BA Ancient History and History / Course details

This module offers an in-depth analysis of medieval multiculturalism by exploring the movement of Norman migrants, travellers and conquerors across multicultural frontiers within the medieval Mediterranean. Better known for ruling Normandy and England after 1066, the Latin Christian Normans also spread into Iberia, southern Italy and Sicily, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, and in doing so encountered the world of Islam and Greek Orthodoxy. The Norman migrants established powerful states throughout the Mediterranean, especially in the ‘Crusading’ Principality of Antioch and the Kingdom of Sicily. The latter developed into a unique multicultural state inhabited by Muslim, Greek Christian, Jewish, and Latin Christian communities, and governed by Norman Kings who dressed in Byzantine robes, resided in stunning Arab-Islamic palaces, promoted alleged crypto-Muslim eunuchs to positions of power, and commissioned magnificent multicultural monuments. This course then analyses the dynamics and impact of Norman movement within the Mediterranean world, and the range of multicultural encounters that occurred as a result.

Via seminar activities and assessments, a diverse range of primary and secondary source material (library-based and online) will be employed to encourage students to examine - in the context of Norman movement in the Mediterranean - notions of multiculturalism, tolerance and frontiers, and to develop nuanced understandings of varied phenomena such as soft power, acculturation, diaspora and identity. Students will also engage with historiographical debates on the construction of medieval multiculturalism, on modern perception of Norman migration and explore some of the most contested historical themes in recent scholarship

• Understand the defining features of the multicultural Mediterranean world into which the Normans expanded in the period 1000-1200
• Critically assess the parallels and contrasts evident in the experience of the different socio-religious communities which were ruled by, or came into contact with, the Normans.
• Examine how identities and frontiers could be constructed and transformed in the Middle Ages
• Evaluate the contested contemporary and modern perceptions of Norman movement in the Mediterranean.

• Understand the key historical models framing the multicultural Mediterranean and Norman movement across its multiple frontiers.
• Evaluate the influences, value and limitations of the key sources: narrative, documentary and material.
• Identify and evaluate the major historiographical debates underpinning the topic.
• Assess the sociological and anthropological models underpinning identity formation, diaspora and multiculturalism.

• Essay writing
• Seminar participation and communication of complex ideas to a wider group
• Analysis of evidence (both primary and secondary source) to establish independent interpretation
• Independent research
• Utilisation of online databases and internet resources appropriate to the module

• Present nuanced interpretations via advanced written and oral communication
• Accomplish independent research projects
• Work collaboratively as part of a team
• Critical thinking and analysis

A. Metcalfe, The Muslims of Medieval Italy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

P. Oldfield, Sanctity and Pilgrimage in Medieval Southern Italy, 1000-1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

E. Tounta, ‘The Italo-Greek Courtiers and their Saint: Constructing the Italo-Greek Elite’s Collective Identity in the Twelfth-Century Norman Kingdom of Sicily’, Mediterranean Studies 28 (2020), 88-129.

N. Hodgson, ‘Normans and Competing Masculinities on Crusade’, Crusading and Pilgrimage in the Norman World, ed. by Kathryn Hurlock and Paul Oldfield (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2015), 195-213.

J. Johns, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily: the royal Diwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

J. C. Birk, Norman Kings of Sicily and the Rise of the Anti-Islamic Critique: Baptized Sultans (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016).

G. A. Loud, The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest (Harlow: Pearson, 2000).

S. Davis-Secord, Where Three Worlds Met. Sicily in the Early Medieval Mediterranean (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017).