A fresh and invigorating survey of the sea as it appears in medieval English literature, from romance to chronicle, hagiography to autobiography.
As the first cultural history of the sea in medieval English literature, this book traces premodern myths of insularity from their Old English beginnings to Shakespeare’s
Tempest. Beginning with a discussion of biblical, classical and pre-Conquest treatments of the sea, it investigates how such works as the Anglo-Norman
Voyage of St Brendan, the Tristan romances, the chronicles of Matthew Paris,
King Horn, Patience, The Book of Margery Kempe and
The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye shape insular ideologies of Englishness. Whether it is Britain’s privileged place in the geography of salvation or the political fiction of the idyllic island fortress, medieval English writers’ myths of the sea betray their anxieties about their own insular identity; their texts call on maritime motifs to define England geographically and culturally against the presence of the sea. New insights from a range of fields, including jurisprudence, theology, the history of cartography and anthropology, are used to provide fresh readings of a wide range of both insular and continental writings.
SEBASTIAN I. SOBECKI is Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
Table of Content
Introduction
Traditions
Deserts and Forests in the Ocean
Almost beyond the World
Realms in Abeyance
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
A Thousand Furlongs of Sea
Epilogue:
The Tempest’s Many Beginnings
Bibliography
Index
About the author
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.
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