Steven Hutchinson’s Frontier Narratives: Liminal Lives in the Early Modern Mediterranean is an ambitious project that successfully traces the complex relations amongst races and cultures in the early modern Mediterranean. Following closely Fernand Braudel’s model of a greater Mediterranean with liquid frontiers and constant movement, in combination with George Simmel’s definition of “unity” (“harmonious and confrontational ‘dualistic’ relations”), Hutchinson explores traffic, exchanges, circulation, and interactions in contact zones. Working with an impressive variety of texts and genres and in various languages, Frontier Narratives is the welcome product of a mature scholar and a true comparatist. The book expands our understanding of the complex ways of being that produce what the author calls a “frontier consciousness,” one in constant negotiation with a complicated and challenging context that demands continual improvisations and performative responses. The aim of the book is to explore in a deeper way the diversity of voices that were the protagonists of what Hutchinson calls the “Mediterranean frontier narrative.”The book is divided into five chapters. The “Introduction” works as a first chapter and effectively lays out the methodology and overall critical approach to the project. The second chapter, entitled “Slaves,” explores what Hutchinson calls “Mediterranean frontier slavery,” distinguishing it from the trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic African slave trades. He argues that if compared to the two other types of slavery, what makes Mediterranean frontier slavery unique is the fact that it had “nothing to do with race at all” (42). For Hutchinson, other key factors came into play, such as religious difference, economic considerations, and political opposition. In fact, he questions the effectiveness of the category of the “Other” in the Mediterranean contact zones. Hutchinson proposes instead that what predominates is an extended familiarity among cultures and even religions, with the possibility of integration to another culture or a return to the homeland, something that was quite difficult (if not impossible) in the Trans-Saharan and the slavery originating in West Africa. These possibilities allow Hutchinson to propose a geographical uniqueness in the Mediterranean. One of the strongest aspects of this book is that the author provides many examples that effectively illustrate the singularity of this slave trade. Hutchinson refers to several individual testimonies and stories from figures such as João Carvalho Mascarenhas, Jerónimo Gracián, Emanuel d’Aranda, and Laurent d’Arvieux (among others), along with literary examples from Cervantes, strongly supporting the argument in favor of a uniquely Mediterranean practice of slavery. Even more significant is Hutchinson’s attention to the experiences of enslaved women, a major absence in previous critical and historical accounts. In many accounts women were treated as erotic possessions that could be exchanged from owner to owner as gifts. However, other possibilities are documented, such as marriage or integration into Maghribian or Turkish culture, a path not available in contexts of enslavement outside the Mediterranean.In Chapter 3, Hutchinson tackles the enigmatic figure of the renegade. The Mediterranean renegade represents a true challenge to scholarly work, since there is a near absence of texts written by renegades themselves. Furthermore, one must rely on narratives that are intensely hostile to them, including those written by authors such as Antonio de Sosa and even Cervantes. The Christian side had a deep antipathy towards renegades, and the existing narratives tend to describe them with exaggerations and stereotypes. Undeterred by these circumstances, Hutchinson attempts to work through and around these obstacles by analyzing texts and documents from multiple languages, disciplines, and genres, searching for narrations, descriptions, and ideological points of view. As he did in the previous chapter, Hutchinson provides multiple examples of individual renegades, demonstrating how important they were to the economies and exchanges among cultures (exchanges that did not preclude conflict). In fact, the book argues for an understanding of the Mediterranean as a space where renegades thrived and became protagonists of its contact zones. One of the most significant contributions of this chapter is a clarification of the role of religion in a renegade’s conversion. Hutchinson argues quite convincingly that religious belief was not the prime motive for changing sides and that there were many other factors at play. In fact, it is difficult to know with any certainty what renegades truly believed. What is crucial is the way they acted. They display a split identity and a conflictive personality that is difficult to ascertain. This multiplicity of character and undecidability leads Hutchinson to keenly conclude that concepts such as identity, hybridity, assimilation, or syncretism have a limited usefulness when it comes time to give an account of a renegade’s various performative actions and decisions.If a chapter best illustrates Frontier Narratives’ guiding principle of listening and being attentive to the words of the protagonists of the Mediterranean, it would be Chapter 4. Dedicated to martyrs, the chapter challenges the limitations of pre-conceived definitions of what martyrdom means. For example, if to be a martyr is defined by a willingness to die and suffer great pain defending one’s religious beliefs, Hutchinson finds that this definition does not fit many of the cases of martyrdom that he explores. Some so-called martyrs “provoked their own martyrdom” (138) and did not necessarily do so in defense of their religion. In many instances narratives of martyrdom are tainted by later interpretations, at times functioning as highly propagandistic rhetorical devices that intensify the emotional impact of such deaths. Again, for Hutchinson, individual cases point out problems with definitions and assumptions on the part of scholars. He carefully avoids the pitfalls of ready-made concepts and the force exerted by certain words that have often been taken for granted. Hutchinson does acknowledge the cruelty perpetrated in the Mediterranean on all sides. However, his close attention to intentions and actions allows for a more complex and nuanced view of martyrdom, one that values individual cases and experiences over general, preconceived ideas.With the title “Counternarratives,” the fifth and last chapter of the book is devoted to Moriscos. After the expulsion of 1609–13, they revealed their adaptability to Mediterranean frontier zones. As foreigners, they were ideal: “mobile, capable, adaptable, loyal and predisposed to confront the Christian north and to fit in culturally and religiously in the Islamic south and east” (154–55). Throughout the book, Hutchinson values rhetorical and textual analysis as cornerstones of his approach to the complexity of the Mediterranean. In fact, close reading rescues the richness of narrations and documents from what have become comfortably entrenched statements reproduced by scholars. For example, in the discourses on Moriscos one needs to account for the diverse intonations found in what may appear to be similar statements that, read carefully, can produce quite different meanings. Hutchinson proceeds to illustrate this by way of four short textual examples of intolerance that, on the surface, seem to be saying the same thing but turn out to be saying something quite different. He then proceeds to focus on how Cervantes deals with the topic of the expulsion and Moriscos. He pays close attention to the strategies of intolerance and how Cervantes both mimics and undermines such rhetoric. His reading of the character of Ricote is fascinating. Hutchinson argues that with Ricote Cervantes mimics anti-Morisco rhetoric and eschews invoking religion or “a cosmic scheme” that would justify the expulsion, opting instead to stress the affective bonds among characters, what Hutchinson calls Abencerrajismo (an emphasis on hospitality, dialogue, and friendship). Other works by Cervantes reflect the inclusion of alternatives to violence through episodes of friendship and reciprocity. In a sense, what Hutchinson emphasizes is fluidity and contact over otherness, separation, the inability to communicate, a lack of knowledge of other cultures, and religious intolerance. Even though he recognizes that there were cases of intolerance and violence among the diversity of cultures in the Mediterranean, he still points out the multiple examples in which negotiations were indeed not only possible but preferred. These counternarratives, some of them too often ignored, transcend the barriers of ethnicity, religion, language, and gender.Frontier Narratives rewards the reader with a comprehensive conclusion that effectively and convincingly lays out an alternative Mediterranean. Hutchinson judiciously follows the methodological path he charts, concluding that the complexity of the Mediterranean needs to be understood as a unity (again following Braudel and Simmel), characterized by a plural alterity (not distant otherness) capable of adaptation and improvisation. The Mediterranean frontier is a space in which popular conceptions of religion can be much more generalized than rigid dogma, where action may be more significant than thoughts, where modes of becoming do not project a distinct identity. Hutchinson is a scholar that has avoided the lure of ontological certainties and the “clear” meanings inherited from previous scholarship. With solid bibliographical research, he allows the subject he studies to determine how far existing words or concepts should serve us, and when we need to seriously re-think them in the context of what we are reading. Frontier Narratives is an innovative and fascinating book, a major achievement of interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship, and one that will significantly improve our understanding of the Mediterranean and its complex liminal spaces. It represents a much-needed recuperation of how our literary approach to language may contribute to the work of historians, anthropologists, and several other fields. Frontier Narratives is destined to become a key point of reference, a book that will surely alter for the better the interdisciplinary directions of the field of Mediterranean Studies and beyond.