Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages

Archipelago, Island, England

J. Cohen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780230603264
• eBook ISBN: 9780230614123
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Through close readings of both familiar and obscure medieval texts, the contributors to this volume attempt to read England as a singularly powerful entity within a vast geopolitical network. This capacious world can be glimpsed in the cultural flows connecting the Normans of Sicily with the rulers of England, or Chaucer with legends arriving from Bohemia. It can also be seen in surprising places in literature, as when green children are discovered in twelfth-century Yorkshire or when Welsh animals begin to speak of the long history of their land s colonization. The contributors to this volume seek moments of cultural admixture and heterogeneity within texts that have often been assumed to belong to a single, national canon, discovering moments when familiar and bounded space erupt into unexpected diversity and infinite realms.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Infinite Realms
• 1 Between Diaspora and Conquest: Norman Assimilation in Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis and Marie de France’s Fables
• 2 Reliquia: Writing Relics in Anglo-Norman Durham
• 3 Cultural Difference and the Meaning of Latinity in Asser’s Life of King Alfred
• 4 Green Children from Another World, or the Archipelago in England
• 5 Beyond British Boundaries in the Historia Regum Britanniae
• 6 Arthur’s Two Bodies and the Bare Life of the Archives
• 7 The Instructive Other Within: Secularized Jews in The Siege of Jerusalem
• 8 Subversive Histories: Strategies of Identity in Scottish Historiography
• 9 Sleeping with an Elephant: Wales and England in the Mabinogion
• 10 Chaucer and the War of the Maidens
• 11 The Signs and Location of a Flight (or Return?) of Time: The Old English Wonders of the East and the Gujarat Massacre
• List of Contributors
• Index