Ever since the western involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, and then Syria, the term “fixer” became commonplace. It designates almost exclusively men who perform a range of services for foreign journalists and armies. Acting as interpreters, local informants, guides, drivers, mediators, brokers, these men are intermediaries, enablers who possess multiple skills and bodies of knowledge. Fixers existed already in the Middle Ages, in situations of multilingual encounter, such as crusades, pilgrimages, proselytization, trade, translation. Fixers are the invisible men and women of history, then as now. This book aims to restore their presence in a productive conversation between the fixers of the past and of the present.
Zrinka Stahuljak, Les Fixeurs au Moyen Âge. Histoire et littérature connectées (L’Univers historique) (SEUIL, 2021).
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