Lampedusa: Island of Trust in a Sea of Danger, ca. 1200-1750

At the Academy, Remensnyder will work on a microhistory of how in the medieval and early modern eras the tiny uninhabited Mediterranean island of Lampedusa became a place where multiple sorts of “betweenness”—geographic, religious, and political — overlapped to create a space of Muslim-Christian cooperation and trust. Drawing on sources such as sailors’ logs, portolan guides and maps, chronicles, isolarios, epic poetry, institutional archives of the Knights of Malta, consular correspondence, archaeology, and devotional imagery, Remensnyder’s project fuses the subjects of small islands and sailors’ culture, and addresses the intermingling of the sacred and practical in maritime geography. Combining history, island studies, thalassology (the study of the sea), literary studies, and archaeology, the project explores the deep past of Lampedusa to illuminate larger questions. Remensnyder opens a new chapter in the history of Muslim-Christian encounter in the premodern Mediterranean by broadening the scholarly frame to include natural space, particularly maritime islands, as an active agent in the production of mixed identities and cultural forms. The book also explores the importance of small islands to the religious culture of Muslim and Christian sailors, and suggests a new view of sacred sites venerated by multiple religions in the intertwining of devotees’ practical and spiritual needs. Finally, Remensnyder offers a historical perspective on the current refugee crisis by tracing the genealogy of the outsized role played in this emergency by small Mediterranean islands that politically belong to Europe but that geographically hug the coasts of North Africa and Turkey.