Cultural diversity in the British Middle Ages : archipelago, island, England / edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome.

Series:

New Middle Ages (Palgrave (Firm))

New Middle Ages

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Race relations.

History.

Group identity.

Ethnic relations.

Great Britain--Ethnic relations--History--To 1500.

Great Britain.

Great Britain--History--Medieval period, 1066-1485.

Group identity--Great Britain--History--To 1500.

Great Britain--In literature.

Great Britain--Race relations--History--To 1500.

Physical Description:

x, 240 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

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.

Contents:

Between diaspora and conquest : Norman assimilation in Marie de France's Esope and Petrus Alfonsi's Disciplina clericalis / Suzanne Conklin Akbari

Reliquia : writing relics in Anglo-Norman Durham / Heather Blurton

Cultural difference and the meaning of Latinity in Asser's Life of King Alfred / David Townsend

Green children from another world, or, The archipelago in England / Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Beyond British boundaries in the Historia regum Britanniae / Michael Wenthe

Arthur's two bodies and the bare life of the archives / Kathleen Biddick

The instructive other within : secularized Jews in the siege of Jerusalem / Randy P. Schiff

Subversive histories : strategies of identity in Scottish historiography / Katherine H. Terrell

Sleeping with an elephant : Wales and England in the Mabinogion / Jon Kenneth Williams

Chaucer and the war of the maidens / John Ganim

The signs and location of a flight (or return?) of time : the old English wonders of the East and the Gujarat Massacre / Eileen A. Joy.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0230603262

9780230603264

OCLC:

154703611