Medieval Christian (Dis)identifications: Muslims and Jews in Guibert of Nogent

Abstract

Recent work in cultural studies has strongly called into question any easy division of public and private, political and psy chological realms, importantly adopting and furthering femi nist critique of the unexamined maintenance of a distinction between the personal and the political. Thus, for instance, in continuing Foucault's excavation of the complex and often self-contradictory ways in which large social entities?regimes of sexuality?are constituted, queer theory has insisted on the importance of psychological process, bringing psychoanalytic thinkers into the Foucaultian investigation and examining how individual identity formation is implicated with the operation of larger social and cultural forces.1 My current project, pursuing such an approach, situates itself at a point of intersection between psychology and politics in order to interrogate the mutual dependence of medieval personal and political constructs. As much work in cultural studies has shown, both a society's self-constitution and an individual sense of self depend upon the casting out of others, the definition of areas of exclusion that secure realms of inclusion.2 Here, I am concerned with such processes as they operate in relation to medieval religious categories, and I mean to explore the ways in which medieval representations of difference operate both in the construction of a religious hegemony crucial to Western European hierarchical (Christian, masculinist, heterosexist) society and in the securing of a self within that larger sociopolitical structure. For medieval Latin Christianity there were a variety of possible religious (and racial) others that might serve the purposes of dis identification: at home, there were Jews and heretics, at a greater