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.
Introduction: Infinite Realms—Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
• 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 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 Joy
Overview
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...