Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction: Infinite Realms

   • Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

   Pages 1-16

3. Between Diaspora and Conquest: Norman Assimilation in Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis and Marie de France’s Fables

   • Suzanne Conklin Akbari

   Pages 17-37

4. Reliquia: Writing Relics in Anglo-Norman Durham

   • Heather Blurton

   Pages 39-56

5. Cultural Difference and the Meaning of Latinity in Asser’s Life of King Alfred

   • David Townsend

   Pages 57-73

6. Green Children from Another World, or the Archipelago in England

   • Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

   Pages 75-94

7. Beyond British Boundaries in the Historia Regum Britanniae

   • Michael Wenthe

   Pages 95-115

8. Arthur’s Two Bodies and the Bare Life of the Archives

   • Kathleen Biddick

   Pages 117-134

9. The Instructive Other Within: Secularized Jews in the Siege of Jerusalem

   • Randy P. Schiff

   Pages 135-151

10. Subversive Histories: Strategies of Identity in Scottish Historiography

    • Katherine H. Terrell

    Pages 153-172

11. Sleeping with an Elephant: Wales and England in the Mabinogion

    • Jon Kenneth Williams

    Pages 173-189

12. Chaucer and the War of the Maidens

    • John M. Ganim

    Pages 191-208

13. 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

    Pages 209-229

14. Back Matter

    Pages 231-240

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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.

• England
• France
• historiography
• Middle Ages

"The eleven essays brought together in this volume bring those neighboring realms into breath-taking focus by examining currents of cultural difference lapping onto the edges and sometimes percolating up into the middle of texts that ostensibly serve to delineate England as an always inevitable island unto itself...this collection will serve as an indispensable guide to future travelers in archipelago it so brilliantly reveals." - Journal of the Early Book Society

"This intriguing collection of essays sets out to trouble the myth of the English nation, calling into question the wholeness, autonomy, insularity, and inevitability of the political entity we now call the British Isles. Cohen s infinite realms project recasts the island (the symbol of totality and autonomy) as an archipelago (a symbol of fragmentation and interdependence) whose current political configuration can in no way simply be read back into the past. The essays, on texts both familiar and arcane, not only invite us to rethink the textual canons of Great Britain s four main ethnic groups, but more radically to interrogate the fictiveness of political identity itself. This is not just another collection touting cultural diversity among hypostasized identities; these essays invite us to reimagine political collectivities, rethinking the ways in which they encounter one another, clash, assimilate, and reform around new identities." - Laurie A. Finke, Kenyon College and co-author of King Arthur andthe Myth of History

JEFFREY JEROME COHEN is Professor and Chair of English, The George Washington University, USA. 

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