Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195–1656 (review)

Offering a rich survey of Cheshire culture in a literary-historical analysis that transcends medieval–modern boundaries, Robert W. Barrett, Jr.’s Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195–1656 provides a crucial intervention in recent conversations about medieval nationhood. Cheshire, with its hybrid identity as a borderlands community and its exceptional status as a palatine county, serves Barrett’s historiographical agenda of recalling critical attention to regional difference within England. Barrett highlights the continuity of topographical features of Cheshire and its urban center, Chester, while demonstrating the negotiation of local interests with “national contexts” (p. 17). While joining scholars such as James Simpson and David Wallace in querying the traditional divide between the late medieval and early modern eras, Barrett makes a fascinating case for discontinuities in the “distribution of periodization across English space” (p.13): Cheshire writing filters events through its own sense of time, as well as space. Barrett uses searching analysis of chronicles, romances, and book-culture in a powerful study of “Cestrian exceptionalism” (p. 3), exploring what proves to be an ongoing regional engagement with transregional realities.

In the first chapter, Barrett adopts a longue durée historiography, in order to make a case for a regionally inflected discourse grounded in a monastic vision of urban space. Comparing the works of two Benedictine monks each attached to St. Werburgh’s Abbey, in Chester, Barrett argues that a “Cheshire writing” (p. 27) can be discerned that transcends the three centuries separating the monks’ textual productions. Barrett explores Lucian’s urban descriptio, De Laude Cestrie (ca. 1192), in which a spiritualized geographical discourse presents Chester as both a monastic and global center. While protecting the abbey’s interests in his idealized city, Lucian demonstrates a transnational perspective in which Chester identifies itself in contradistinction to an unstable Rome. Barrett reveals the intensification of civic-monastic tensions in Henry Bradshaw’s Life of St. Werburge (ca. 1500), in which the city of Chester is linked both with the monastery whose interests Bradshaw protects and with the body of St. Werburge, who brings a mystical corporal unity to the community. For Barrett, Bradshaw echoes Lucian in negotiating transnational issues alongside local ones: competing both against Lutheran doctrines and mayoral authorities, Bradshaw’s printed Life of St. Werburge interrelates national and regional interests, showing that “Cheshire texts can speak for England” (p. 58).

Chapter 2 examines the manner in which urban topography shapes the Chester Whitsun plays, in an exploration of the synergy between dramatic settings and the social and economic realities of sixteenth-century Chester. Barrett offers a rich reading of the vibrant economy generated through spectatorship of the plays, and tracks the ways in which “mobile” theatrical meaning (p. 67) is inflected by landmarks such as the corn market, the Pentice, the abbey, and the River Dee. The Chester plays prove as socioculturally complex as the city within which they are staged. Barrett reads anxieties about political life into the Tanners’ Fall of Lucifer, with angelic rebellion figuring fears of disenfranchisement in an oligarchic Chester. Analyzing poor laws and social understandings of charity and their relation to the Glovers’ Blind Chelidonian; the Raising of Lazarus play, Barrett demonstrates the interrelation of centralized Tudor and local policies.

Chapter 3 focuses on Robert Amery’s remarkable 1610 production of Chester’s Triumph, a civic pageant designed to celebrate the upcoming inauguration of Henry Frederick Stuart as Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester. Amery’s urban pageant demonstrates the ongoing negotiation of local and “national” concerns in Cheshire (p. 96), as the producer adapts to the absence of royal visitors by saturating the work with civic and personal meanings. Barrett links the ironmonger- producer’s Chester’s Triumph with Thomas Dekker’s Troia-Nova Triumphans, analyzing each as a production that stages civic instability only to reinforce “oligarchic solidarity” (p. 107). Barrett turns to book-culture to generate a fascinating interpretation...