Geography and English Identity in the Middle Ages

As is well known, in his influential 1983 book Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson placed the emergence of the concept of nationalism at the end of the eighteenth century. While generally accepting the conclusions of Anderson with respect to modern manifestations of nationalism, researchers in various disciplines have increasingly sought in the decades since Imagined Communities came out to broaden and complicate the notion of nationalism, or at least of national identity, and to identify versions of it in other historical and cultural contexts. In doing so, they have amply demonstrated that there are other perspectives on the idea of nation than those associated with modern Europe. Fabienne Michelet, in one of the books under consideration here, goes so far as to contend that “hegemonic processes and attempts at delineating a national community are of all times” (2006, 12). The two books reviewed in this article relate to the issue of perceptions of national identity in England. They take their place among important contributions in recent years that identify moments and processes associated with an emergent sense of English identity prior to the late-eighteenth-century, and, eschewing modern myths of origin, seek to disentangle such moments and processes from their ideological appropriation and annexation in the period of the development of ‘Andersonian’ nationalism, particularly in the nineteenth century. In exploring the theme of identity they both make innovative use of constructions of geography evident in the periods studied.

Among such earlier moments and processes, particular attention has been paid to the early modern period (notably by Bernhard Klein), the later Middle Ages (as in the volume Imagining a Medieval English Nation, edited by Kathy Lavezzo), the thirteenth and early fourteenth century (by Thorlac Turville-Petre), and, above all, Anglo-Saxon England (with seminal contributions from Nicholas Howe, Sarah Foot and Kathleen Davis). Within Anglo-Saxon England, scholars studying constructions of national identity have focused particularly on the period of King Alfred (the late ninth century) and that of Ælfric (the late tenth to early eleventh century), and have built too on earlier work by Patrick Wormald, who had identified Bede, writer of the ‘foundational’ Ecclesiastical History of the English People in the early eighth century, as a key inventor of the English. The book by Kathy Lavezzo reviewed in this essay sweeps from Anglo-Saxon England through to the later Middle Ages, as does Catherine Clarke’s recent Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400. Another notable recent contribution to the debate about emerging English identity has come in a perceptive essay from Nicole Guenther Discenza, “A Map of the Universe: Geography and Cosmology in the Program of Alfred the Great,” attending, as do the books under review here, to notions of center and margin.

Apprehension of the concern for national identity in the medieval period has been distracted by too unreflective an acceptance of Anderson’s particular definition of nationalism and also, as studied notably by Patrick Geary and Allen Frantzen, by the muddying effect of romantic constructions of early national history, which achieved their high point in the era of ‘nation forging’ in the nineteenth century, mythologizing what were seen as originary periods in the early medieval past. Through the application of cultural theory and careful analysis of texts from the medieval period itself, the books under review get us beyond such limitations and provide ways of seeing how medieval communities might have imagined themselves. The two monographs share a similar animus in key respects, most obviously in their timely highlighting of ideas of geography, a subject that has recently established itself prominently in the world of cultural studies.

Michelet’s Creation, Migration, and Conquest is particularly influenced by Howe, and also draws productively on the ideas of space developed...