This talk  is part of a  forthcoming study Boccaccio and the Invention of Islam. Writing Otherness and Crossing Faiths in the Mediterranean, explores cross-cultural exchanges due to coerced trespassing of a geographic and cultural periphery. The geocritical notions of “transgression” and “periphery” are applied to locate spaces of diversity and ultimately to draw attention to aspects of cultural appropriation, slavery and violence in and around the Medieval Mediterranean.  The focus is on the mobility of women, in relation to merchants’ routes and practices, privileging the economic aspect of cross-cultural exchanges. The talk addresses cases of women dislocated and/or trespassing a geographic periphery in other people’s clothes, to see if in Henri Lefebvre’s terms how and if women “produce” their own space, beyond that periphery that is always a physical as well as gendered periphery.