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Anna Heebøll
The concept of frontier society as a framework for an analysis of the relationship between Christians and non-Christians in the Middle Ages
Scholars of medieval history have been especially inclined to apply the concept of frontier society as their analytical framework. This article outlines the history and historiography of the concepts frontier and frontier society and thus reveals a wide variety of approaches and definitions. Considering a frontier to be a zone rather than a line and a frontier society to be the setting of cultural and religious contact, Nora Berend (in At the Gate of Christendom, 2001) shows how a specific frontier ideology and the relations between Christians, Jews, Muslims and 'Pagans' were shaped by the frontier in medieval Hungary. The article then applies this approach comparing the Hungarian conditions with those of a classical frontier society, the Iberian Peninsula, and uncovers striking similarities as well as differences.
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