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To those who feel nerves before attending a party or have to overcome a sense of anxiety before guests arrive, medieval historian Lars Kjaer assures you are not alone—people who lived almost 1,000 years before us felt the same way.

In fact, the trepidation about being a guest or playing host goes back even further than the Middle Ages.

As Kjaer, an associate professor at Northeastern University in London, points out in the first line of his co-edited , "Guests, Strangers, Aliens, Enemies: Ambiguities of Hospitality in the Middle Ages, c. 1000–1350," "many of our oldest stories are about killing guests," going back to Homer's ancient Greek epics, "Iliad" and "The Odyssey."

The reason why tales of guests being set upon and slain still shocks audiences to this day—"Game Of Thrones" fans will remember the revulsion felt after the massacre in the now infamous episode—is because it plays on modern anxieties about being a guest, Kjaer argues.

"Even if we're not worried about being stabbed to death by our neighbors when we go to a party, there is still that anxiety when you step through the door to a party that you've been invited to," says Kjaer.

"You are exposed in various ways socially. Will I be made to feel welcome? I'm placing myself in the hands of my host—what's this going to be like? And it's the same when you open your home to have guests over. Are they going to behave? Are they going to help create a good atmosphere? Those are vulnerable, powerful feelings.

"We are still as tuned in to that as they were in ancient Greece, as they were in ancient Israel, and as they were in medieval Europe. And that's why those stories, the story of a broken guest-host relationship, can still shock us."

Kjaer says the idea for putting a book together about hospitality in the Middle Ages with fellow historian Wojtek Jezierski, from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, was due to his own interest in what happens when the rules and ideals of host-guest relationships fall by the wayside.

"I've always been really interested in breaches of the rules," says Kjaer. "I've always been interested in the bits where the value systems break down, where complexities, ambiguities and uncertainty occur.

"To me, those breaking points are the really revealing ones because they force people, both now and also then, to really explicitly talk about, evaluate and reflect on what it is that really matters. What's actually most important? That seems to me to be one of the central mysteries of what it is to be human. How do we handle living in an imperfect world?"

The open-access book, published by Brepols, pulls together nine papers from scholars based in the United States and across Europe, looking at the "places where these ideas of hospitality get put under pressure," Kjaer sets out.

In their introduction, Kjaer and Jezierski state, "Hospitality has, as far back as we can trace it, been beset with anxiety and ambivalence."

"To host someone, and to be hosted, hinges on trust between the parties, a tacit contract that can be betrayed by either side," they write. "Stories of guest-killing and host-killing grips us because they bring to light ubiquitous, unacknowledged struggles."

As well as editing the 312-page anthology over the past five years, used his own chapter in the book to look at a period when enemies learned to be hospitable to each other, despite opposition from their own side, by exploring the experience of Western crusaders living in Jerusalem between the Second Crusade (1147–1149) and the Third Crusade (1189–1192).

His paper unpacks how in the mid- to late-12th century, the crusaders, who controlled Jerusalem at the time, had an image problem back home in the West. Their backers started to see them as becoming overly integrated with the majority Muslim population and other rival Christian sects living in the Holy Land—groups who were regarded as the enemy during the fierce fighting of the First Crusade.

"What people in the West are increasingly saying," the historian explains, "is these people in the East are not the blood-soaked superheroes of our imagination.

"The Westerners are looking at these stories of the First Crusade and the massacre of Jerusalem, and they're like, 'Yeah, that's the stuff.' Those atrocities, sadly, were celebrated as grand examples of holy Christian violence.

"And then they look at the reality of people who are adapting politically, who are making alliances with neighboring rulers and trying to get by, and this is nothing like what they were expecting."

The Christian crusaders and their descendants were put in a "tough spot," says Kjaer, caught between living up to the "hardline demands from back home" and the reality of living side-by-side with a heavily Muslim population. His research found that some gravitated to eating Islam-approved diets due to having local cooks, while others allowed their places of worship to be used by Muslims.

Kjaer cites the Syrian and Muslim aristocrat Usama Ibn Munqidh, who wrote a memoir, "The Book of Contemplation," that dates from around 1183, detailing his time in Jerusalem before the Third Crusade.

Usama recalls how he was permitted by the Knights Templar, a military religious order, to pray in a side chapel of their church in Jerusalem. But one day, while praying turned towards the direction of Mecca, as is customary for Muslims, a Western knight spotted him and started to "rough him up" and attempted to force him to turn around to pray towards the east, the direction that a Christian would conduct their prayers.

According to Usama's account, the Templars seized the crusader, threw him out of the church and apologized to the chronicler for the man's actions, explaining that, as a new arrival, he had never seen someone praying in that fashion.

"That's difficult," says Kjaer, "because this Western crusader would have arrived expecting the Templars to be all like, 'We hate Muslims,' 'No tolerance' and 'Crusade all the time.'

"But when you're actually in the country, when actually in the crusader states, you have to find a way to live together. You have to find a way to accommodate others—and hospitality is central to that. My research was about exploring how they tried to manage those ambiguities and those conflicting obligations."

This story is republished courtesy of Northeastern Global News .