Sebastian Sobecki 
The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages 
Maritime Narratives, Identity and Culture

Essays examining the way in which the sea has shaped medieval and later ideas of what it is to be English.


Local and imperial, insular and expansive, both English yet British: geographically and culturally, the sea continues to shape changing models of Englishness. This volume traces the many literary origins of insular identity from local communities to the entire archipelago, laying open the continuities and disruptions in the sea’s relationship with English identity in a British context. Ranging from the beginnings of insular literature to Victorian medievalisms, the subjects treated include King Arthur’s struggle with muddy banks, the afterlife of Edgar’s forged charters, Old English homilies and narratives of migration, Welsh and English ideas about Chester, Anglo-Norman views of the sea in the
Vie de St Edmund and
Waldef, post-Conquest cartography,
The Book of Margery Kempe, the works of the Irish Stopford Brooke, and the making of an Anglo-British identity in Victorian Britain.


SEBASTIAN SOBECKI is Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.


Contributors: Sebastian Sobecki, Winfried Rudolf, Fabienne Michelet, Catherine A.M. Clarke, Judith Weiss, Kathy Lavezzo, Alfred Hiatt, Jonathan Hsy, Chris Jones, Joanne Parker, David Wallace

Tabela de Conteúdo

Introduction: Edgar’s Archipelago – Sebastian Sobecki

The Spiritual Islescape of the Anglo-Saxons – Winfried Rudolf

Lost at Sea: Nautical Travels in the Old English
Exodus, the Old English
Andreas, and Accounts of the
adventus Saxonum – Fabienne Michelet

Edges and Otherworlds: Imagining Tidal Spaces in Early Medieval Britain – Catherine A M Clarke

East Anglia and the Sea in the Narratives of the
Vie de St Edmund and
Waldef – Judith Weiss

The Sea and Border Crossings in the Alliterative
Morte Arthure – Kathy Lavezzo

‘From Hulle to Cartage’: Maps, England, and the Sea – Alfred Hiatt

Lingua Franca: Overseas Travel and Language Contact in
The Book of Margery Kempe – Jonathan Hsy

‘Birthplace for the poetry of the sea-ruling nation’: Stopford Brooke and Old English – Chris Jones

Ruling the Waves: Saxons, Vikings, and the Sea in the Formation of an Anglo-British Identity in the Nineteenth Century – Joanne Parker

Afterword: Sea, Island, Mud – David Wallace

Bibliography

Sobre o autor

SEBASTIAN SOBECKI is Professor of Later Medieval English Literature at the University of Toronto. His research extends to a wide area of late medieval literary culture, especially law, travel, politics, authorship, manuscripts, and palaeography.