used as a kind of analytical category in seemingly distant topics.