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.