Sarina Kuersteiner

Research interests

I am a historian of the medieval Mediterranean with a particular interest in the high and late medieval period (ca. 1000-ca. 1500 CE). My main interest is how economic and legal history intersects with the history of religion, art history, and literary history. Even though my past research has focused on the Mediterranean, medieval Italy in particular, current research includes the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Seas of Southeast Asia. In the context of these geographies, I am passionate about sharing with my students the question of how people made sense of their lives and how identities were expressed during the medieval period before nation-states began drawing new borders.

One book project, “Shapes of Risk in Medieval Commerce: Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean, ca. 1000-1400 CE,” examines differences and similarities in conceptions of risk among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim merchants. For the medieval traders I study, trading meant sharing in a cross-cultural context. However, previous scholars have mostly highlighted medieval European businessmen as the ones who invented the financial tools that enabled Europe’s economic success in the early modern and modern periods. My research shows instead that the history of European economic institutions is complicated, contingent, and to a large extent the product of cross-cultural encounters that took place in the global medieval world.

The other book project, “Minds and Margins: Notarial Culture in Bologna, 1250-1350,” examines the self-images and experiences of notaries. Notaries are professional writers of contracts, court records, administrative documents, and other official acts. Contractual text is, however, by far not the only content we find in notarial registers. Notaries entered poems, prayers, images, sketches, and musical notes there too. My book project is the first interdisciplinary study of notaries bringing together marginalia and contractual texts to ask a seemingly simple question: How can we understand notaries if we take into consideration both marginalia and legal acts? Did they separate their personas from the offices they oversaw? Such separation between professional and personal spheres is presumed to be a prerequisite for the functioning of bureaucratic governments. “Minds and Margins” examines marginalia as windows into notaries’ mindsets. Future research aims to include acts and registers from other cities and towns located in modern Italy, Spain, and France. To this end, I am currently planning the construction of an open-access database that allows researchers to upload marginalia (including metadata) that they have collected during archival research. The dragons, knights, werewolves, castles, religious objects, animals, poems, prayers, slurs, and other kinds of marginalia that can be found on the covers of numerous notarial registers certainly invite interest, expertise, and contributions of not just a few but many researchers from different disciplines.