The volume asks how regional identities were created in the northern German cultural area in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period. The spatial turn within the humanities and cultural studies has rekindled interest in how 'regionality' is conceptualized and constructed; this also reframes those questions about the relationship between identity and alterity, which have increasingly preoccupied medieval studies since the 1970s. Because it is undeniable that, in addition to linguistic, historical, political and economic criteria, regional affiliations can also have a special function for the formation of personal and group-related identity. However, how regional identities are formed and by which complex relationships of self and foreign attributions they are determined, requires detailed historicizing investigations, which the volume presents for the lively contact and border region of northern Germany.