Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages Archipelago, Island, England

by Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome

• ISBN13: 9780230603264
• ISBN10: 0230603262
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-07-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is Professor and Chair of English, George Washington University. He is the author of Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain; Medieval Identity Machines; Of Giants; and the editor of The Postcolonial Middle Ages; Thinking the Limits of the Body; Becoming Male in the Middle Ages; and Monster Theory.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: Infinite Realms	p. 1
Between Diaspora and Conquest: Norman Assimilation in Petrus Alfonsi's Disciplina Clericalis and Marie de France's Fables	p. 17
Reliquia: Writing Relics in Anglo-Norman Durham	p. 39
Cultural Difference and the Meaning of Latinity in Asser's Life of King Alfred	p. 57
Green Children from Another World, or the Archipelago in England	p. 75
Beyond British Boundaries in the Historia Regum Britanniae	p. 95
Arthur's Two Bodies and the Bare Life of the Archives	p. 117
The Instructive Other Within: Secularized Jews in The Siege of Jerusalem	p. 135
Subversive Histories: Strategies of Identity in Scottish Historiography	p. 153
Sleeping with an Elephant: Wales and England in the Mabinogion	p. 173
Chaucer and the War of the Maidens	p. 191
The Signs and Location of a Flight (or Return?) of Time: The Old English Wonders of the East and the Gujarat Massacre	p. 209
List of Contributors	p. 231
Index	p. 233
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.