Ambiguities of Hospitality: Intercultural Integration and Conflict in Host-Guest Relations on the European Borderlands, c. 1000-1350

This project studies the linguistic and ritualistic expressions of hospitality as means of intercultural integration and conflict in the European borderlands in the high Middle Ages, c.1000-1350.

We argue that the widespread conviction that host-guest relations–reception of guests, convivial feasting, gift-giving–have always functioned as a benign sociopolitical glue, particularly in pre-modern societies lacking permanent institutions, is too simplistic.

Hospitality is rather an ambiguous means of power producing the status differential between host and guests, with equal capacity to create trust and distrust between people.

The project focuses on the European frontier societies emerging in the zones of Christianity’s expansion, where the ambiguity of hospitality was most critical: the north-eastern Europe in the age of Christianization (Pomerania and Prussia in particular) and the era of crusades in the Middle East.

Three main questions are posed: How was the ambiguity of host-guest relations managed in ritualistic and linguistic terms? How did hospitality affect intercultural cohesion or enmity?

How did semantics of hospitality change during the high Middle Ages in core European regions vis-à-vis the borderlands? The material will consist of historiography and hagiography.

The results will map out the interaction between Christian, pre-Christian, and Islamic senses of hospitality and display hospitality’s ambiguous role in multicultural and polarized societies.