Regionalism and Identity in Medieval England
Abstract
Regionalism and Identity in Medieval England arises out of my interest in the broader cultural implications of dialectal diversity in medieval texts. To what extent do linguistic provenances correlate with other characteristics of regional culture in medieval texts? What value did medieval authors and audiences attribute to regional cultural affiliations? How were texts transformed as they moved from region to region? Why is it that modern scholarship often tends to de-emphasise the significance of regional affiliations in texts, focussing instead on their construction of national identity? In Regionalism and Identity I suggest that these questions can be answered by an understanding of how medieval English writers conceptualised the region.
Regionalism and Identity examines how regional identities were formed and contested in medieval England, focusing on Anglo-Saxon and post-Conquest narratives with localized. It explores how writers dramatize anxieties over the conflicting cultural imperatives of regional, national, and other forms of identity, and how they work to resolve or further problematize these conflicts. I argue that medieval English writers conceived of the region not just in terms of topographical or political boundaries, but also in terms of ethnic, legal, and linguistic categories of identity which they mapped onto bounded spaces. Thus the region could serve as a type of meta-category encompassing other, sometimes multiple, types of identity. My central thesis is that the textual act of delimiting these affiliations in spatial terms itself imposes a regional interpretation of their significance.
In identifying the regional cultures that shape medieval English narratives, I focus on the survival and transmission of Anglo-Saxon literary traditions after the Norman Conquest. By breaking down boundaries of periodization in the field of medieval English literary studies, I critique teleological approaches to medieval regional culture which see regional identity overtaken by national identity in the course of the Middle Ages. Instead, I treat regionalism as a phenomenon that persists despite the development of national identity and indeed has an influence on literary constructions of the nation. In order to account for the co-existence of regional and national cultures, I adopt the terms “regional” and “trans-regional” to suggest the dual cultural spheres in which many medieval writers participated. When medieval authors attempted to negotiate the two cultural spheres, complex tensions resulted, producing a phenomenon similar to what postcolonial theory has come to regard as hybridity, the conjoining of two not fully assimilated cultures. From this perspective, regional diversity was a form of cultural diversity in the Middle Ages. My research thus promises to bring medieval regional culture closer to modern critical concerns by shedding light on the way space was used to understand identity in the Middle Ages and by showing how this understanding informed literary responses to cultural heterogeneity.