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

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 theVie de St Edmund andWaldef, post-Conquest cartographyThe 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

Introduction: Edgar's Archipelago - Sebastian Sobecki
The Spiritual Islescape of the Anglo-Saxons - Winfried Rudolf
Lost at Sea: Nautical Travels in the Old EnglishExodus, the Old EnglishAndreas, and Accounts of theadventus 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 theVie de St Edmund andWaldef - Judith Weiss
The Sea and Border Crossings in the AlliterativeMorte Arthure - Kathy Lavezzo
'From Hulle to Cartage': Maps, England, and the Sea - Alfred Hiatt
Lingua Franca: Overseas Travel and Language Contact inThe 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