ABSTRACT
The wanderer, is he a human being without place and bonds? If, literally, he is without a fixed dwelling, does this imply that he is without a place, without bonds and even desire? If it is in relation to the self and one’s desire that one finds oneself without a place and without bonds, this was not the case for wanderers in the Middle Ages. The reference to the desire for what we define as nomadism, hardly understandable to us later sedentary people, enables to appreciate the situation in the Middle Ages. At that time the bonds continued to be shaped, even on the roads, for people who, being homeless, are not necessarily without laws and bonds. They are not on the fringe of society, quite the contrary. This explains how the people who were hungry (see the large number of famines in the Middle Ages) were, all the same, not recognised or considered as being ‘poor’, a recurrent form of marginality in our own society.
