ABSTRACT
It is surely a strange fact that one of the central figures in the production of modern mobility is the medieval vagrant. The shadowy figure of the vagrant (or vagabond) stands behind contemporary legal and governmental approaches to moving bodies. He floats among the pages of contemporary social and cultural theorists and haunts the origins of the modern novel. Here I want to trace some of the remarkable effects of the vagrant and to reflect on the centrality of the vagrant’s mobility to the production of a number of different kinds of knowledge. Such an account is necessarily episodic as the vagrant appears and disappears. For long stretches of time he (the vagrant is almost always ‘he’ in the sources I am describing) is invisible, inhabiting the spaces where those of us in polite society fear to look or travel. At other times he is caught in the steely beam of surveillance. Occasionally he simply pops up to thumb his nose at the ‘truth already established (Bakhtin 1984, 45). My purpose is to illuminate the paradoxical centrality of the vagabond’s existence to understandings of mobility in the modern western world. It follows the intuition expressed by Stallybrass and White (Stallybrass and White 1986) that what is socially marginal is often symbolically central.
