Overview

An examination of how regional identities are reflected in texts from medieval England. The period after the Norman Conquest saw a dramatic reassessment of what it meant to be English, owing to both the advent of Anglo-Norman rule and increased interaction with other cultures through trade, travel, migration, and war. While cultural contact is often thought to consolidate national identity, this book proposes that these encounters prompted the formation of intercultural regional identities. Because of these different cultural influences, the meaning of English identity varied from region to region, and became rooted in the land, its history, and its stories. Using romances and histories from England's multilingual literary milieu, including the Gesta Herewardi, Fouke le Fitz Waryn, and Richard Coer de Lyon, this study examines some of England's contact zones and how they influence understandings of English identities during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Moving from local identity in Ely, to the transcultural regions of Lincolnshire and the Welsh Marches, and finally investigating England as a border region from a global perspective, this book examines the diversity of Englishness, the effects of cultural contact on identity, and how English writers imagined their place in the world.

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9781843845683

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She makes an important contribution to ongoing debates about the evolution of English identity in the period before the development of the nation state, and offers a subtle but important challenge to some of the theoretical frameworks that have informed recent work on this subject. -- Midland History

Dolmans demonstrates multidirectional readings that refuse the choice between reading out from the center or reading in from the margins, drawing needed attention to the sheer heterogeneity of England's local populations and to medieval consciousness of the diversity of European and global communities. * SPECULUM * She makes an important contribution to ongoing debates about the evolution of English identity in the period before the development of the nation state, and offers a subtle but important challenge to some of the theoretical frameworks that have informed recent work on this subject. -- Midland History Writing Regional Identities is an engaging and thought-provoking study that illustrates the international, transcultural, and multilingual nature of medieval England. -- Victoria Shirley * CERAE *

Dolmans demonstrates multidirectional readings that refuse the choice between reading out from the center or reading in from the margins, drawing needed attention to the sheer heterogeneity of England's local populations and to medieval consciousness of the diversity of European and global communities. * SPECULUM * She makes an important contribution to ongoing debates about the evolution of English identity in the period before the development of the nation state, and offers a subtle but important challenge to some of the theoretical frameworks that have informed recent work on this subject. -- Midland History

Author Information

EMILY DOLMANS is a lecturer in Medieval Literature at the University of East Anglia

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