Our Sea of Islands: New Approaches to British Insularity in the Late Middle Ages 3031464044, 9783031464041

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Our Sea of Islands New Approaches to British Insularity in the Late Middle Ages Edited by

m at t h e w boy d g ol di e se b a s t i a n sobec k i

Our Sea of Islands

Matthew Boyd Goldie • Sebastian Sobecki Editors

Our Sea of Islands New Approaches to British Insularity in the Late Middle Ages

Previously published in postmedieval Volume 7, issue 4, December 2016

Editors Matthew Boyd Goldie Rider University Lawrence Township, NJ, USA

Sebastian Sobecki Toronto, ON, Canada

Spin-off from journal: “postmedieval” Volume 7, issue 4, December 2016 ISBN 978-3-031-46404-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

Our seas of islands ........................................................................................................................................... 1 Matthew Boyd Goldie and Sebastian Sobecki: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2016, 2016: 7:471483 (13, December 2016) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-016-0022-2 The trouble with Britain ............................................................................................................................... 15 Patricia Clare Ingham: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2016, 2016: 7:484496 (13, December 2016) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-016-0025-z Britain and the sea of darkness: Islandology in al-Idrīsī’s Nuzhat al-Mushtaq ........................................ 29 Christine Chism: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2016, 2016: 7:497510 (13, December 2016) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-016-0021-3 From Pliny to Brexit: Spatial representation of the British Isles .............................................................. 43 Alfred Hiatt: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2016, 2016: 7:511525 (13, December 2016) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-016-0023-1 Brendan meets Columbus: A more commodious islescape ........................................................................ 59 James L. Smith: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2016, 2016: 7:526538 (13, December 2016) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-016-0027-x Fictions of the Island: Girdling the sea ....................................................................................................... 73 Lynn Staley: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2016, 2016: 7:539550 (13, December 2016) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-016-0028-9 The Bermuda assemblage: Toward a posthuman globalization ................................................................ 85 Steve Mentz: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2016, 2016: 7:551564 (13, December 2016) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-016-0026-y Afterword ....................................................................................................................................................... 99 Peregrine Horden: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2016, 2016: 7:565571 (13, December 2016) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-016-0024-0 Dynamic fluidity and wet ontology: Current work on the archipelagic North Sea ................................107 Robert Rouse: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2016, 2016: 7:572580 (13, December 2016) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-016-0030-2

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Editors’ Introduction

Our seas of islands

Matthew Boyd Goldiea and Sebastian Sobeckib a

Department of English, Rider University, Lawrenceville, NJ, USA. Department of English, Language, and Culture, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands. b

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7, 471–483. doi:10.1057/s41280-016-0022-2

Epeli Hau‘ofa’s essay on a ‘sea of islands’ was intended to offer a bottom-up, corrective, and holistic view of Oceania. Instead of colonial images of the Pacific as a vast ocean with tiny isolated islands in it, he included the sea as part of what can constitute a home and reimagined Oceania as historically inflected ‘networks . . . integrated by trading and cultural exchange systems’ (Hau‘ofa, 1993, 7–9). From a perspective on the sea, a large landmass can be a haven, danger, or obstruction. Smaller islands might not only block travel, but they can also offer the interactive space of a shore combined with a more accessible interior. Islands may also reticulate in a variety of forms, sometimes presenting series of lands that offer waystations for sea travel. Seas additionally narrow and transition to rivers that can lead far inland. Although an idealistic strain in Hau’ofa’s and others’ visions of Pacific and other maritime networks has been criticized, the point remains that while some oceanic expanses can present a barrier, they tend instead to facilitate travel.1 These general observations about islands and sea suggest some beginning points for thinking about late-medieval archipelagism, but describing a specifically British area and what it contains remains problematic. We look therefore to the political historian J.G.A. Pocock who adopted the term ‘Atlantic archipelago’ to denote ‘a large – dare I say a sub-continental? – island group  2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

1 For a summary of critiques, see Goldie (2010, 143).

Vol. 7, 4, 471–483

Chapter 1 was originally published as Goldie, M. B. & Sobecki, S. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7: 471483. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-016-0022-2.

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2 Pocock quotes ‘not in narrow seas’ from New Zealand poet Allen Curnow’s volume of that title (Curnow, 1939).

lying off the northwest coasts of geographic Europe, partly within and partly without the oceanic limits of the Roman empire and of what is usually called ‘‘Europe’’ in the sense of the latter’s successor states’ (Pocock, 2005, 29). Pocock identifies himself in part as a New Zealand historian, and his antipodean perspective suggests a view of ‘the world as an archipelago of histories rather than a tectonic of continents’ (Pocock, 2005, 19), ‘histories both transplanted by voyagings and generated by settlements and contacts, and consequently as never quite at home’ (Pocock, 2005, 19). British and New Zealand histories, he argues, share myths and narratives of ‘peoples in motion’ and ‘histories traversing distance’ (Pocock, 2005, 23). From a late-medieval perspective, every locational and spatial term is problematic: England, Britain, British Isles, Atlantic, North Sea, Great Britain, ‘oure occian’ and ‘oure wilde see,’ and so on. In her essay ‘The trouble with Britain,’ Patricia Ingham points out the frequent conflation of one place, region, or name with another, England for Britain most commonly, whereas whatever the entity is, ‘multi-geographic’ might be the most apt term. People forget, for instance, that ‘Great Britain’ and ‘the more Britain’ were the terms to distinguish the island or islands from Brittany. Even Pocock’s adopted term, ‘Atlantic archipelago,’ for all its destabilizing and multiplying, still posits a cohesive sociological unit and is only vaguely located. The term archipelago is itself somewhat anachronistic when applied to medieval geography; it does not appear in English before 1500, at which time it refers to the Aegean Sea before being applied more broadly. Pocock’s ‘Atlantic archipelago’ is a term nevertheless with a past that confirms his idea of archipelagic history. The term does not seem to have been used to refer to Britain, Ireland, and so on until the 1980s and may in part be attributable to the Falklands War. At that point in time, ‘South Atlantic Archipelago,’ or just the ‘Atlantic Archipelago,’ referred to the Falkland Islands 300 miles east of Argentina. It would appear that the reference to British, Irish, and other islands as the ‘Atlantic archipelago’ therefore is transferred from the South Atlantic to the North during that time of martial and political upheaval. This would confirm Pocock’s observation that modern British history is ‘Formed partly in an archipelago of the Southern Ocean’ and ‘presents the islands including Britain as another archipelago . . . not the promontory of a continent; it presupposes histories ‘‘not in narrow seas’’’ (Pocock, 2005, 23).2 We might therefore adopt and adapt Pocock’s term, and call our area of study the ‘Northeast Atlantic archipelago.’ This introduction offers a partial overview to the volume and indicates one possible path to thinking about late-medieval seas of islands in the Northeast Atlantic. Geography, genealogy, law, politics, ethnography, linguistics, economics, literature, and other disciplines afford distinct historical ways to examine the region in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. In the

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space available, we will address the first four – geography, genealogy, law, and politics – with the understanding that there are of course intersections and overlap among these discourses as well as limitations and challenges within each. It may indeed be said that our approach is under the sign of the number four: four disciplines, four winds and so the cardinal directions, four corners of the world, four seas, and England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. This quadrivial venture emphasizes geographical inconsistencies alongside a growing legal and political coherence to the Northeast Atlantic archipelago. Despite a temptation to collapse disciplines and approaches, geographical considerations of the archipelago are distinguishable from political, ethnographic, and other lines of inquiry, including a proto-English nationalism that has gained a considerable amount of focus in recent years. The insular and maritime entities that the term ‘North Atlantic archipelago’ encompasses are complicated in many ways: what they are, where they are, and the relations among them. Islands are firstly geographical in late-medieval European writings, not in the sense that geography is a distinct, well-defined discipline, but Greek, Roman, and medieval authorities, after describing the three continents of the northern hemisphere, include islands as a separate group. Britain is often prominent in this group; Isidore of Seville, for example, is typical in this regard in Book 14 of the Etymologies when he groups chapters on islands, beginning with Britain, then briefly describes Thanet, Ultima Thule, the Orkneys, Ireland, Cadiz (considered an island), the Fortunate Islands, the Gorgades (traditionally off the African west coast), and so on (Isidore, 1911). Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ thirteenth-century De proprietatibus rerum, his encyclopedic compilation of sources about the world, has a chapter on the earth’s regions, and its introduction states the world has three parts before it resorts to an approximately alphabetical treatment of its various places (Bartholomaeus, 1483, 15.1). The following uses Bartholomaeus, Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, and John Trevisa’s late-fourteenth-century translations of both to examine geographical discussions of the Northeast Atlantic archipelago. First we might ask where the entities are. Christine Chism’s ‘Britain and the Sea of Darkness: Islandology in al-Idrı¯sı¯’s Nuzhat al-Mushtaq’ suggests that the answer in part depends on the location from where one looks. From Norman Sicily, the North Atlantic archipelago is in the ‘Sea of Darkness,’ also a place of ‘epistemological breakdown.’ The traditional distinction in both Christian and Muslim geography between Asia-Africa-Europe and the rest may account for Higden’s citation of authorities that say that ‘Anglia Britannica alter orbis appellatur’ and that the edge of the French cliff is the end of the world, so Britain merits being called another world (Higden, 1869, 2:1.39).3 Bartholomaeus likewise describes the following: ‘Anglia occeani est insula maxima que

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3 See Lavezzo (2004).

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circumfusa mari a toto orbe undique divisa.’ Trevisa renders the passage, ‘Inglond is þe moste ilond of Occean and is biclippid alle aboute with see and departed from þe roundenesse of þe worlde’ (Bartholomaeus, 1975, 15.14). Both Higden and Bartholomaeus claim that Isidore says that Anglia has its name from being ‘angulus’ because it is at the end of the world or, as it were, makes up a corner of the world. The allusion seems to be to Isaiah 11:12 and the ‘four quarters of the earth,’ although why Anglia is in one corner appears to be a traditional addition. In Bartholomaeus, it is the most fruitful and fertile ‘angulus orbis’ (Bartholomaeus, 1483, 15.13; Higden, 1869, 2:1.39). The names are complicated, but Isidore (cited incorrectly as ‘Alfridus’ in the Trevisa translation of the Polychronicon) says further that England is an island, and islands are called such because they are ‘in salo’ [‘in the sea’] (Isidore, 1911, 14.6; Bartholomaeus, 1975, 6). On the topic of names and the location of the entities within the North Atlantic archipelago, Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Gerald of Wales, and others offered their versions of genealogical history in earlier centuries, many of which were picked up by later authors. Other less-known genealogies were added. Their contemporary Gervase of Tilbury, for example, suggested the name England from the Angles, who came from a Saxon island of ‘Engla’ (Gervase, 2002, 306–307). Again, both Bartholomaeus and Higden are interesting. They not only repeat the stories from Bede, Geoffrey, and others of Brutus traveling to an island coast during his exile, but they also posit less-known origins for the names. Bartholomaeus and Higden have an abbreviated version of the story of Brutus and then the Saxons, but they also add that the latter named the land after the daughter of one of the Saxon ‘dukes,’ ‘Engela regina.’ Both repeat the story of Gregory the Great and angels, but they also say that the island has its name of Albion geologically because of its white rock cliffs above the sea (Bartholomaeus, 1483, 15.13; Higden, 1869, 2:1.39). Was the archipelago considered one geographical unit? Was it an it, or were the islands a they? Singular or plural? These are the kinds of questions Alfred Hiatt asks in his essay ‘From Pliny to Brexit: Spatial representation of the British Isles,’ in which he follows Patrick Gautier Dalche´ in warning that ‘it should not be assumed too readily that the concepts of ‘‘island,’’ ‘‘continent,’’ and even ‘‘ocean’’ remain identical across different cultures.’ The Polychronicon attributes to Henry Huntington the idea that England is ‘floure of londes al aboute,’ and it is unambiguous in stating that the ‘ilond of Bretayne’ in Brutus’ time ‘bygan for to have þ[r]e principal parties’: England, Wales, and Scotland, which also have three main islands near them – Anglesey, Wight, and Man – as well as smaller ones (Higden, 1865, 1869, 1–2:1.37–43). Ireland is not included as part of the Polychronicon’s chapters on England-Britain (although its earlier chapter on Hibernia says it ‘was of olde tyme incorporat in to þe lordschippe of Bretayne’)

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(Higden, 1865, 1:1.32). Bartholomaeus’ entry on Ireland says it is near Britain, but he does not say it is part of it (Bartholomaeus, 1975, 15.74). Bartholomaeus is in fact interestingly contradictory in his entries on Anglia, Britania, Europa, Hibernia, and so on. First, it is curious that he has entries both for Anglia and Britania. Second, neither corresponds with today’s England or Britain. Trevisa’s translation begins the entry on Anglia by saying ‘Inglond is þe moste ilond of Occean,’ while the entry on Britania simply begins ‘Briteyne is an ilonde of Occean in Europa’ (‘in Europa’ in the Latin) (Bartholomaeus, 1975, 15.14, 15.28). Third, nowhere does Bartholomaeus say that England is part of Britain; they are instead chronological terms: Albion, Britannia, then Anglia. Even whether Britain/England and Ireland were considered insular in any significant way is a valid question. In the geographical writings, it is not always clear whether Britain and Ireland are islands, as though their greater size tips them over into the category of merely a land. Trevisa often substitutes ‘londe’ for the Latin text’s ‘insula’ when he translates observations about Britain and Ireland, or else he mixes kinds of lands together. In the entry for Europe in Bartholomaeus, for instance, he says ‘And þereaftir [Barbaria] is Gothia, and þanne Dacia, Dennemark, þan Germania, þanne Gallia and þe londe of Breteyne, Orcades, and many ilondes’ (Bartholomaeus, 1975, 15.50). The entry for Ireland similarly says, ‘Irlonde hat Hibernia and is an ilonde of Occean in Europa, and is nȝe to þe londe of Bretayne, and is more narowe and streyte þanne Bretayne and more plenteuouse place’ (Bartholomaeus, 1975, 15.151). Scotland is quite confusedly described as ‘a lon[g]e strecchinge cuntrey, as it were a forlonde in þe erþe4 of Bretaigne. And is departede fro norþe Englonde with ryvers and armes of þe see, and is yclosede aboute with Occean in e[i]þere syde, and is also departede fro Irlonde wiþ þe see of Occean’ (Bartholomaeus, 1975, 15.151). What kinds of relationships obtain among the lands? Three entities are important: other islands or lands, Europe, and the sea. References to other islands are as frequent as they are to continental lands. For Higden, Ireland ‘is þe laste of alle þe west ilondes,’ Spain is three days’ sailing to the southeast of it, ‘þe more Bretayne’ is to the east one day’s sail, and Iceland is three days’ sail to the north (Higden, 1865, 1:1.32). Elsewhere, he claims that Bede ‘clepeþ Hibernia propurliche i-nempned þat west ilond þat is an hundred myle from every Britayne, and departed wiþ þe see bitwene’ (Higden, 1865, 1:1.37). For Britain, he says, ‘Þe meeres [‘‘limites’’] and þe marke were þerof somtyme þe Frensche see boþe by est and by souþ’ (Higden, 1869, 2:1.43). Bartholomaeus’ authorities say ‘Brytayne þat now hat Anglia is an ilonde ysette aforne Fraunce and Spayne’ and ‘haþ Fraunce in þe souþe syde,’ and we have already read of it and Ireland being ‘in Europe’ (Bartholomaeus, 1975, 15.14, 15.28). Looking elsewhere for evidence, Flanders is said to have Germania on the east side, ‘þe ilonde of

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4 Early and less corrupt manuscripts of the translation have ‘erþe.’ Others have other English words, and the Latin text again has ‘insula.’

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Bretayne in þe north, and þe Frenssge see in þe weste’ (Bartholomaeus, 1975, 15.58). Various relationships to the sea also appear. The islands are usually described in terms of distance, often including Thule and Iceland, as we have seen. An instance of this sort of measurement in addition to Scotland above is the Orkneys, which Bartholomaeus calls ‘an ilond of Occean in þe Brittishe see in Europa, þerof many oþer ilondes þat ben nyȝe þerto han þe name’ (Bartholomaeus, 1975, 15.110). Thanet is likewise an ‘ilond of Occean,’ ‘departede from Bretayne wiþ a litil arme of þe see,’ and ‘Vitria,’ similarly to the Orkneys, ‘a litil ilonde in þe Bryttisshe see […] departede from þe more Bretayne with a litil arme of þe see.’ (Trevisa interposes in the description of ‘Vitria’ that no mention is made of which direction it lies from Britain, and he questions whether it is the same as the island of Wight [Bartholomaeus, 1975, 15.154, 15.172]). Thule is ‘þe last ilonde of Occean bytwene norþ cuntrey a south, vi. dayes sailynge byȝonde Bretayne,’ while Iceland is ‘þe laste regioun in Europa in þe norþe biȝonde Norwey, in þe firste parties þerof is alwey ise and glass. And streccheþ uppon þe clyffe of Occean toward þe north, yfrore for grete and stronge coolde. And Islonde hath þe over Scicia in þe eest syde, and Norwey in þe souþe, and þe Irysshe occean in þe weste’ (Bartholomaeus, 1975, 15.160, 15.173). The conclusion from these geographies and genealogies, and there are many other works of course, is that there is very little consistency in terms of the entities themselves, where they are, and the relationships among them. There is even less correspondence between how they were described and the entities we know today as Britain, England, Ireland, the North Sea, the North Atlantic, and so on. One final observation involves cartographical evidence, which suggests something similar, namely that the handful of surviving late-medieval maps also presents a less than consistent view of the area. One problem with maps is that they vary in terms of what they depict because of framing and scale. The Matthew Paris, Gough, Totius Britanniae Tabula Chorographica map (British Library Manuscript Harley 1808), and even John Hardyng’s map of Scotland constrict the focus, while maps of larger areas, including the so-called mappaemundi and portolan charts, tend to show a variety of relationships among lands. But if the Northeast Atlantic archipelago was not consistently, or at all, considered one geographical unit, were there other senses in which this archipelago was thought of as one entity? Can, as James Smith asks in ‘Brendan meets Columbus: A more commodious islescape,’ separation paradoxically bring things together? In the second edition of his Principall Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation, printed in three volumes between 1598 and 1600, Richard Hakluyt gathered some seventy medieval texts, in addition to hundreds of later works, to build an implied case

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for English imperial expansion (Hakluyt, 1598–1600).5 Hakluyt’s quasi-legal case itself rests on precedents, ancient trade links, insular conquests, and control over the sea surrounding the archipelago. The medieval texts he collected for his volumes range from Ohthere’s northern voyages, over diplomatic spats with the Hanseatic League, to the first complete printing of the virulently jingoistic fifteenth-century poem The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, which, in the second and more soberly political edition of the Principall Navigations, replaces Mandeville’s Travels.6 Among the economic, cultural, and political arguments for an archipelagic Britain advanced by Hakluyt, the legal claims to England’s maritime dominion over the British Isles assume a central position. Of the seventy medieval case studies that preface the Principall Navigations, King Edgar’s circumnavigation of Britain is the most outspoken about England’s archipelagic ambitions, besides revealing that a residual understanding of the unified British Isles as-located-inthe-British-Ocean existed ever since the twelfth century. Although Hakluyt props up the historicity of this momentous claim by stating that he has sourced the material for this section from Roger Howden’s Chronica and the Worcester Chronicle in addition to John Dee’s General and Rare Memorials, the entire section only reproduces material assembled by Dee, whose ideas, in turn, are given an impressive platform in the Principall Navigations. At the heart of Dee’s, and therefore Hakluyt’s, claim of archipelagic dominion is the belief, grounded in the spurious ninth-century charter Altitonantis (which was actually a twelfthcentury forgery), that King Edgar ruled the entire British Isles by virtue of keeping the seas: Altitonantis Dei largiflua clementia, qui est rex Regum, Ego Ædgarus Anglorum Basileus omniu´q[ue] Regum, Insularum, Oceanı´q[ue] Britanniam circumiacentis, cunctaru´mq[ue] nationum qu[æ] infra eam includuntur, Imperator, & Dominus, gratias ago ipsi Deo omnipotenti, Regi meo, qui meum Imperium sic ampliauit, & exaltauit super regnum patru[m] meorum: qui licet Monarchiam totius Angliæ adepti sunt a` tempore Athelstani (qui primus regnum Anglorum, & omnes Nationes, qu[æ] Britanniam incolunt, sibi Armis subegit) nullus tamen eoru[m] vltra eius fines imperium suum dilatare aggressus est. Mihi autem concessit propitia Diuinitas, cum Anglorum Imperio, omnia regna Insularum Oceani, cum suis ferocissimis Regibus, vsq[ue] Noruegiam, maxima´mq[ue] partem Hyberniæ, cum sua nobilissima Ciuitate Dublinia, Anglorum regno subiugare: Quos etiam omnes, meis Imperijs colla subdere (Dei fauente gratia) coegi. Quapropter & ego Christi gloriam, & laudem exaltare, & eius seruitium amplificare deuotus disposui, & per meos fideles Fautores, Dunstanum viz. Archiepiscopum, Athelwoldum, & Oswaldum episcopos (quos mihi patres spirituales, & Consiliatores elegi) magna ex parte, secundum quod disposui, effeci, &c. (Hakluyt, forthcoming)

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5 A fourteen-volume edition of the Principall Navigations is currently being prepared under the general editorship of Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt. The first volume and the first half of the second volume, edited by Sebastian Sobecki, contain all seventy medieval texts printed by Hakluyt. 6 On the changes between the two editions, see Fuller (2011).

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[By the plentiful mercy of God thundering on high, who is king of kings, I Edgar, king of the English and emperor and lord over all the kings of the islands of the ocean that surround Britain, and of all the nations that inhabit it, give thanks to the omnipotent God, my king, who has so considerably enlarged my empire and raised it above the realms of my forefathers. Although they held the crown of all England since the time of Æthelstan (who, first among the kings of the English, conquered by force all the nations that inhabit Britain), ultimately none of them has attempted to extend his control beyond its boundaries. Yet divine favour has granted me, together with the realm of the English, to subjugate to the kingdom of the English all the kingdoms of the islands of the ocean with their fierce kings, as far as Norway and most of Ireland, with its excellent city of Dublin. All this I have subjected to my yoke with the help of God’s grace. Therefore I exalt Christ’s glory and praise, and I intend to increase His worship. I have performed much of what I intended with the help of my trusted aides, namely Archbishop Dunstan and bishops Æthelwold and Oswald, who are spiritual fathers to me and whom I have chosen as counselors. (Hakluyt, forthcoming)] This charter, as do some others, styles Edgar as basileus, an insular emperor ruling over Britain, Ireland, Norway and ‘the islands of the ocean that surrounds Britain’ – in other words, Pocock’s Northeast Atlantic archipelago and then some. John Dee makes this twelfth-century forgery the centerpiece of his case for archipelagic dominion, buttressing his argument with chronicle accounts of Edgar’s attempt to enforce his total control of the British Isles by his annual circumnavigation, a claim often repeated from the twelfth century onwards. According to most accounts, every year Edgar would command an AngloSaxon fleet – inflated by Dee to thousands of ships and a hundred thousand soldiers – to sail ‘about this Brittish Albion, with all the lesser Isles next adjacent round about it,’ and ‘by such ful and peaceable possession, find himselfe (according to right, and his hearts desire) the true and soveraigne Monarch of all the British Ocean, environing any way his empire of Albion and Ireland, with the lesser Islands next adjacent’ (Hakluyt, forthcoming). Despite the artificiality of Dee’s numbers, this was a very real claim made by his sources, perhaps articulated best, again, by Higden, as transmitted by Hakluyt’s Dee: dem quoque Ædgarus, 4000. naues congregauit, ex quibus omni anno, post festum Paschale, 1000. naues ad quamlibet Angliæ partem statuit, sic,

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æstate Insulam circumnauigauit: hyeme vero`, iudicia in Prouincia exercuit: & hæc omnia ad sui exercitium, & ad hostium fecit terrorem. (Hakluyt, forthcoming)7 [This Edgar gathered 4000 ships, of which each year, after Easter, he placed 1000 on each side of England. Thus, he circumnavigated the Island in summer. In winter, however, he administered justice in his territory. And he did all this for his own navy and the deterrence of his enemies. (Hakluyt, forthcoming)]

7 Dee’s source is Higden (1879, 7: 6.11).

Ever since the twelfth century, Edgar’s imperial fiction, loosely supported by the legal status of the Altitonantis charter, was used to uphold claims to Ireland (especially Dublin), the Isle of Man, and other islands located in the seas surrounding Britain (Sobecki, 2011a). The second tradition that lent force to the idea of the British archipelago (united under an English monarch) was the alleged subjection of between six and eight insular kings on the River Dee near Chester shortly after Edgar’s coronation on 11 May 973. This event is reported in the various recensions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Anonymous, 1996–2007) as well as in many other texts (Thornton, 2001): 7 sona æfter þam se cyning gelædde ealle his scipfyrde to Leiceastre, 7 þær him comon ongean .vi. cyningas, 7 ealle wið hine getreowsodon þæt hi woldon efenwyrhtan beon on sæ 7 on lande.8 [And immediately after that the king took his whole fleet to Chester, and there six kings came to him, and all gave him pledges that they would be his allies (lit. fellow workers) on sea and on land. (Thornton, 2001, 50)] Such accounts of Edgar’s alleged rule over all the islands surrounding Britain, by virtue of controlling the seas, filtered into numerous chronicles and historiographies, from the Melrose chronicle to Aelred of Rievaulx’s Genealogia regum Anglorum, until they eventually reached the fifteenth-century proto-mercantilist Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, a poem most likely associated with the highest ranks of Henry VI’s government and, in particular, with William Lyndwood, Keeper of the Privy Seal, and one of medieval England’s most formidable canon lawyers (Sobecki, 2011b). By the sixteenth century, with help from the Libelle, Dee, and Hakluyt, the Northeast Atlantic archipelago had become Edgar’s archipelago, a distinctly English and imperial construct.9 Lynn Staley’s essay ‘Fictions of the island: Girdling the sea’ similarly posits the ‘off-shore calculus’ of mercantile perspectives of the time that sought to turn an image of seas of islands into a commercial ‘highway of profit.’ In the seventeenth century, John Selden

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8 This extract is taken from the D version, as represented in London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.iv; see http://asc. jebbo.co.uk/d/d-L. html.

9 On the further development of ‘Edgar’s archipelago,’ see Sobecki (2011a).

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equipped his defense of territorial waters, Mare clausum, with Edgarian support, and Samuel Pepys, clerk of the acts of the Navy Board, owned a copy of Marchamont Nedham’s 1652 translation of Selden’s work. A small panegyric poem addressed to an apostrophized Britannia, and prefaced to Nedham’s translation, spells out in English what Edgar’s archipelago would begin to mean for those who, over the coming centuries, came into contact with an Englishruled Northeast Atlantic archipelago: New Seas thou gain’st; & to the antient FOUR By Edgar left, thou addest many more. (Selden, 1652, frontispiece, ll. 23–24) The extent of the post-Edgarian annexation of oceans to the Four Seas became part of the legal fabric of the British Empire – even the future president of the United States, John Adams, had to fight off Edgar and his archipelago (Sobecki, 2011a, 29–30). The de jure incorporation of other seas is showcased in a trial of 1834. After the captain of a Royal Navy ship was accused of falsely imprisoning a sailor off the coast of New Zealand, the attorney general for New South Wales stated that

10 Lewis vs Lambert, cited in Sobecki (2011a, 29).

11 On the precise identity of these four seas, see Kiralfy (1989, 383–384).

[b]y the law of England the King of England is Lord of the four seas and his power over the ocean has extended from time to time by the growth of the Navy and the maritime ascendancy of Great Britain.10 But before this Northeast Atlantic archipelago – Edgar’s archipelago – could start adding new seas to its small insular empire, it needed to assert Britain’s proprietorship of its adjacent waters. The essentially paradoxical term ‘territorial waters’ is precisely that: an attempt to turn sea into land, wilderness into legal property. For medieval and post-medieval readers, Edgar’s circumnavigation had created the precedent of an English-centered British basileus who divided the sea he owned into four administrative regions: the Channel, the North Sea, the Irish Sea, and the Western Sea or the southwestern approaches of the Atlantic.11 In a legal context, these four seas became synonymous with proximity, familiarity, reach, and, essentially therefore, Britain itself. Steve Mentz’s essay ‘The Bermuda assemblage: Toward a posthuman globalization’ suggests something of the same accumulatory aspect of Bermudan identity, an accretion of elements that – only retrospectively and from a limited human point of view – achieves a form of coherence. The legal appropriation was gradual yet lasting and explains why the Edgarian fiction, when it was invoked in the later Middle Ages, was so successful. The groundwork had been prepared in legal discourses since at least

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Our seas of islands

the late thirteenth century. The following case from 1290, known as the Modus Levandi Fines, invokes the ‘binding force of the collusive conveyance of land known as the Fine (or final concord)’ on persons who do not object to it within a year: And the cause wherefore such solemnity ought to be done is because a fine is so high a bar, of so great force, and of so strong nature in itself, that it concludeth not only such as be parties and privies thereto and their heirs but all other people of the world, being of full age, out of prison, of good memory and within the four seas (dedeinz les quaters meers) the day of the fine levied. (Kiralfy, 1989, 380) Albert Kiralfy has demonstrated that the regular occurrence of the phrase dedeinz les quaters meers, or its Latin translation, ensured that the ‘four seas’ became interchangeable with ‘beyond the seas,’ that is, beyond Britain: ‘‘‘Beyond the seas’’ was a later equivalent of the ‘‘four seas’’’ (Kiralfy, 1989, 382). From a legal point of view, that which was thought of as lying within the seas circumscribed jurisdiction; conversely, regions beyond the (four) seas denoted the end of English jurisdiction. So when Edgar’s circumnavigation returned to the forefront of political discourses with the fifteenth-century poem The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, the legal fiction of the Four Seas had already been absorbed as an expression of implied territorial waters. As such, Edgar’s archipelago had been established long before Selden, Cromwell’s agent Nedham or the Stuart navy could speak of Edgar as ‘Quatuor Maria vindicare’ (Waterhouse, 1663, 408). Yet insular connectivity is not just about water. Peregrine Horden’s afterword draws attention to land routes in the ongoing archipelagism or ‘Philippinization’ of Britain. Such a focus reminds us of other spatial and motile networks, ‘terrestrial connectivity,’ besides maritime seas of islands. Thinking along these lines might at least serve to remind us that oceans are one of the four principal water ecosystems. The others are rivers, lakes, and wetlands, and each deserves its own particular attention because of its defining characteristics: rivers dividing and connecting, striating Britain on maps, and subject to control of a different kind from seas; lakes in some ways similar to forests in their wildness and as resources; fens, mires, and sloughs with all their ambiguities and challenges. Nor should we forget about islands within islands, such as the Isle of Ely: six hundred years before Dutch hydro engineers drained the Fens of East Anglia, Hereward the Wake blockaded the island of Ely, delaying William the Conqueror’s attempt to connect England to the Duchy of Normandy. Or consider statuschanging geographies, such as with the Isle of Thanet, whose separating waters meant that it was a main route of transport from London to the channel for hundreds of years, vessels passing between the mainland and the island until the

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Goldie and Sobecki

fifteenth century when Thanet became un-islanded as the rivers silted up. If, as Horden argues, ‘connectivity’ stands for ‘high connectivity,’ then an inward focus on riverine transport, mobility, and the narratives such movement generates can only enhance the idea of the archipelago as such: by linking the shores of islands with their hinterlands, these internal regions are, in turn, connected to the other islands of the archipelago.

About the Authors Matthew Boyd Goldie teaches at Rider University. His latest publication is on a fifteenth-century English rutter, a maritime navigational treatise, in Speculum. He is the author of The Idea of the Antipodes: Place, People, and Voices (2010) and editor of Middle English Literature: A Historical Sourcebook (2003). He is currently working on a study of space in late medieval physics and Middle English literature (E-mail: [email protected]). Sebastian Sobecki is Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture at Groningen University. His first book, The Sea and Medieval English Literature (Brewer), appeared in 2008, and his second monograph, Unwritten Verities: The Making of England’s Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463–1549 (Notre Dame) in 2015. He is working on The Material Politics of England’s Fifteenth-Century Literature (Oxford) and completing two volumes of a new edition of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (Oxford), besides co-editing three books: Medieval English Travel (Oxford), with Anthony Bale; A Companion to John Skelton (Brewer), with John Scattergood; and, with Candace Barrington, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Law and Literature. His articles have appeared in Speculum, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Renaissance Studies, The English Historical Review, The Chaucer Review, The Library, New Medieval Literatures, and The Review of English Studies, among others (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Anonymous. 1996–2007. Manuscript D: Cotton tiberius B.iv. In The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: An Electronic Edition, vol. 4, literary edition, ed. T. Jebbson, http://asc. jebbo.co.uk/d/d-L.html. Bartholomaeus Anglicus. 1483. De proprietatibus rerum. Nuremberg, Germany: Anton Koberger. Bartholomaeus Anglicus. 1975. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum: A Critical Text, ed. M. C. Seymour. Oxford, UK: Clarendon.

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Curnow, A. 1939. Not in Narrow Seas: Poems with Prose. Christchurch, New Zealand: Caxton. Fuller, J. C. 2011. Arthur and Amazons: Editing the Fabulous in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations. The Yearbook of English Studies 41(1): 173–189. Gervase of Tilbury. 2002. Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, eds. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns. Oxford, UK: Clarendon. Goldie, M. B. 2010. The Idea of the Antipodes: Place, People, and Voices. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures. New York: Routledge. Hakluyt, R. 1598–1600. Principall Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation. London. 3 vols. Hakluyt, R. Forthcoming. Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. 1 vol., ed. S. Sobecki. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hau‘ofa, E. 1993. Our Sea of Islands. In A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. E. Waddell, V. Naidu, and E. Hau‘ofa, 2–16. Suva, Fiji: School of Social and Economic Development, University of the South Pacific. Higden, R. 1865–1886. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis Together with the English Translations of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century. 9 vols., ed. J. Rawson Lumby and C. Babington. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green. Isidore of Seville. 1911. Etymologiarum. Oxford, UK: Clarendon. Kiralfy, A. 1989. The Riddle of the Four Seas a Correspondence. The Journal of Legal History 10: 380–388. Lavezzo, K. 2004. Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000–1534. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pocock, J. G. A. 2005. The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Selden, S. 1652. Of the Dominion or Ownership of the Sea, trans. M. Nedham. London. Sobecki, S. 2011a. Introduction: Edgar’s Archipelago. In The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity, and Culture, ed. S. Sobecki, 1–30. Cambridge, UK: Brewer. Sobecki, S. 2011b. Bureaucratic Verse: William Lyndwood, the Privy Seal, and the Form of the Libelle of Englyshe Polycye. New Medieval Literatures 12(1): 251–288. Thornton, D. 2001. Edgar and the Eight Kings, AD 973: Textus et dramatis personae. Early Medieval Europe 10(1): 49–79. Waterhouse, E. 1663. Fortescutus Illustratus or a Commentary on That Nervous Treatise, De Laudibus Legum Angliae. London.

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Article

The trouble with Britain

Patricia Clare Ingham Department of English, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.

Abstract This essay argues that scholars have overlooked the analytical power, complexity, and useful mobility of the category of ‘Britain.’ I argue, accordingly, for a reconsideration of the ways that an attentive appreciation of the diverse medieval uses of ‘Britain’ or the ‘British Isles’ might defamiliarize geographic relations both within and among the islands of the British archipelago. Drawing on various works that trouble the singularity of those terms, I trace a few lines of association across areas usually understood as utterly different, culminating in a reading of the geographic confusions of the Middle Scots Arthurian text, The Knightly Tale of Sir Gologras and Gawain. In that text, European location emerges, plausibly, as a ‘British,’ that is, a Scottish, question. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7, 484–496. doi:10.1057/s41280-016-0025-z

1 All quotations of Dunnett’s work are taken from the 1998 edition.

Dorothy Dunnett’s impressive novel King Hereafter retells the story known to most of us as Macbeth. We find precious little about ships or voyages in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, so it may seem surprising that Dunnett’s book opens by orienting the legend’s historical moment via a veritable sea of islands. Thorkel Amundason, the foster father of Dunnett’s protagonist Thorfinn (her candidate for the historical Macbeth), elicits the narrator’s first words. The year is 1000 C.E., an explicitly post-imperial time in which ‘a thousand years had passed since the White Christ was born in that age when the Romans had conquered the world’ (Dunnett, 1998, 1).1 Thorkel recalls his own seafaring youth:

© 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

Vol. 7, 4, 484–496

Chapter 2 was originally published as Ingham, P. C. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7: 484496. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-016-0025-z.

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The trouble with Britain

As a child Thorkel Amundason had touched Alba often enough, on his father’s trading-ship going to Dublin, or as part of a young man’s crew looking for booty in England. Alba he never attacked, nor did anyone else from Orkney or Norway. At the height of the Viking invasions, the King of Alba had found a way to buy peace. He had married his only daughter and heiress to the ruler of the Orkney islands, seven miles to his north, which long ago had been settled from Norway, and the baby born of that marriage he had made the child-Earl of Caithness, his northernmost province, over which for uncountable years the Earls of Orkney and the Kings of Alba had squabbled. (Dunnett, 1998, 2) Thorfinn is the baby born of that marriage – the Earl of Caithness, halfOrkney / half Alban – and Alba, of course, the land ‘that men later called Scotland’ (Dunnett, 1998, 2). When Dunnett foregrounds the historical ‘connectivity’ of islands and headlands in the vicinity of the North, she orients her readers away from stable borders and monumental state foundations and toward movement and mobility: ships ‘touch’ Alba en route to Ireland or in search of English plunder; Vikings invade and peace is bought; marriages are arranged and children born; settlers in Orkney – separated from Caithness by only seven miles of water – have Norwegian roots. Readers are plunged, immediately, into a North Atlantic zone (Hudson, 2012, 1–32), and the Irish and the Northern Seas link a variety of islands: Iceland, Iona, and Skye; the archipelagos known to us today as the Orkneys; the Shetlands; and the Inner and Outer Hebrides.2 I begin with this gesture to Dunnett’s reorientation of the story of Macbeth in part because it can help to defamiliarize what we think we know about the (singular) ‘island of Britain,’ or even the (plural) ‘British Isles.’ It is not hard to recognize ‘Alba’ as Scotland. In the long medieval tradition of British insularity, a tradition beginning with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Scotland is named, and subsequently recalled in much later literature, as ‘Alban’ or ‘Albany.’ What Dunnett’s retelling demonstrates, however, is more profound even than an accounting of the diversities across Britain’s insular spaces. It is something we also know but regularly forget: that the complex multiplicity and connectivity of various groupings of islands were always available to undercut whatever anxious fictions of oneness might coalesce under the signifiers ‘England,’ ‘Wales,’ ‘Scotland,’ or even ‘Britain.’ A singular identity posited for any part, portion, or fragment of a British isle (or any combinations thereof) was always already a tendentious definition shot through with amity and enmity; with violence, desire, and movement; with friendships, alliances, and community; with seafaring, mudflats, and tides; with geographic differences and diverse contestations – and this was part of

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2 Hudson (2012) has demonstrated the role of Viking invasions in connecting (his word is ‘unifying’) the Irish Sea world as an economic zone, integrating it with the trade network in the North Sea.

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Ingham

3 Ingham (2001). 4 I thus very much admire the emphasis on postcolonial uses of the notion of geographic and conceptual ‘beside.’ See Goldie (2010), especially pp. 5–6. 5 And, indeed, some scholars have found reason to doubt what they see as an insufficient emphasis on the oppositional force of the colonial difference between the Welsh and the English – in my reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight especially. On this point, see the interesting critique by Arner (2006). 6 On this point see Holsinger (2005). 7 While my earlier work is everywhere indebted to Davies, this particular study came out too late for me to incorporate its insights into Sovereign Fantasies.

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what I meant when, in the doctoral dissertation that would become Sovereign Fantasies (Ingham, 2001), I began thinking about the ‘making of Britain’ by way of the phrase ‘national fantasy.’3 My account of national fantasy did not mean to emphasize collocations of insides and outsides, or notions of England or Britain as delimited via a liminal relation to the centrality of an elsewhere, whether real or imagined.4 It was my hope, instead, that an emphasis on Britain could destabilize English southern centrality especially, in favor of an understanding of the changing cultural, political, regional, and geographic affiliations and disidentifications, the processes of interaction and movement that prompt – but also prop up – identity-formation amidst a messy history of legends, genealogies, and stories both shared and contested.5 It was also my hope that the Middle English texts of Arthurian romance might be seen as crucially engaged with the kind of fraught questions of community at the time already understood to be important to Chaucerian texts, or to a work like Piers Plowman. I was, accordingly, most interested in networks of association, in material dependencies and thefts, in borrowings (however, submerged), in appropriations, canny, legitimate, and not. For these reasons, I find the suggestion by Manion (2011) that annexation is ‘anachronistic’ to medieval sovereignty unconvincing. Such is, after all, one feature of the nature of ‘feudal’ ideology: to undermine incipient critiques of land theft. Sovereign Fantasies, of course, had its limitations, the most important being a much too limited engagement with ‘non-Middle English literatures,’ particularly the Welsh and Scots.6 Engaged with postcolonial theorizations in conversation with psychoanalytic understandings of identity, desire, and dependence, the work was also meant to demonstrate that the Britain rightly engaged as a modern agent of colonization was always already colonized at its very heart. Exhibit A, in this regard, might be the habit of English monarchs of deploying ‘Britain’ as an alias for ‘England.’ As R. R. Davies (2000) points out, sovereigns interested in consolidating England’s hold of Wales would use Britain in just such ways. Of course, Davies’ entire body of work demonstrates the need for care before following such practice silently in our analyses of these categories.7 For reasons to do with linguistic and literary histories, many of them very good indeed, nearly all subsequent studies of medieval insular identity across these islands have tended to double-down on the category of England rather than to interrogate fully the shifts and slips pertinent to the broader, more provocative, if less linguistic, category of Britain. To be sure, scholars have well recognized, as Sebastian Sobecki puts it, that ‘endeavoring to situate

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The trouble with Britain

Englishness in relation to Britishness’ means an awareness of the fact that ‘ideas of English identity frequently engage with many of the other inhabitants of the archipelago, the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish, and the Norse’ (Sobecki, 2011, 3). In this regard, the best work on the distinction between England and Britain has emphasized the sea. Elsewhere Sobecki writes, ‘What proved more effective in importing an awareness of insularity into Englishness was the realisation, arrived at sometime after the loss of the country’s possessions on the Continent during the close of the Hundred Years War, that which geographically and culturally defines Britain and a large part of England is above all the sea’ (Sobecki, 2007, 2). French losses are only one part of the story, however. Sovereign Fantasies argues that in the wake of the loss of French territories, an insular cultural identity was mobilized via Arthurian histories and Arthurian Romance with its representation of Arthur as a ‘native’ British King. Not to mention the consolidation of England’s claims to both Wales and Scotland. Here is Sobecki, again: ‘“The sea” denotes Britain’s insular setting’ and refers ‘to the full range of maritime topoi available to insular writers’ (Sobecki, 2011, 3). Yet I pause over the ease with which the next clause follows: ‘whereas “English” is understood not just as a historical self-designation but a process that involves not one but many British communities’ (Sobecki, 2011, 3). This statement is certainly fine, as far as it goes, but my main point is that it does not go very far at all in helping us to understand the displacements of just such engagements, particularly as they relate to processes of annexation or cultural appropriation, to what has been called ‘internal colonialism,’ or to the fraught designations of Europe’s socalled ‘internal primitives.’8 For these reasons, I do not think it entirely accurate to call an emphasis on the category of England a complication of work done on the fraught geopolitical relations among British insular regions and their continental allies.9 Slippages between the categories of Britain and of England in such work too often go unremarked.10 Analyses of Englishness have, of course, offered us many insights. But what they have not offered us, if I might be permitted to say so, is an entirely satisfying analysis of the vagaries of insular affiliation and aggression, or the histories through which some affiliations and associations shift and are passed on while others simply pass away. They have not, that is, always been helpful in parsing the differences as well as the overlapping tensions among such terms. Yet these overlapping tensions are distinctly legible in various Early and Middle English literary works, particularly in those evincing an interest in what Randy Schiff has called ‘the shifting political landscapes produced by expansive and discontinuous late-medieval imperial states’ (Schiff, 2011, 104).11

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8 See Hechter (1975). Although Hechter’s reliance on models of center and periphery are unsatisfying, his attention to the distribution of resources and development of infrastructure remains cogent. On ‘internal primitives,’ see FernandezArmesto (1987). 9 Though also focused on the category of ‘England,’ Barrett, Jr. (2009) offers a salutary counter example, demonstrating with rich detail the power of regional claims over against ‘national’ ones. 10 As for instance, ‘The great instigator of the matter of Britain, Geoffrey of Monmouth, opens his Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1138) with this statement, “Brittania insularum optima in occidentali oceano” (2, 52, “Britain, the best of islands, is situated in the

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Ingham

Western Ocean”). […] Around the same time as the [Alliterative Morte Arthure], we find the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opening his alliterative poem with an account of the translation of empire that describes the Trojan Brutus’s mythic founding of Britain beyond La Manche. […] As these and other geographic accounts of England’s global location affirm, the border of the world ocean belonged to England as well’ (Lavezzo 2011, 116, my emphasis). By what logic does Britain, in such famous Arthurian contexts, silently slide into, or become subsumed by, England? What, in addition to consolidating the hegemony of an English imaginary, do such silences serve? And what are we to make of this in an analysis of a Middle English poem filled with geographic references and in which cultural designations of Arthur’s British

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Recently scholars such as those gathered in this special issue have emphasized the mobilities at stake in such shifting histories.12 In this they have joined Schiff, Rob Barrett, Alfred Hiatt, and others interested in parsing the contested geographies enumerated among the diversities of people or places across the breadth of the totius insulae Britanniae, the whole island of Britain.13 It is also fair to say that, for all the consequential ‘reality effects’ wrought by Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain, his ‘tota insula’ is both aspirational and impossible, in other words nothing less than a fantasy, in the fullest sense of that term. This is not only because of the various and well-documented competing claims among diverse peoples for territory, oversight, or treasure (Picts or Scots, highlanders and lowlanders, Angles or Saxons, Northumbrians or Norse, English or Normans, Welsh, or Manx, or Flemish, or French). There never was a ‘tota insula’ in another way, too: the islands in the British archipelago were always dizzyingly many, and their geographic relations were rendered in various ways, through various kinds of maritime connectivity, at various times. This varied situation gestures toward the trouble to which my title refers. And it pertains especially to the islands off the Scottish coast and throughout the northern Atlantic zone.14 Let me count the ways: the Orkneys, Shetlands (its literature mostly Norwegian), the area known from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries as ‘The Kingdom of the Isles’ (mostly Gaelic and which included the Hebrides, the islands in the Firth of Clyde, and the Isle of Man), the Isle of Wight, or of Anglesey, the Channel Islands, the Isles of Scilly, Thorny Island, or Bardsey Island. (Even this list is far from comprehensive, given that Ireland, and accordingly the Arran Isles, Achill Island, and so on, are all missing.) Thanks to work by medievalists like Matthew Boyd Goldie or Alfred Hiatt; thanks as well to the insightful theorizations of Antonio Benı´tez-Rojo on the power of chaos theory for an understanding of the Caribbean archipelago (Benı´tez Rojo, 1997), or Antonis Balasopoulos’s incisive analysis of the insular form as channeling and limiting certain kinds of utopian projects (Balasopoulos, 2008), we now more readily recognize the problems with privileging the ‘insular’ over the maritime, particularly insofar as such forms seem less adept at tracking change, mobility, and movement. But recalling that Geoffrey of Monmouth’s tota insula was a powerful, aspirational fiction can help us here, too. Precisely as fantasy it opens upon an assessment of the multiple uses of the island form as a figure for alternative spaces, for other worlds (fictional, religious, or legendary). The sheer number of such other worlds specifically framed as islands found in literature of the British Isles is itself notable. Avalon, the Isle of the Mighty; the Western Isles, or Northern Isles, or Southern Isles, all from literatures connected to things Arthurian, with links to English, French, Scots and Welsh traditions.15 These texts, like a number of romance references to Arthurian other worlds, are shot through with comings and goings, with water-landings and crossings, with

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The trouble with Britain

ferries and ferrymen, tidal places and fens, with barges and boats, with floating, or wading, or sailing. Middle English poets note the multiplicity of islands associated with Welsh, English, and Scottish spaces in various ways, some of these specifically geographic. Sometimes islands are specified among the diverse spaces of Britain ‘the Broad.’ The impressive geographic list offered by the poet of the Alliterative Morte Arthure (Benson and Foster, 1994), for example, begins with mention of Atlantic islands in the North, ‘Argayle and Orkney and all these oute-isles’ (1.30). Islands that lie well outside England’s borders inaugurate the list of places stipulated when Arthur ‘recovers’ the crown: ‘Of all that Uter in erthe ought in his time: / Argayle and Orkney and all these oute-iles / Ireland utterly, as Ocean runnes, / Scathel Scotland by skill he skiftes as him likes, / And Wales of war he won at his will’ (ll. 29–33) [Of all that Uther on earth owned in his time / Argyll and Orkney and all these outer isles, / Ireland as a whole, the Ocean runs by [it] / Evil Scotland he uses as he likes / Wales, which he won by warfare at his will.] I have argued elsewhere that this list orients the reader or listener in geographic terms, from the northernmost ‘British’ (both Scottish and Irish) hinterlands and isles, heading southward toward continental Arthurian holdings, and back again to insular spaces. Moving across the water to list the diverse geographic spaces with a claim on Arthurian sovereignty – some, far away; others, close to home – the description culminates in detailing Arthur’s court at Caerlion in Wales with unusual specificity, ‘guiding the reader on a journey back, with each line more particular and local than the one before’ (Ingham, 2001, 89 [87–90]). The collocation of ‘all these outer isles’ with Ireland hemmed in by the sea, across to the continent and then back to Glamorgan in Wales, reminds us of the watery ways of conquest and colonization, also a feature of Dunnett’s opening to her modern retelling of Macbeth. Elsewhere in the Middle English corpus, geographic precision (also frequently northern) regularly destabilizes England’s centrality. When Gawain departs on his famous winter journey in fitt II of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and ‘fareȝ over þe fordeȝ by þe forlandeȝ,’ the poet specifies that ‘al þe iles of Anglesey’ are on his left side (Tolkien and Gordon, 1967, ll. 699, 698). In the Welsh texts known as the Mabinogi, Britain converges with the ‘Island of the Mighty’ a number of times but especially at the end of the ‘second branch,’ Branwen, ferch Llyˆr, when Welsh survivors of an apocalyptic war with the Irish take the severed head of Bran the Blessed to Gwynfryn, the ‘White Hill’ associated with the site of the Tower of London.16 Texts featuring Gawain are also notably specific with regard to regional spaces, forests or lakes. Gawain and Gaynor are visited by a surprisingly material ghost of Guinevere’s mother while strolling near Wadelyn Lake. And by the time King Arthur’s death is described in Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, sovereign signifiers – whether swords or

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affiliations outnumber his English affiliations by more than five to one? England was not, that is, simply an alias for Britain in the later Middle Ages, despite such uses of Britain by sovereigns consolidating insular control; it is certainly not one in the Alliterative Morte Arthure, as I have argued elsewhere. 11 See Schiff (2011, esp. 100–105; 120–122) for his disagreements with my earlier work, though perhaps our central disagreement is a question of emphasis. In retrospect, Schiff’s critique of the concept of nation is well taken: the continued prominence of ‘England’ as a figure for medieval insular nation in some ways speaks directly to this point. 12 See, as an excellent example, Baswell (2007).

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13 See also, Warren (2000), Goldstein (1993), and Fradenburg (1991). 14 For an important account of the ways in which early ‘Scottish’ literature coheres with literature of the North Atlantic zone, in particular that written by poets of Scandinavia, see Clancy (2012). As he points out, ‘the Western and Northern Isles were under Scandinavian dominion[…] until respectively 1299 and 1469’ (Clancy, 2012, 17). 15 On ‘otherworlds’ as indices for ‘the limits of English territory and power within the British archipelago’ as well as ‘other authorities and possibilities beyond English colonial rule,’ see Clarke (2011). 16 On the Irish tradition of another Bran and his Voyage, see Siewers (2012, 35).

bodies – ferried between worlds by ladies and queens across lakes, inlets or seas are crucial to Arthur’s funeral rites. None of the watery sites mentioned above mainly or only evoke England. And neither do the insular maps produced in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, a time that witnessed a ‘growth of interest in the production of relatively detailed maps of Britain,’ as Alfred Hiatt has pointed out (Hiatt, 2011, 141).17 Matthew Paris’s 1250 map of Britain orients facing landmasses to Britain ‘from Norway to Normandy’; and on the Gough map (1360?) ‘some care has gone into depicting Britain’s offshore islands,’ including the Orkneys, Lindisfarne, the Isle of Man, the Isle of Wight, and various channel islands. Both maps of Britain, Hiatt argues, ‘insist on [Britain’s] contingent position in a network of regional affiliations and implicit rivalries’ (Hiatt, 2011, 142). According to researchers working on the impressive website Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain, recent ‘paleographical and linguistic evidence [demonstrate the map’s] significance as a visual depiction of an English island-realm’ well into the later centuries. Yet even this ‘English island-realm’ gives manifold hints of the diversities obscured or overlooked. The map may be a ‘reflection of changing relations between England and Scotland a century on from when it appears first to have been composed,’ including a developing ‘geographical bias towards England and Wales in the “freshening up” of the map’s inscriptions, for Scotland’s place-names were left alone.’18 An emphasis on regional affiliation and rivalry, and on changing relations between England and Scotland, is corroborated, from time to time, in Arthurian texts of the alliterative period,19 including the Alliterative Morte Arthure. Certainly the histories of enmity along the Anglo-Scots border have political as well as cultural resonances, some registered in that poet’s designation of Scotland as ‘scathel,’ or wicked. In this context, we might remember that, during the Hundred Years’ War, both Scotland and Wales at times fought alongside the French and against the English. In the remainder of this essay, I touch on the mobility of geographic questions by way of some interesting features found in a late Arthurian romance in the Anglo-Scots tradition, The Knightly Tale of Syr Gologros and Gawain. I am particularly interested in thinking about the geographic confusions, inconsistencies, or displacements in that text, a poem that opens (unusually) not with history but with travel and Arthur moving across landscapes – both insular and European. These explicitly European sites, as we shall see, surprisingly resemble the Scottish highlands. The collocation of Arthurian home and away emerges in the poem’s opening beats. In the second line of the first stanza, we are informed of a time when Arthur turned toward Europe: In the tyme of Arthur, as trew men me tald, The King turnit on ane tyde towart Tuskane,

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Hym to seik ovr the sey, that saiklese wes sald, The syre that sendis all seill, suthly to sane. With banrentis, barounis, and bernis full bald, Biggast of bane and blude bred in Britane. (Hahn, 1995, ll. 1-6) [In the time of Arthur / as men told me truly / The King turned one time toward Tuscany / him to seek over the sea, that guiltless was sold, / the Sire that sends all wholesomeness, truly to say. / With bannerettes, barons, and fighters bold / Biggest of bone and blood bred in Britain.]20 The poem begins in medias res with King Arthur on the move; yet the opacity of these first lines disorients a modern reader to the point of distraction. Time and space weirdly converge. On the one hand, the opening evokes an historical present very briefly, and framed via the Arthurian past – one time, in that time of Arthur, the king turned toward Tuscany. The effect is temporally telescopic as brief mention of history quickly recedes before the immediacy of Arthur’s actions (‘to seek over the sea’; ‘the Sire… sends’). The geographic framing is as interesting as the temporal. In contrast to the specificity of insular regions emphasized in many Gawain-romances, and in contrast to the Alliterative Morte Arthure’s list of Arthur’s islands and cities and provinces and places, Gologras and Gawain begins in transit. Tuscany is less a territory held than a destination ‘over the sea,’ a distant location to which the sovereign turns on the way toward seeking the redress of innocent suffering. The opening stanza, that is, enacts a focalization both temporal and geographic: zooming in from a larger historico-legendary frame of some vague Arthurian time and place, readings are drawn, vertiginously, into an eventful moment of the King crossing the sea with bold fighters (bred in Britain) and heading toward Tuscany. In somewhat typical fashion, Arthurian sovereignty beckons toward ‘all sail’ [‘wholeness’ or ‘wholesomeness’], an amelioration of the fortunes of a (here unnamed) ‘sakeless’ [‘guiltless one’], a somewhat typical object of Arthurian chivalric justice. A comparison with the Alliterative Morte is all the more striking given the mention here of guiltlessness. Arthur’s (failed) efforts to redress innocent suffering become something of a leitmotif in the Alliterative Morte. Ultimately, Arthur will travel to the castle of his adversary, Gologras. Although the romance identifies its location as somewhere on the Rhone, the poet’s description, which occurs as part of the climax of one of the main adventure plots, draws readers to other geographies as well, even to diverse geographies simultaneously. As the King and his troops approach Gologras’s impregnable fortress, ‘…thai war of ane wane, wrocht with ane wal, / Reirdit on ane riche roche, beside ane riveir, / With doubill dykis bedene drawin ovr all’ (ll. 237–239) [‘They were aware of one building fortified by one wall, / Erected on a magnificent rock beside a river / with double moats together set over all.’]

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17 Hiatt analyzes a diverse array of maps and seacharts to emphasize the contextual features of such representational endeavors, all of which are ‘susceptible to multiple readings’ (2011, 157). 18 Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain, a collaborative effort hosted by King’s College, London, offers a wealth of information on new paleographic research findings regarding this map. 19 On this point, see Schiff (2011, 100–127). 20 All Modern English translations are my own.

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Textual editor Thomas Hahn notes that such descriptions call to mind the history of wars along the Scots border. He writes,

21 Hahn (1995, note to line 237).

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Gologras’ castle, which stirs both admiration and hostility in Arthur, strikingly resemble[s] those of the massive strongholds at the center of struggles between monarchs and local lords in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries…. Its location on a high rock by a river, with a long curtain wall and defensive towers, recalls, for example, the magnificent Bothwell Castle, built above the steep sides of the River Clyde, south of Glasgow. (Hahn, 1995, 283)21 The first part of the description emphasizes a built landscape recognizable from key moments in Scottish border history – an impregnable fortress sedimented atop an inaccessible rock. The lines that follow emphasize waterways as both defensive features and connective routes to other countries: ‘Apone that riche river, randonit full evin / The sidewallis war set, sad to the see; / Scippis saland thame by, sexty and sevyn, / To send, quhen thameself list, in seir cuntre´’ (ll. 248–250). [‘Upon the rich river symmetrically arranged / The sidewalls were set, firm against the sea; / There were ships sailing by them, sixty and seven / [Available] for dispatch, when them [it] pleased, into diverse countries.’] If this is meant to be the valley of the Rhone, it also alludes to other places, as Hahn’s comments make clear. And it is precisely with regard to water that we find a contradiction – all in the space of a single verse. Sidewalls set ‘upon the rich river’ hold firm not against river tides, but against ‘the sea.’ Furthermore, the waterway is filled to the brim with numerous ships at sail (sixty-seven, to be exact), all ready to embark to other countries. This fact further complicates a reader’s vision of the ‘river’ stipulated in line 248. It is difficult to imagine a group of sixty-seven ‘ships’ all ‘at sail,’ on a river, no matter how large. The Middle English Dictionary notes that ‘river’ (from the Old French) can refer to ‘the bank of a river; also a body of water’ (MED, s.v. ‘river[e]’). And yet, the citations offered as evidence of usage persistently refer to the narrower term, to ‘river’ in the modern English sense. Given its French roots, the term may also refer to an embankment akin to the French ‘riviera.’ In any case, the description suggests a different kind of body of water than readers might normally expect in this context, perhaps a bay, harbor, or large inlet. Furthermore, the category of ‘sea’ can include large lakes, firths, and fords, and other bodies of water that might not exactly be recognized as sea today; but river, even one as commanding as the Rhone, does not seem to be among these. Finally, if, as Sobecki’s work demonstrates, ‘“The sea” denotes Britain’s insular setting’ in writers from Great Britain, then we arguably see here a displaced reference to that setting as one of the ‘maritime topoi available to insular writers’ (Sobecki, 2011, 3). What this suggests, in other words, is that one trouble with Britain in the works of insular writers involves the multiple ways a British geographic imaginary creeps into geographies of all kinds, at home and away.

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Interestingly, when this Anglo-Scots poet, early in the romance, describes the landscape that Arthur travels across on his journey to the continent, the description evokes the Scots highlands, in all their wet and boggy marshiness: The King faris with his folk, ovr firthis and fellis, Feill dais or he fand of flynd or of fyre; Bot deip dalis bedene, dounis and dellis, Montains and marresse, with mony rank myre; Birkin bewis about, boggis and wellis, Withoutin beilding of blis, of bern or of byre; Bot torris and tene wais, teirfull quha tellis. (Hahn, 1995, ll. 27–33) [The King fares with his folk, over firths and fells / Many days before he found flint or fire / But deep valleys continuously, uplands and vales, / Mountains and morass with many boggy mires, / Birch trees about, bogs and streams, / without buildings for comfort, barn or shed, / [Nothing] but mounds and difficult ways tortuous to [whoever] tells [about it].] Boggy mires, streams, firths, and fells offer clues to the arduousness of this journey – an issue crucial to the plot of the first adventure in this romance. Yet they also render geographic difficulty in ways that resonate with an Anglo-Scots audience. Randy Schiff reads these moments as urging us to see the romance in “transnational” terms (Schiff, 2011, 125). Multi-geographic might be equally accurate – here we repeatedly see a European locale overwritten with Scots and insular ‘British’ features. This is the kind of trouble that Britain as a category seems always to raise. One island or many? European or insular? One culture or four? A past inheritance, or an aspirational future? The point redounds to a reconsideration of literary history conceived less as a singular linguistic development and more as a means of engaging and imagining diverse geographies. And such is especially important to the Scottish literary tradition, a linguistic and literary heritage as much (perhaps more) at home in the Northern Atlantic Zone that Dunnett’s version of Macbeth evokes as it is in any English sphere of influence. In his analysis of ‘Scottish Literature before Scottish Literature,’ Thomas Clancy muses on the problem engaged by a consideration of literary culture via language alone. As he writes, Scottish Literature is not like English Literature. Despite academic habits, the term Scottish Literature cannot naturally be made subservient to one linguistically determined literary tradition. A history of English literature may be allowed, should its authors wish, to encompass all literature written in the English language and its subsidiary dialects, and thus extend to North America, Australia, India, Africa, and beyond. Alternatively, it may concentrate its focus on the literature of England – arguably a political and geographical unit of considerable stability since the eighth century, and possessing since that time essentially one main vernacular language.

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Scottish literature, on the other hand, must be, if it is to make sense as a term, the literature of Scotland as a geographical and political unit. (Clancy, 2012, 13–14) Clancy’s distinction between the cultural and the linguistic – Scottish and English – is to the point. And precisely as such, his remarks (like this essay) place the category of Britain in high relief. Alluding both to a plurality of islands and a fiction of wholeness, to past legacies and future ambitions, to diverse languages, cultures, and politics, ‘Britain’ remains an under-utilized analytical tool. The trouble posed by ‘Britain’ as a category, in other words, has manifold analytical uses. It can make clear the methodological errors involved in eliding insular diversities or diversities of islands; it can amplify literary associations that cannot be reliably tracked via linguistic categories alone; it can assist us in analyzing rather than simply following the practice of acquisitive English sovereigns. Precisely as a term with complex, mobile, multiple, and shifting referents, the category ‘Britain’ can trouble us to reconsider the full sense of what we mean by ‘our sea of islands.’

About the Author Patricia Clare Ingham is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (2001), (with Alexander Doty) The Witch and the Hysteric: medieval monstrosity in Benjamin Christensen’s Ha¨xan (2014), The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation (2015), and a number of articles on Chaucer, medieval romance, and critical theory. She serves as one of the editors of the journal Exemplaria: Medieval / Early Modern / Theory (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Arner, L. 2006. The Ends of Enchantment: Colonialism and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48: 79–101. Balasopoulos, A. 2008. Utopiae Insulae Figura: Utopian Insularity and the Politics of Form. Transtext(e)s Transcultures, Hors se´ries: 5–21. Barrett, R.W., Jr. 2009. Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195–1656. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Baswell, C. 2007. Albyne Sails for Albion: Gender, Motion and Foundation in the English Imperial Imagination. In Freedom of Movement in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2003 Harlaxton Symposium, 157–168, ed. P. Horden. Donington, Spalding, UK: Shaun Tyas. Benı´tez Rojo, A. 1997. The Repeating Island, trans. J.E. Maraniss. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Benson, L.D., and E.E. Foster. 1994. Alliterative Morte Arthure. In King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. L. D. Benson and E.E. Foster. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications. Clancy, Thomas. 2012. Scottish Literature before Scottish Literature. In The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature, ed. G. Carruthers and L. McIlvanney, 13–26. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Clarke, C.A.M. 2011. Edges and Otherworlds: Imagining Tidal Spaces in Early Medieval Britain. In The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages, ed. S. Sobecki, 81–101. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer. Davies, R.R. 2000. England’s First Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093– 1343. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Dunnett, D. 1998. King Hereafter. New York: Vintage. Fernandez-Armesto, F. 1987. Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Fradenburg, A. (L.O.) 1991. City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Goldie, M.B. 2010. The Idea of the Antipodes: Places, Peoples, Voices. New York: Routledge. Goldstein, R.J. 1993. The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Hahn, T., ed. 1995. The Knightly Tale of Gologas and Gawain. In Sir Gawain: Eleven Tales and Romances, ed. T. Hahn, 234–308. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications. Hiatt, A. 2008. Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes Before 1600. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hiatt, A. 2011. ‘From Hull to Carthage’: Maps, England, and the Sea. In The Sea and Englishness, ed. S. Sobecki, 133–157. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer. Hechter, M. 1975. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Holsinger, B. 2005. Review, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). Modern Language Quarterly, 66(1): 119–124. Hudson, B. 2012. Prologue: The Medieval Atlantic Ocean. In Studies in the Medieval Atlantic, 1–32, ed. B. Hudson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ingham, P.C. 2001. Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lavezzo, K. 2011. The Sea and Border Crossings in the Alliterative Morte Arthure. In The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity and Culture, ed. S. Sobecki, 113–132. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer. Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain. 2011. King’s College, London, http://www.goughmap.org. Manion, L. 2011. Sovereign Recognition: Contesting Political Claims in the Alliterative Morte Arthure and The Awntyrs off Arthur. In Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. R. Sturges, 69–91. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. Middle English Dictionary (MED). 2013. s.v. ‘river(e).’ Ann Arbor, MI: Regents of the University of Michigan, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/.

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Schiff, R. 2011. Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and National Literary History. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Siewers, A. 2012. Desert Islands: Europe’s Atlantic Archipelago as Ascetic Landscape. In Studies in the Medieval Atlantic, ed. B. Hudson, 35–63. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sobecki, S. 2007. The Sea and Medieval English Literature. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer. Sobecki, S. 2011. Introduction: Edward’s Archipelago. In The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity and Culture, ed. S. Sobecki, 1–30. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer. Tolkien, J.R.R. and E.V. Gordon. ed. 1967. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Warren, M.R. 2000. History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Article

Britain and the sea of darkness: Islandolog y in al-Idrı¯sı¯’s Nuzhat al-Mushtaq

Christine Chism Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Abstract This paper argues that al-Idrı¯sı¯’s geography, while pursuing the sovereign interests of the Norman king of Sicily, Roger II, nonetheless critiques Norman empirebuilding using insular tropes and littoral uncertainty in his description of Britain and the other countries of the seventh climate. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7, 497–510. doi:10.1057/s41280-016-0021-3

Desire for Islands The first part of the twelfth century was a rich moment for describing insular Britain, both from within and from afar. From within British borders, writers like Geoffrey of Monmouth envision Britain as an island ripe for colonial foundation. Britain becomes both destination and destiny at the moment that the goddess Diana appears in a dream to the Trojan refugee, Brutus, and inspires him with a new world vision – an island in the west: Brutus, beneath the setting sun, beyond the kingdoms of Gaul, There is an island, encircled by the sea, There is an island, inhabited by giants, But now it is deserted, ready to receive your people.  2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

Vol. 7, 4, 497–510

Chapter 3 was originally published as Chism, C. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7: 497510. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-016-0021-3.

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Seek it out: for it shall be your everlasting seat. It shall be a second Troy unto your descendants. There kings shall arise from your line, and unto them Shall all the lands of the earth be subject. (Faletra, 2008, 51) [‘Brute, sub occasu solis trans Gallica regna / insula in occeano est undique clausa mari; / insula in occeano est habitata gigantibus olim, / nunc deserta quidem, gentibus apta tuis. / Hanc pete; namque tibi sedes erit illa perhennis. / Hic fiet natis altera Troia tuis. Hic de prole tua reges nascentur, et ipsis / tocius terrae subditus orbis erit.’] (I.305–12, Geoffrey of Monmouth, 2007, 21). This appealing destination, the lovely sea-encircled land of Britain, is created as an object of desire, haunted by giants, and awaiting its chosen people. For Brutus and his rebellious emancipates, the dream of freedom rapidly becomes a dream of stability, recovery, and domination in the island of Britain, of everything the Trojan refugees had lost under diaspora and slavery. This vision of England as second Troy, drawing on and rivaling tropes of the promised destination of Aeneas’s imperial Rome, enacts the desire for islands, the ‘nesomania’ characteristic of colonial discourse both within and beyond the Middle Ages (Michener, 1992, 157). The politics of this alternative destination cast the island into a familiar chronotope: a primitive and secluded space of fantasized nature ripe for domination, a temporal littoral zone of origin and terminus only, where time and ongoing life do not progress (Goldie, 2011). Pursuing the logic of this chronotope, Gilles Deleuze even maintains that all islands are fundamentally deserted and cannot be lived upon; when humans live there, it is only to make conscious an implacable, ineradicable solitude; all islands by this logic are fantasy islands (Deleuze, 2004, 9–14). Geoffrey’s vision of colonialist nesomania instills in Brutus the desire to use the island as a seedling of a lost motherland. Britain will become a repeating island, in Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s sinister sense, replicating Troy abroad and enacting the homeland’s immortality by means of its own colonial reproduction (DeLoughrey, 2007, 6–20). Geoffrey’s Britain will become another Troy [‘altera Troia’], germinating itself, its peoples, and its kings into Gaul, Brittany, and Rome itself. Yet this colonialist imperialist dream is a phantasm, for what will happen when Brutus reaches the islands of Britain is emphatically not timelessness but History. Geoffrey’s subsequent narration of British triumph and destruction falls into a cyclical rather than progressive dialectic that both realizes and frustrates the teleologies of colonial foundation by succumbing to cycles of repeated violence, familial devastation, and environmental catastrophe within the islands of Britain themselves. Geoffrey died around 1155, leaving his Historia to influence subsequent worldings of insular England both as a seed and critique of empire building for centuries to come.

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Britain and the sea of darkness: Islandology in al-Idrı¯sı¯’s Nuzhat al-Mushtaq

Yet Geoffrey of Monmouth was not the only person writing a description of England in the second quarter of the twelfth century. Another writer, Abu abdAllah Muhammad al-Idrı¯sı¯, was also writing the island, from a much farther remove. England and Ireland occupy the remotest western edges of the seventh climate in al-Idrı¯sı¯’s geography, Nuzhat al-mushtaq fi-ikhtira¯q al-a¯fa¯q, finished in 1154, just before the death of its Norman patron, Roger II of Sicily. Both Geoffrey and al-Idrı¯sı¯ wrote while inhabiting post-Norman conquest islands – England and Sicily – but they wrote within different political situations. Geoffrey was a careerist secular canon, possibly of Breton ancestry, and a historiographical freelancer, writing from outside the institutions of monastic history that inform the writings of his contemporaries William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon (Robertson, 1998): he dedicated his famous history of the ancient Britons, Historia Regum Britanniae, and its late-career offshoot, the Vita Merlini, to a variety of possible patrons. This dedicatory ambivalence is reflected in his narratives, which appear both to feed Norman colonial interests and explicitly critique Norman military violence. In the Vita Merlini, Geoffrey explicates how Norman wars (particularly the regnal war between Stephen and Matilda) ravage and damage the islands of Britain (Geoffrey of Monmouth, 1973). At the end of the poem, Ganieda’s prophecy culminates in a fierce imperative: to dial back the Norman Conquest and undo its insular military ravages: ‘Leave, Normans, and stop your wanton armies from bearing their weapons through our homeland[….] Christ, restore the realm’s tranquility, and freedom from wars’ (Faletra, 2008) [‘Iteque Neustrenses, cessate diutius arma/ferre per ingenuum violento milite regnum(…) Christe(…) da regno placidam bello cessante quietem’] (l. 1511–17, Geoffrey of Monmouth, 1973, 135). Al-Idrı¯sı¯, by contrast, writes directly to a single Norman patron in the service of trans-regional Norman sovereign interests, working with Roger II over a period of 15 years on a highly visible royal commission: a world map and an accompanying written description of the world. His account of Britain drew from sources provided to him by Roger II, who received news both from Normandy and from William II in England. Not surprisingly, this account reflects a territory conquered from the sea, focusing on coastal strongholds and the greater inland cities, whose river routes they guard, and providing mileages between important fortifications that will aid the quick transfer of troops and information (Ferrar, 2012). Al-Idrı¯sı¯ refracts Norman interests into the very shape of the island. As he works up the coasts systematically from south to north, he ignores the western reaches of the island, and radically abbreviates and bisects Scotland into Sqosia and Rslandia. He erases Wales entirely, stating that England resembles ‘the head of an ostrich’ [‘r’as al-na a¯mah’], and later, ‘the narrow part of [Cornwall] resembles a bird’s beak’ [‘hatha al- arf al-raqı¯q minha shabı¯h b-minqa¯r a’ir’] (al-Idrı¯sı¯, 1975, 944). Given al-Idrı¯sı¯’s south-upward orientation, this England-

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as-bird’s head silhouette is possible only if one discards Wales (Stevenson, 1948; Ferrar, 2012). Wales was not yet under Norman rule and was probably not described in the sources from which al-Idrı¯sı¯ was working; therefore it vanishes, both from the profile of the island and from any internal description. In a similar way, al-Idrı¯sı¯ presents Ireland as a wasteland. Al-Idrı¯sı¯’s Norman sources thus inform his neutrally styled and even bland description of parts of the world nearest to Norman interests, while crossing the rifts of Norman dynastic dispersion north and south. His view of Norman England denotes the idea of island as territorialized resource, and other unconquered islands and regions in the British archipelago conform to the trope of ‘desert’ island, indexed and set aside for later colonial attention, or else they vanish altogether (Figures 1, 2). Yet, al-Idrı¯sı¯’s view of insular England from afar does not simply accede to the worlding of Norman interests. England’s insularity in al-Idrı¯sı¯ is complicated by its position in the extremest climate of the world, the northernmost seventh climate, which is itself a littoral zone for the mappable world. Like the littorals celebrated in recent island theory and literature, England’s littorality is interactive with oceanic forces, the pressures of alternative economies, and the epistemological complexity that attends the only partly knowable. This paper explores al-Idrı¯sı¯’s description of insular Britain, written from afar, arguing that its clear colonialist underpinnings are complicated by Britain’s situation on the northern littoral of the known world. Unlike Geoffrey’s Britain, al-Idrı¯sı¯’s Britain is embraced by seas of darkness (‘the sea of darkness’ is a premodern Arabic name for the Atlantic Ocean), and it prefaces a survey of geographical extremity in every sense of the word, through Denmark and Norway, Polonia and Russia, the land of the Comans, Greater Bulgaria, and the Turkish peoples. It passes inaccessible cities, unknown peoples, impenetrable interiors, unclimbable mountains, impassible valleys, culminating in the landscapes of the legendary valley of smoke and fire in section eight, the bottomless river in the lands of the Gog and Magog in section nine, and then, finally, in section ten, the Land of Darkness itself, where the mystery of the sea of darkness invades the land, and we can go no further. Al-Idrı¯sı¯’s England is a Norman littoral zone between the Mediterranean and the unknown reaches of the world, and in that liminal and elusive space, both the nesomaniac desire for islands and its capacity ever to know them meet their ends.

A l - I d r ¯ı s ¯ı : A P t o l e m a i c G e o g r a p h y f o r a N o r m a n A g e Al-Idrı¯sı¯’s geography decidedly transforms the regionally organized and confessionally divided worlds familiar from medieval travel accounts. Organized by Ptolemaic climates rather than regions, Al-Idrı¯sı¯ synthesizes Islamic geographical works, from both the Ptolemaic and the Balkhi schools of geography, with Christian sources, such as Paulus Orosius, along with the accounts of

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messengers and travelers. Al-Idrı¯sı¯’s climatic organization of the world effectively liberates the viewer from the world-producing dialectics of the familiar and the strange that govern the rihla accounts of other Islamic writers, such as Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta. It also avoids the focus solely upon the Islamicate regions that interested other Muslim geographers, such as Ibn Khurrada¯dhbih and Ibn Hawqal. Instead, al-Idrı¯sı¯ invites the reader to view the world from the homogenizing viewpoints of the stars. His seven climates are homologous to the multiple climate plates of the Islamic navigational instrument, the astrolabe. This knitting together of celestial and terrestrial cartographies was deliberate and technology-driven; al-Idrı¯sı¯’s account was to explicate an extraordinary instrument also commissioned by Roger II, a nearly six-foot, 450 lb. silver planisphere, engraved on one side with the celestial constellations and zodiac, and on the other with the geographical climates of the world. As a result, alIdrı¯sı¯’s text, whose title translates to ‘the pleasure of him who longs to cross the horizons,’ offers its readers an enticing fantasy of godlike universal epistemological access across changing latitudes, without regard to regional or confessional templates. Many readers of the Nuzhat al-mushtaq do not like this disorientation of regions. Editors, redactors, translators, and area studies specialists have often sought to restore regional unity by jigsawing together or selecting among narrative sections to create al-Idrı¯sı¯’s India (Ahmad, 1954), southern Tunis (Prevost, 2007), West Africa (Levtzion and Spaulding, 2003), the British Isles (Beeston, 1950), and North Africa and Spain (al-Idrı¯sı¯, 1866), to name only a few. Our own north-favoring cartographic sensibilities may be disturbed by the southern orientation of the world maps later created to explicate al-Idrı¯sı¯’s text. It is salutary to see a vast Africa crowning the map with Britain and Ireland tucked into the southeastern corner, precisely opposite to the eastern Asiatic lands of Gog and Magog. The map’s southern orientation derives from the three centuries of Abbasid geographical traditional reverence for the qibla, the southward direction of Mecca with respect to Abbasid lands. However, the map also reflects the Christian priorities of its crusade-supporting patron, Roger II, by placing Jerusalem at its precise center, with Mecca running close second just above. The map thus syncretizes Greek, Islamic, and Christian worldviews, negotiating the Mediterranean conflicts of its genesis and production. Al-Idrı¯sı¯’s syncretism, however, is not altogether peaceful. I would argue, along with Jerry Brotton and many others, that the map’s production reflects not convivenc¸ia, but rather the intensely tactical acculturations of Roger II’s court in Sicily (Brotton, 2012, 54–81). Roger II may have actively recruited expert Muslims and Jews, but his Christian sovereignty was absolute in its claims, and the slow purge of Muslims from Sicilian towns and countryside was ongoing. Roger was anxious to extend his Mediterranean holdings to Apulia and possibly al-Andalus, while imparting an Islamicate flair to his sovereignty by patronizing

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Figure 1: This map, like all of the surviving maps of al-Idrı¯sı¯’s narrative, succeeded and reconstructed the text; Konrad Miller’s 1929 version is used here because of its detail and accuracy, and its public domain status.

learning, scientific exploration, and artistic production, in the style of the great Abbasid sultans during the period of the House of Wisdom (ca. 786–833), and his pre-Norman Sicilian predecessors. Roger conceived of his world map project, it seems, as an epistemological buttress to his plans for Mediterranean expansion, as well as an indulgence of general fascination for lands beyond his own. His daily personal involvement with a fifteen-year research initiative is prodigious, if we can believe even half of what al-Idrı¯sı¯ says about him in his introductory encomium. Al-Idrı¯sı¯ was doubtless aware why Roger was interested in enlisting his scholarly aid, and his acceptance of the commission speaks to a world where, in Brotton’s words, ‘Dynastic conflicts and religious divisions ensured that the labels ‘‘Muslim’’ and ‘‘Christian’’ were fluid categories characterized by schism, conversion, and apostasy, rather than unconditional doctrinal belief’ (Brotton, 2012, 55–56). Al-Idrı¯sı¯ wrote the Nuzhat al-mushtaq to accompany Roger’s planisphere and explain its features. However, in actuality, the text is very different from the planisphere, which sumptuously organizes both earth and heavens into a coherent, viewable whole. By contrast, al-Idrı¯sı¯’s narration runs the known world through a paper shredder. Disregarding regional unity, it transects Africa, Europe, and Asia laterally into seven climates, spanning from below the equator to about 64 degrees north. Climate one includes the equator (with a bit of subequatorial known world as far south as Ghana and Mali), and the numbered climates then proceed north towards the bottom of the map, with the seventh and last stretching from England and Scandinavia on the right to eastern Russia on the left. Each climate is then divided into ten sections. This makes seventy sections of the known earth, each of which occupies a full chapter in al-Idrı¯sı¯’s text. The chapters vary widely; the familiar parts of the world are more minutely

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described than areas at the southern and northern ends of Asia, though Britain and France get fair treatment, possibly because of Norman connections and possibly because al-Idrı¯sı¯ is said to have traveled through Spain and France. As the text sweeps from west to east and south to north, the Nuzhat almushtaq gives the impression of a series of pleasant tourist brochures strung end-to-end. Al-Idrı¯sı¯ promises his reader access to the situation of the countries and the terrain around them, their sites, shapes, and neighborhoods; mountains, rivers, access points, agriculture, staple grains, races, architecture, customs, and particular crafts that they make, the manufactured goods that they trade, the merchandise that they import and export, and the wonders that are related about them and associated with them, and also which ones among the seven climates are notable in terms of the state of people, their societies, natural dispositions, ideologies, and adornments, clothes, and languages. (al-Idrı¯sı¯, 1975, 7) This genial encyclopedism promises to deliver up the mundane and marvelous alike without differentiation. It invites a variety of possible uses without committing to any. Those interested in civilizations can skim birdlike over the list of towns and features to enjoy the anecdotes, panegyrics, rich products, and patterns of armament that enliven his survey. Would-be travelers can play Phineas Finn and collect the lists of distances and itineraries to imagine possible routes and timetables (or military campaigns). Wonder-tale collectors can pause at the western-tending tale of the Mugharriru¯n, the band of intrepid or deluded sailors that set out from Lisbon into the western Pacific to discover the Sargasso Sea, or possibly the Azores, or possibly the Canaries, only to be ignominiously escorted back to the coast of Africa when the western trades begin to blow; or they can marvel at the poisonous fish, gorgeous silks, and the powerful and desirous women of the Kimaki Turks at the opposite eastern edge of the fourth climate. Given this variety of uses, then, it is no surprise that al-Idrı¯sı¯ gave his text a title associated with pleasure and desire: Nuzhat al-mushta¯q fi-ikhtira¯q il-a¯fa¯q, which invokes a multitude of delights. This title presents us both with ‘nuzhat,’ which connotes light recreation, outings, tourism and picnics, and ‘shawq’ (a root-cognate of mushtaq), whose cravings draw from more erotic and intimate registers, including the all-encompassing passion of unrequited love and the religious ardency of a sufi or dervish. The word used for crossing, ‘ikhtira¯q,’ can also mean penetration, piercing, and transecting. The title of al-Idrı¯sı¯’s work, then, with its mix of light entertainment and intense longing, seems to yoke armchair tourism to avid travel lust. Al-Idrı¯sı¯’s strategy of dividing the known world into a grid of climates and sections is a form of pleasurable violence that also produces a science. Its invariable formal arrangements work to depoliticize the world even as it surveys it, transforming violent contact zones into pleasant landscapes. No matter how distant or culturally divergent the subject, each

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chapter opens by indexing the section and climate, and listing the towns included. It then devotes descriptions to each town in order, some longer than others, and proceeds to draw up itineraries of distances in miles or days’ travel between virtually every location it lists. Then, it proceeds on to the next subregion or section. As a result of this invariant form, the detailed description of England in broad outline resembles the description of central Asia, or of Sicily, the island at the center of Roger II’s world. Al-Idrı¯sı¯ constellates towns and cities that share universal features – city walls, fortifications, aquifers, rivers, irrigation channels, bazaars, river banks, gardens, and pleasant vistas, thus fostering analogies between widely separate regions. Amidst this powerfully homogenizing cartographic methodology, nevertheless, the seventh climate – farthest to the north and the location of England – signals its extremity. Beginning with the west, in the first section, it sweeps across a shadowed sea [‘ba r mu lim’], whose islands are altogether unknown, obscure, and uninhabited [‘wa jaza¯’iruhu bi-‘asirihi maghmu¯rah ghayr m amu¯rah’] (al-Idrı¯sı¯, 1975, 943). It then proceeds to England in the second section, where it sketches the shape, major port towns, waterways, and inland cities, along with distances between them. Al-Idrı¯sı¯ foregrounds England’s insularity by hugging the coasts and waterways, surveying the south coast of England from Dorchester [‘Sahsta¯r’] to coastal Wareham [‘Gharhum’] and to Dartmouth; to Southampton and inland by river to Winchester; then to Shoreham, Hastings, and Dover; before shifting north to the river Thames [‘R a¯nzah’], London [‘Lundres’] (the French or Latin of al-Idrı¯sı¯’s source surfaces in place names), and Oxford; then along the coast again to Yarmouth, Norwich, and inland to Lincoln; then a jump north to Grimsby; and then inland to York, Lincoln, and Durham. Of all the towns named, it seems unsurprising in a Norman-inflected account that Hastings receives the most accolades: it is endowed with large holdings, many illustrious [‘jalı¯lah’] inhabitants, markets, and prosperous merchants. A. F. L. Beeston speculates that al-Idrı¯sı¯’s source was a French-speaking sailor who knew well the port cities as far west as Dorchester and as far north as Grimsby, but who was fairly sketchy on interiors and any points farther north and west than Norman trade would reach (Beeston, 1950). Of English history it says nothing. The other lands and islands of Britain fare worse geographically and only a little better culturally and historically. Scotland seems to have been divided into a peninsula (‘Sqosia’) and an island (Rslanda). Sqosia extends 150 miles from the mainland of Britain and comprises the twelfth-century kingdom of Scotland. Rslanda is a large island (400 by 150 miles), located three quarters of a day’s sailing north, which Beeston speculates was the portion of Scotland still under Norse rule (Beeston, 1950, 277, 278). Sqosia is said to have no inhabitants, no cities, and no villages – it is a peninsula that is effectively a desert island. After giving the dimensions of Rslanda, al-Idrı¯sı¯ promises to say more about the island, but he never returns to it.

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Figure 2: Reconstruction of England, Ireland, and a divided Scotland (Sqosia and Rslanda), as shown in Miller’s map.

This theme of desolation, oblivion, and lacuna extends to al-Idrı¯sı¯’s Ireland as well. Due probably to the loss of the initial pages, Ireland is missing in some manuscripts from where it should be, in the first section of the seventh climate. Several of the six manuscripts that contain the seventh climate (Beeston sketches a possible stemma) interpolate Ireland after England (Beeston, 1950, 266), while others provide two descriptions, one before and one after that lists the itineraries and distances between the main islands of the British archipelago. For Ireland, al-Idrı¯sı¯ augments his narrative with an anecdote from a lost work by Mas u¯di that he calls the Book of Marvels [Kita¯b al- aja¯’ib]. Because of this anecdote, we are told more about Ireland’s history than England’s. Ireland, al-Idrı¯sı¯ reports, is three and a half days’ sailing from Brittany on the mainland, and once had three prosperous towns where traders visited to acquire colored stones and amber. However, war arose between the inhabitants when one of them wished to dominate the rest and set his people on them, and the other inhabitants resisted. Because of this enmity, they destroyed each other, while others fled to the mainland, and as a result, not one of the inhabitants is left (al-Idrı¯sı¯, 1975, 947–948). This anecdote is doubly untraceable, since the source in Mas u¯di’s writings is lost, and it seems to have been effaced from several manuscripts of al-Idrı¯sı¯ and reinserted by scribal paraphrase (Beeston, 266–267). Yet the floating anecdotal situation of Ireland in al-Idrı¯sı¯’s text effectively enacts the limits of both Norman insular sovereignty and surveillance. It further implicates colonialism itself when it shows how the urge to dominate lands destroys prosperity and depopulates realms. Thus, in writing Britain from afar, al-Idrı¯sı¯ flanks his England with intimations of genocide and the horrors of civil war. Across vast cultural distances, the texts of Geoffrey of Monmouth and al-Idrı¯sı¯ unexpectedly converge.

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The deserted enormities of Ireland and Scotland and the erasure of Wales and most of England’s interiors underscore the limits of Roger II’s world-spanning epistemological enterprise. Al-Idrı¯sı¯’s text is more eloquent about what cannot be gathered and surveyed than about what can, attesting to an ignorance that intensifies as we move eastward beyond England. More than anywhere else in al-Idrı¯sı¯’s chatty, touristic, compendious geography, the seventh climate intimates that the entire oikoumene itself, centered by Roger II’s Sicily, is an island in a sea, encircled by a larger island encompassed by a darker ocean. The seventh climate, like the antipodes in premodern geographies (Goldie, 2011), decenters hermeneutic certainty about the configuration of the world by suggesting in energetic detail that the ends of the earth – both spatial and temporal – cannot be either encompassed or ignored.

Northern Birds in Dark Seas Idrı¯sı¯’s geography makes bird-shaped England the first inhabited stop on a tour of an extended fretwork of seas, towns, and regions reaching from the Sea of Darkness in the remote west to the Sea of Asphalt in the remote east. The map and the text diverge at both margins: Ireland is mapped to the west of England but not always described in the first section of al-Idrı¯sı¯’s surviving text. Similarly, in the east, various maps show the sea biting inward and the land bristling with the mountains and barriers surrounding the regions of the Ya¯ghu¯g and the Ma¯ghu¯g; while in the text there is only a darkness. In between these western and eastern extremities, al-Idrı¯sı¯ punctuates his dwindling litany of cities with occasional anecdotes gleaned from other wonder-books. He tells of the massive trees of Norway, so large that a race of savages, whose heads attach directly to their shoulders with no necks at all, can hollow them out for houses and subsist on the fruits of oak and chestnut. He tells of the city of Jantı¯ya¯r in the Russian country of the Majus, on the top of an insurmountable mountain, whose people are besieged by the assaults of their Russian neighbors and acknowledge the rule of no king. He tells of the Russian islands of Amznı¯yu¯s the Great, where the western island contains only men, the eastern island only women, and the sexes live apart from each other all year except for spring, when the men sail in boats to the women and spend a month in connubial life before returning home, to repeat the ritual the following year. In the eighth section, accounts of impassible regions – landlocked islands in terms of their isolation – proliferate along with geological marvels. Al-Idrı¯sı¯ reports a familiar tale of the Valley of Fire dug deep into the landscape of Qafra’, whose depths belch smoke by day and glimmer with fires by night, yet a cooling river runs through it from south to north, on which live inhabitants, but no one can get down into the valley nor climb out of it, such are the steepness of its walls. In section nine, he tells of the bottomless river in a deep-carved valley

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in the lands of the Ya¯gu¯g and Ma¯gu¯g, into which they throw prisoners, to the delight of enormous birds that fly out from great caves in the walls of the valley to tear the bodies apart and then return to their caves to eat them. This possibly recalls Tibetan air burial or the legendary Roc, but the monstrous birds at the penultimate section of the climate also echo and remember the massive bird that haunts the oceans of the west. Is it an accident that the ostrich-head shape of England in section two, with its Cornish beak extending to the west, is placed symmetrically to the massive cave avians of Ya¯gu¯g and Ma¯gu¯g in section nine (Figure 3)? Across these regions, the distinct border-creating elemental geographies of fire and water, water and air, and land and water all begin to interpenetrate, either prodigiously as in the Valley of Fire and the Asphalt Sea, or naturally, under the freezing pressures of eternal winter. In island after northern island, beneath the ice and rain that is everywhere described as perpetual [‘da’im’], land merges with ocean, and islands merge with mainlands in the rigors of a sea made solid in the form of ice. Through these anecdotes of elemental extremity, impassibility, and symmetry, the remoteness of the entire climate comes to frame the inhabited regions within it, as orderly terran geography succumbs to incursions from its margins: the subterranean, superterranean, alt-terranean, and hyperterranean (like the giant trees of Norway). The seemingly greatest boundary, between land and sea, proves similarly unstable as the two framing oceans – the Sea of Darkness and the Sea of Asphalt – become indistinguishable from the land, one literally so, and the other effectively, since once the darkness falls, the maritime or terrestrial cannot be discerned. Al-Idrı¯sı¯’s use of this epithet, the Sea of Darkness [‘ba r mu lim’], for the sea that encircles the world is deliberate: he had other choices. The most common name in Arabic for this outer sea in Arabic geographies, such as Mas u¯di’s, is literally ‘the encircling (or circumambient) sea’ [‘al-ba r al-muhı¯t’]. Paul Lunde suggests that the epithet ‘sea of darkness’ draws a boundary around the oikoumene, suggesting the sheer weight of the ignorance of those beyond their faith: For Muslims, the Arabic word for ‘darkness,’ al-zulumat could not but call to mind the magnificent Qur’anic passage in Surah 24, al-Nur, ‘The Light,’ in which the state of the unbeliever is described as being like ‘the depths of darkness in a vast deep ocean, overwhelmed with billows, topped by billows, topped by [dark] clouds – depths of darkness, one above the other.’ (Lunde, 1992, 6)

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Figure 3: Reconstruction of the extreme north and east (as shown in Miller’s map): the many mountains and the valley of fire can be seen.

In selecting ‘the sea of darkness’ over the ‘Encircling Sea,’ then, al-Idrı¯sı¯ is gesturing at the borders of the known, the borders of faith (Muslim and Christian), and the extent of the mappable. The dark sea that penetrates every land-mass of the seventh climate (even the land of Russia has islands) is the sea of epistemological breakdown, beyond which even a monarch, such as Roger II, cannot gather word. This aporetic sea has a force and a weight that becomes more apparent the more it is pushed against. I would argue that al-Idrı¯sı¯’s premodern sea of darkness is different from the inert, alien, and desert sea that Deleuze derives from Pliny, the blank space between the places that matter. It is not an ocean perpetually hostile to land-dwellers and differentiated from their settlements, which isolates islands and makes them desirous sanctuaries, which foments the desire for islands and entices colonialist appropriations (Goldie, 3–12; Deleuze 9–14). This sea is an active agent in al-Idrı¯sı¯’s text. As al-Idrı¯sı¯ surveys the seventh clime, the tension mounts between his relentless, regularizing methodology and the irregular extremities of the terrains and peoples that defy geographical cognition. Sea and land, island and mainland, the strange and the familiar, and the uninhabited and the populated melt together, refusing his surveillance. Cognitive gaps increasingly tatter his narrative and beset his survey of cities – ‘of the land of Little Bajnak nothing has reached us about it other than a single city, Ya¯qa¯mu¯nı¯’ (960). These lacunae bring the mysteries of the sea of darkness literally into the land. This tenebrous maritime invasion culminates in section ten, where the final region of the northeastern end of the earth has only a single descriptive sentence: ‘All of it is Dark – there are no inhabitants in it at all,

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and no one knows what is behind it [the Darkness]’ [‘Kuluhu mu lim; la¯ ama¯rah fı¯hi … wa la¯ y alum ma¯ khalafuhu’] (963). That is the last descriptive sentence of al-Idrı¯sı¯’s account; it halts at the door of a final, decisive ignorance, and refuses to survey further. Ultimately, the decentering power of the seventh climate is such that the Britain seen from afar by al-Idrı¯sı¯ is not only a Britain on the edge of the world but also a Britain on the edge of knowability. Moreover, its edginess is doing something unexpected in a book dedicated to the pleasures of Norman empirebuilding: drawing a line in the sand (or sea – it is impossible to say which). If English writers describing England from within have capitalized upon geographical remoteness and parlayed it into an aura of sacralized exceptionalism, as Kathy Lavezzo has cogently argued (Lavezzo, 2006), al-Idrı¯sı¯, writing Britain from afar, uses remoteness and the darkness which it engenders to implicate the exhaustive completism of Roger II’s terrestrial survey. He also suggests the futility of trans-regional Norman world-building. The view from abroad weaves the edginess of England into something far more complicated – a view of earth itself as island whose littorals are patched together with cognition-defying obscurities. Al-Idrı¯sı¯’s text crosses horizons in one final way – by giving us a literal double horizon in the author’s epigraph. At the end, al-Idrı¯sı¯ claims that he has told everything that has reached him after fifteen years of information gathering about not one earth (‘Ard’) but about two (the dual: ‘Ar ayn’): both the inhabited and the uninhabited [‘m amu¯r wa ghayr m amu¯r’]. He thanks and praises God as the lord of both worlds [‘ a¯limayn’] (963): the world of human knowledge and human habitation, and that which is beyond human knowledge and human habitation. These worlds are not arranged, at the margins of alIdrı¯sı¯’s project, as center and periphery or oikoumene and barbarism; they are side-by-side, inextricable, and both are incomplete. In decentering the human world and making it neighbor to the non-human world, al-Idrı¯sı¯’s epigraph enacts not only geographical humility but also a final refusal of any human monopoly on the planet. To these salutary decenterings, the view of England and its semi-charted seventh climate is key.

About the Author Christine Chism teaches medieval literature at UCLA, after teaching at Rutgers and Allegheny College. Her first book, Alliterative Revivals, explored the uses of the past in English alliterative romance, and her second book, Mortal Friends (forthcoming from The University of Pennsylvania Press), examines the social force of friendship in Middle English literature. She is working on two projects: one on Islamic transculturations from Arabic texts into England, and one on

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comparative worldings in Christian and Islamic travel narratives and geographies, including al-Idrı¯sı¯ (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Ahmad, S.M. 1954. India and the neighboring territories, as described by the Sharif al-Idrisi in his Kita¯b nuzhat al-mushta¯q fi’khtira¯q al-’a¯fa¯q. Aligarh. Dept. of Arabic & Islamic Studies, Aligarh Muslim University. al-Idrı¯sı¯. 1975. Opus Geographicum, Fasc.1–8. Naples and Rome, Italy: J. Brill. al-Idrı¯sı¯. 1866. Edrisi, Description de l’Afrique et de l’Espagne, ed. R. Dozy and M.J. de Goeje. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill. Beeston, A.F.L. 1950. Idrı¯sı¯’s Account of the British Isles. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 13(2): 265–280. Brotton, J. 2012. A History of the World in Twelve Maps. New York: Penguin. DeLoughrey, E. 2007. Routes and Routes: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Deleuze, G. 2004. Desert Islands, and Other Texts: 1953–1974, trans. D. Lapoujade. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Faletra, M.A. 2008. Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain. Petersborough, UK: Broadview Press. Ferrar, M.J. 2012. Al-Idrı¯sı¯, The Book of Roger: The Description of L’Angleterre. http:// www.cartographyunchained.com/cgid1.html. Geoffrey of Monmouth. 1973. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Life of Merlin, ed. B. Clarke. Cardiff, Wales: University of Wales Press. Geoffrey of Monmouth. 2007. Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, ed. M.D. Reeve and trans. N Wright. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. Goldie, M.B. 2011. Island Theory: The Antipodes. In Islanded Identities: Constructions of Postcolonial Cultural Insularity, eds. M. McCusker and A. Soares, 1–40. Amsterdam, Netherlands and New York: Rodopi. Lavezzo, K. 2006. Angels on the Edge of the World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levtzion, N., and J. Spaulding, eds. 2003. Medieval West Africa: Views from Arab Scholars and Merchants. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers. Lunde, P. 1992. Pillars of Hercules, Sea of Darkness. Aramco World: Arab and Islam Cultures and Connections 43(3): 6–17. Michener, J.A. 1992. The World is My Home: A Memoir. New York: Random House. Prevost, V. 2007. Les itine´raires d’al-Idrı¯sı¯ dans le Sud tunisien: deux versions bien diffe´rentes. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenla¨ndischen Gesellschaft 157(2): 353–65. Robertson, K. 1998. Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Translation of Insular Historiography. Arthuriana 8(4): 42–57. Stevenson, R.W. 1948. Idrı¯sı¯’s Map of Scotland. Scottish Historical Review 27(2): 202–204.

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Article

From Pliny to Brexit: Spatial representation of the British Isles

Alfred Hiatt School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK.

Abstract This essay explores the representation of the British Isles on maps and related geographical texts over the course of the Middle Ages. Emphasizing the classical basis for representation of the islands, it examines articulations of insular identity in the debate over the date of Easter as presented in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, in Gerald of Wales’ Topographia Hiberniae, and in later medieval maps of various genres, including mappaemundi, regional maps, and portolan charts. It concludes with brief reflections on the contemporary crisis of insular identity manifest in the 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7, 511–525. doi:10.1057/s41280-016-0023-1

Nearly a century ago, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski published a study of the Trobriand Islands in which he showed that the ostensibly isolated communities of the west Pacific archipelago were in fact intimately and routinely linked by trade and ritual acts of diplomacy. Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) was innovative both in method and in its findings: based on years of fieldwork and first-hand observation, Malinowski described the trading network known as the ‘Kula’ in rich detail. Of central importance to the study were the journeys undertaken by the islanders for the purposes of trade and the attitudes and practices that these voyages engendered. The Kula defined and connected points within a region in which trade goods moved – the ‘Kula ring’ – characterised by the cultivation of partnerships and the maintenance of rules of exchange (Malinowski, 1922, 498). Malinowski pointed out that the  2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

Vol. 7, 4, 511–525

Chapter 4 was originally published as Hiatt, A. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7: 511525. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-016-0023-1.

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islanders were able to make regular journeys across considerable distances, unaided by charts or compasses, relying only on their knowledge of the sea, winds, and regional geography. At the same time, however, he emphasized the high levels of anxiety that surrounded the Kula, the natives’ limited knowledge of places beyond the Kula ring, the uncertainties of travel, and the need for constant magical reinforcement to guard against natural dangers (winds), malevolent forces (witchcraft), and the potential failure of the trading partnerships. Malinowski asserted: The main attitude of a native to other, alien groups is that of hostility and mistrust. [… A] wall of suspicion, misunderstanding and latent enmity divides [the Trobriander] from even near neighbours. The Kula breaks it through at definite geographical points, and by means of special customary transactions. But, like everything extraordinary and exceptional, this waiving of the general taboo on strangers must be justified and bridged over by magic. (Malinowski, 1922, 345) A very different account of travel and interrelationships in the Pacific has emerged more recently in the writing of the ethnographer and satirist Epeli Hau‘ofa. In his lectures, essays and creative works, Hau‘ofa presents the region he prefers to call Oceania as a ‘sea of islands,’ a space of community and kinship in which the sea works as a highway to connect rather than to divide (Hau‘ofa, 2008). In Hau‘ofa’s account, Pacific islanders, far from fearful, are intrepid and routine voyagers. While he tends to focus on contemporary travel and communication across large distances, he bases his articulation of Oceania on the pre-colonial history of the region. ‘The world of our ancestors was a large sea full of places to explore, to make their homes in, to breed generations of seafarers like themselves. […] Theirs was a large world in which peoples and cultures moved and mingled, unhindered by boundaries of the kind erected much later by imperial powers’ (Hau’ofa, 2008, 32–33). The works of Malinowski and Hau‘ofa – written some seventy years apart, and from significantly different perspectives – thus offer linked, but profoundly divergent paradigms of islands and insularity. Both emphasise ‘connectivity’ between island populations, but whereas in one model movement between islands reinforces and ritualizes difference, in the other it effaces boundaries and forms the bedrock of a shared culture. Can either or both of these understandings of archipelagic space have utility in understanding medieval European, and specifically medieval British, insularity? Any answer to this question must come fringed with certain caveats. Beyond the obvious point that the medieval Atlantic and North Sea region – if it was a ‘region’ – is a very different space to the Pacific Ocean both in terms of size and disposition of islands and continent(s), it should not be assumed too readily that the concepts of ‘island,’ ‘continent,’ and even ‘ocean’ remain identical across different cultures (Gautier Dalche´, 1988). In the following pages, I argue that in

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the Middle Ages there were different and competing understandings of insular and archipelagic space. Consequently, the representation of Britain and surrounding islands may be understood in terms of a series of debates (or, perhaps, the same debate replayed) about the relationship of islands to each other and to the mainland. I will suggest that, in the course of these debates, in which classical geographical descriptions were appropriated by Christian authors, the intellectual, ecclesiastical and political pull of continental Europe ultimately won out over the more de-centred conception of a ‘sea of islands.’ But I also want to suggest that the idea of a regional network of islands, comprising the British isles but extending to Scandinavia in the north, never went away, and by the end of the Middle Ages increasing interest in the Atlantic as a site of exploration and commerce offered the possibility of a vastly expanded ‘sea of islands.’ Finally, I will consider the eerie (but from a historical perspective wholly predictable) way in which the debate about whether Britain is an island cut off from Europe or a part of it, out or in, has been reinscribed as the question of Britain’s membership of the European Union.

B e t w e e n N o r t h a n d We s t In the Middle Ages, there were many kinds of island: to take only its literal sense, ‘insula’ might designate a geographical space such as Britain, Ireland, Iceland, or Taprobana, but it might also describe a peninsula such as Lindisfarne, or one of the four great land masses into which – according to classical theories, such as the ones expounded in Macrobius’ Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (2.9) – the world was divided. The Ocean, so these same classical authorities held, encircled the entire earth, and could be distinguished from seas, such as the Mediterranean, Caspian, and Red seas; nevertheless, the nature of the Ocean, particularly in its northernmost reaches, remained a matter of uncertainty. On at least one early medieval map, an eighth-century mappamundi which appears in the context of Easter tables, the British Isles are directly aligned with the western Ocean. Instead of Britannia and Hibernia, the mapmaker marked the two conjoined landmasses ‘oceanus occiduus’ [‘western ocean’] and ‘mare mortun….occeanus’ [‘dead sea, ocean’]; the identities of the islands remain legible, in spite of the inscription, but they are subordinated to that of the outer sea.1 By contrast, the map depicts the Mediterranean as something approaching a sea of islands – Crete, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearics among them – sheltered by the arc of Europe and Africa. This map represents only one view of the northwestern islands available to a literate early medieval audience, of course. Elsewhere in contemporary writings, it is possible to find a much more detailed, and less daunting, understanding of the western ocean and its islands. The foundations of medieval visual and verbal

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1 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 6018, fols. 63v–64r. The ‘mare mortun’ (i.e. mare mortuum) refers to the widely dispersed classical and medieval notion of a frozen sea in the far northwest. On the map’s association with Easter tables, see Chekin (1999).

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descriptions of Britain, its islands, and the sea around them were classical. The island of Britannia was, for Pliny the Elder, ‘celebrated in our records and those of the Greeks’ [‘insula clara Graecis nostrisque monimentis’]: ‘it lay in the north-west and across a significant interval of water it faced the greatest regions of Europe – Germania, Gallia, and Hispania’ [‘inter septentrionem et occidentem iacet, Germaniae, Galliae, Hispaniae, multo maximis Europae partibus magno intervallo adversa’]. It had once been called Albion; Ireland lay above it (or beyond – ‘super’), and then there were the smaller islands: the Orkneys, which numbered forty, the seven Shetlands, thirty Hebrides and no less than six islands between Hibernia and Britannia (‘Mona’, ‘Monapia’, ‘Riginia’, ‘Vectis’, ‘Silumnus,’ and ‘Andros’), with two more to the south and others scattered in the ‘German sea’ (Pliny, 1942, 4.102–103, 198). Farthest flung of all was the island of Thule (‘Tyle’), without night in midsummer and without day in midwinter; one day’s sail beyond it the sea was frozen (Pliny, 1942, 4.104, 198). To this rapid – yet richly detailed – inventory, Pliny’s fourth-century reviser Iulius Solinus added significant details concerning Britain and Ireland. Ireland was remarkable for its savage inhabitants, and its lack of snakes; the inhabitants of the island of ‘Silura’ (probably the Scilly islands) refused to accept coins, while fertile Thanet was similarly anathema to serpents (Solinus, 1895, 22.2–8, 100–101). Britain itself was notable for its many rivers and rich springs, as well as its minerals and stones (Solinus, 1895, 22.10, 102). Solinus’s sources for this expansion of Pliny are for the most part unknown (though he took some material from the Cosmographia of Pomponius Mela), and the section is conceivably the addition of a very early reader (Milham, 1986, 259). In any case, by emphasising their strangeness and their resistance to cultural norms, the account of Ireland, Britain, and surrounding islands in Solinus had the effect of putting the region further from the Roman cultural ambit than Pliny had done. Both authors nevertheless clearly conceived of Britannia and Hibernia in archipelagic terms, as larger members of a series of islands, and the content and mode of their descriptions, characterised by the mixture of topography, mirabilia, and ethnography, had a lasting influence on medieval geographical writing: as well as a text widely disseminated in its own right, Solinus’ Polyhistor was a major source for the description of the world in Book 14 of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (2011), as well as for more obscure texts such as the anonymous Carolingian treatise entitled De situ orbis (1974).

The Eclipse of Insularity? Undoubtedly the most influential early medieval description of the British archipelago appeared in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede inherited from Pliny and Solinus, as well as from Paulus Orosius’ early

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fifth-century geographical introduction to his Historiae adversus paganos (Orosius, 1889), Isidore, and others, a strong consciousness of the distance separating the island of Britannia from mainland Europe. However, it was the project of the Historia Ecclesiastica to identify the providential nature of the island, to document the evangelisation of the gens Anglorum and to affirm Britannia’s reinsertion within a Roman orbit. Islands and peninsulas abound in the Historia: in addition to Britain and Ireland, Bede’s narrative ranges from Man (subjected to English rule by King Edwin) and Anglesey, where the north sea crashes, to the Isle of Wight, one of the last refuges of paganism. The conversion of the Angles begins on Thanet where King Æthelberht meets Augustine and his companions and allows them a mansio in Canterbury (Bede, 1969, 1.25, 72). Monasteries themselves function metaphorically as islands and literally so in cases such as Lindisfarne and Iona. Britain is fertile, populous; Ireland is blessed, a land of milk and honey, but one that is ultimately eclipsed by developments across the water. There is no better illustration of the tension between the evangelist’s view of the islands – a view authorised and directed by Rome, nourished by journeys back and forth to the metropolis – and the de-centred, archipelagic perspective of the itinerant Irish clergy than in the famous debate about the calculation of the date of Easter that occupies Book 3 of the Historia Ecclesiastica. The climax of the debate, at the Synod of Whitby in 664, pits the spokesman for the ‘Irish’ calculation, Bishop Colman, against the representative of the ‘Roman’ date, the priest Wilfred – both men with Lindisfarne connections, but only one on the right side of history. Bede allows Colman a dignified speech – in which the Bishop cites the precedent of his superiors and ancestors and the authority of John the evangelist – but he cannot withstand Wilfred’s far longer reply. Wilfrid’s argument has a geographic base: he has witnessed the Roman method for calculating Easter not only in the city where Peter and Paul lived, taught, died, and were buried, but also in other parts of Italy, in Gaul, in Africa, Asia, Egypt, Greece, and in every city in which the church of Christ has spread, through multiple nations and tongues. Only the Irish, the Picts, and the British, ‘on the two last islands of the Ocean’ [‘de duabus ultimis Oceani insulis’] – and not even on all of them! – face off against the world (Bede, 1969, 3.25, 300; Merrills, 2005, 258–260). The speech brilliantly turns Pliny’s description – ‘Britannia the island facing the greatest parts of Europe across a large channel’ [‘Britannia insula (…) maximis Europae partibus magno intervallo adversa’] – into an encapsulation of perverse isolationism. What about the great Irish saints, pleads Colman: what about Anatolius, Columba, and others? Were they wrong in following John’s words? Even if they were saints, comes Wilfrid’s scathing reply, is a handful of men from one corner of a far-flung island to be preferred to the universal church of Christ through all the world [‘paucitas uno de angulo extremae insulae’] (Bede, 1969, 3.25, 306)? Colman, defeated, tellingly returns to the islands: first to Iona, then Inisboufinde, then Ireland, setting up

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2 See, for example, Michelet (2006).

monasteries, islands within the islands (Bede, 1969, 4.4, 346–348). The victory of Wilfred is the victory of the mainland, of the world, over the islands at the end of the world, and Wilfred himself is entirely emblematic of the new spatial order: having entered Lindisfarne at 14, he travels to Rome with Benedict Biscop, where he learns the correct method of calculating Easter; he returns to Britannia via Dalfinus in Gaul, then becomes bishop of Northumbria, where reversals of fortune force him into repeated visits to Rome to assert his rights. He has a near-death experience in Meaux, makes converts in Frisia as well as in Sussex, and dies in Oundle (Bede, 1969, 5.19, 516–530). Whereas Colman moves between the islands of the north, Wilfrid’s trajectory is vertical – to Rome and back again, through Gallia – and Bede, not without some sympathy for insular particularity and its history, endorses the metropolitan man. Wilfrid’s perspective was, unsurprisingly, shared by other bishops charged with converting pagan peoples in the islands of the far north. Adam of Bremen dedicated the final book of his Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae pontificum [‘History of the Bishops of the Church of Hamburg-Bremen’] to a detailed missionary geography of the Baltic Sea and the Scandinavian archipelago, drawing attention to the dangers and distance of far-flung islands but also to the happy fact of their reception of the word of God. ‘Only where the world has its end,’ Adam delightedly concluded, ‘does its [the metropolitan Church at Hamburg-Bremen’s] preaching fall silent’ [‘ibi solummodo ponens evangelizandi silentium, ubi mundus terminum habet’] (Adam of Bremen, 1853, col. 659). Visual description was not always easily assimilable to a narrative of conversion, however, in part because of the eclectic nature of its sources. The Cotton – or ‘Anglo–Saxon’ – world map was produced in the first part of the eleventh century, probably at Christ Church, Canterbury, but it is surely a copy – if perhaps an elaborated one – of an earlier model (see Figure 1). Its nomenclature is, for the most part, derived from Orosius, but things become more complex in its northwest corner. Here, as has often been observed,2 a far more detailed regional picture appears than on other world maps. A north sea zone encompasses Thule in the far northwest corner, Ireland, Britain, and the Orkneys in the west, with Iceland [‘Island’], Norwegians [‘Neronorroen’], and perhaps even Lapps [‘Scridefinnas’] further east. One could naturally subject this map to a Wilfredian reading: Rome is given prominence, and the cities in Italy may represent part of an itinerary (Archbishop Sigeric’s journey from Rome to Canterbury appears elsewhere in the manuscript). The axis continues through the Cyclades to Jerusalem, suggesting points of connection between the centres of Anglo-Saxon power (London, Winchester) and the parts of world invoked in Wilfred’s speech: Egypt, Greece, Asia, Africa. Yet, in another direction, the map tells a different, more oblique, story. At some point, the image must have been subjected to the influence of the eccentric Cosmography of ‘Aethicus Ister’, a work compiled in the eighth century which purports to be Jerome’s translation of the eponymous Aethicus (‘Aethicus Ister’, 2011). The Cotton map’s references

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Figure 1: The Cotton world map. East at top. British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.V.1, f.56v. The British Library Board.

in the far north of Europe and Asia to Turks and the ‘race of griffons’ have their origin in Aethicus, which suggests something more multi-faceted than a programmatic narrative of evangelisation. More tantalising still is the glimpse of an early medieval mappamundi apparently afforded by a text entitled Descriptio totius orbis, which is contained in a twelfth-century manuscript from northern Italy. The Descriptio appears to record the inscriptions of a large world map, which Patrick Gautier Dalche´ has argued on textual evidence is likely to have originated in an insular monastery, perhaps Iona itself, before being conveyed to Bobbio (Gautier Dalche´, 2010). Particularly striking is a series of islands recorded in the Descriptio: ‘In the same sea [i.e. around Britain] there are other islands: Suil, Abath, Scithia, Imdas, Etha, Coloso, Bereba, Malle, Euoea, Selech, as well as Thanatos, Tile, Titana, Scanzia, Meuania, Cathafico, Barcinona, and many others’ [‘In eodem mari sunt alie insule, scilicet Suil, Abath, Scithia, Imdas, Etha, Coloso, Bereba, Malle, Euoea, Selech, itemque Thanatos, Tile, Titana, Scanzia, Meuania, Cathafico, Barcinona, et alie

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multe’] (Gautier Dalche´, 2010, 7). Several of these names remain unidentified, but others are clearly from a British and north Atlantic archipelago: ‘Thanatos’ [Thanet], ‘Tile’ [Thule], ‘Scanzia’ (effectively Scandinavia), ‘Meuania’ [Man]. Still others tally with the Life of Columba compiled on Iona by the monk Adomna´n: ‘Coloso’ [Coll], ‘Malle’ [Mull], ‘Etha’ [Tiree], ‘Scithia’ [Skye], ‘Suil’ (possibly Seil), and ‘Selech’ (perhaps one of the Scilly isles) (Gautier Dalche´, 2010, 7–8; Adomna´n, 1961). If Gautier Dalche´’s hypothesis is correct, the large mappamundi copied in the Descriptio showed a picture of northwestern islands more detailed than any surviving world image. Its shared topography with the Life of Columba suggests its compatibility with the de-centred archipelagic notions of space articulated by Colman, in which far from being cut off, the isles of the northwest represent the presence of Christianity at the ends of the known world.

The Anglo-Norman Archipelago The years following the Norman Conquest saw profound changes to the relationship between England and its archipelago, with consequences for visual representation of these spaces. The Anglo-Norman drive into Wales and then Ireland found its greatest chronicler, and proponent, in the form of Gerald of Wales. Gerald’s Topographia Hiberniae operates in the Plinian/Solinian tradition, with an emphasis on mirabilia tinged with a keen political sense. Gerald sets Ireland firmly on an east–west axis. It is the ‘last of the western islands’ [‘Insularum occidentalium haec ultima’], the furthest extent of the known world, its marvels in dialectical relation to the better known wonders of the east (Gerald of Wales, 1867, 1.1, 22). An extended comparison of east and far west at the end of the first distinctio confirms the salubrious, snake-free west as the physical and moral superior (Gerald of Wales, 1867, 1.34–40, 68–73). The conclusion to the Topographia sees Henry II styled a second, western, Alexander [‘Alexander noster occidentalis’] for his conquest of the hitherto indomitable Irish (Gerald of Wales, 1867, 3.47, 189). Nevertheless, several sections of the Topographia outline not only the connections Ireland has with Britannia and other nearby islands (Man, the Orkneys), but also with Norway, whose occupation of parts of the island were recent history. Farther afield still, Gerald provides commentary on Iceland, significantly noting its distance from Ireland (‘three days’ sailing’), and the ambiguous Thule, either a fantasy [‘fabulosa non minus quam famosa’] or located in the furthest recesses of the northern ocean (Gerald of Wales, 1867, 2.13, 2.17, 95–96, 98–100; MundDopchie, 2009, 89–95). Gerald’s interest in insularity extends to a discursus on the origins of islands – they emerged paulatim [‘gradually’] after the flood – and a characteristic anecdote about a phantasmagoric island [‘insula Phantastica’] that appears and disappears but that can be secured by the insertion of burning iron into its surface (Gerald of Wales, 1867, 2.16, 98; 2.12, 94–95).

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Two maps have been found in manuscripts of the Topographia, both clearly early illustrations of the text, though probably neither authorial. One, contained in four extant manuscripts, is a schematic diagram of the British archipelago – Britannia, Hibernia, and the Orcades – oriented to the east, and with north and south marked.3 The other, found in a single manuscript, is far more elaborate and essentially constitutes a map of Europe (see Figure 2). This image, which appears between the Topographia and Gerald’s account of the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland (the Expugnatio Hibernica) is also oriented to the east and shows a similar but not identical configuration of the archipelago. This expanded view from the west faithfully reproduces Gerald’s location of Ireland in relation to Iceland and Spain while omitting Thule. Above the archipelago appears the superstructure of Europe, with Rome top and centre, France well elaborated, and central and northern Europe compressed. The map could be read as a statement of Norman dynastic influence and control throughout Europe: Normandy, Anjou, Poitou, and Gascony are clearly marked in France, while further west and south, Apulia, Calabria (with the city of Reggio prominent), and Sicily are notable presences. At the same time, the map has been convincingly read as a visualisation of itineraries from Ireland and England to France and Italy (O’Loughlin, 1999). While the map of the archipelago on its own could be read as an emblem of insular culture – in the words of Virgil’s Eclogue 1, l. 66, ‘penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos’ [‘Britons completely cut off from the entire world’] – the map of Europe firmly locates those same islands within the dominant rhetoric of the Topographia. The western isles face east, incorporated in the intellectual, political and religious structures and institutions of mainland Europe. They are at once the spiritual subjects of papal Rome and the political subjects of Angevin power, with its sprawling network extending as far as the kingdom of Jerusalem. This image broadly accords with Robert Bartlett’s observation that the powerful connections with France that followed from the Norman Conquest conversely prompted ‘a decline of the traditional importance of Scandinavia in English affairs’ (Bartlett, 2000, 102). Danish and Norwegian kings, pirates, and settlers were largely a thing of the past. All the same, the text of the Topographia, with its digressive island-hopping north of Ireland, subtly allows a meandering trajectory shaped by history and mirabilia to accompany the linear narrative of Henry II’s conquest. The Topographia maps are, in their way, emblematic of two significant aspects of the cartographic representation of Britain in English maps produced in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: the emergence of regional maps of Britain and the maintenance of the mappamundi tradition. The maps of Britain are notable because of the relative rarity of regional maps in the Latin west until the fifteenth century. The four surviving maps of Britain drawn by Matthew Paris around the middle of the thirteenth century are principally concerned with the representation of England, Scotland and Wales, although Matthew included some of the surrounding islands, such as the Orkneys, the Channel islands, Man,

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3 The manuscripts are: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 400, f. vii verso; British Library, MS Arundel 14, f. 27v; British Library, MS Additional 33991, f. 26r; and Paris, BNF lat. 4846, f. 63r.

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Figure 2: Map of Europe following Gerald of Wales’ Topographia Hiberniae. East at top. Dublin, National Library of Ireland, MS 700, f.48r. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

4 BL Cotton MS Claudius D VI, f. 12v; BL Cotton Julius D.VII, fols. 50v and 53r; BL Royal MS 14.C.VII, f. 5v; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 16, f. iv verso.

and Anglesey.4 The more detailed Gough map of Britain shows the most developed representation of the Orkneys and the west coast islands of any extant pre-sixteenth-century map. A large ‘Insula de Orkeney’ includes four towns, the largest of which is Kirkwall. A further seven islands seem to represent the archipelago, although in the current state of the map, any toponyms on them are illegible. Eleven islands of various sizes appear off the west coast of Scotland: these include Iona, the Isle of Bute, possibly the Isle of Arran, and another island marked ‘les outisles’. Farther south, between the northwest coast of England and the east coast of Ireland, the Isle of Man seems to have contained a legend referring to the island’s occupation by Norway (Parsons, 1958). Here, as on Matthew Paris’ maps of Britain, the emphasis is overwhelmingly on land and itineraries within land. Nevertheless, both Matthew and the maker(s) of the Gough map wanted to locate Britain and its islands within a regional space: both

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maps indicate land to the northeast and east (Norway, Denmark, and the low countries) as well as French ports across the Channel (Calais, Boulogne). Such toponyms suggest regional networks of trade and travel rather than isolation. In the mappamundi tradition of the later Middle Ages, Britain and Ireland enjoyed varying degrees of prominence on the oceanic periphery. The level of representation could be highly schematic, with Britannia, Hibernia, and the Orcades marked simply among the islands populating the ring of outer ocean.5 On the other hand, encyclopaedic world maps, such as the Hereford mappamundi (ca. 1300), provided relatively detailed representations of the islands within the same basic framework, including many toponyms and topographical details (Westrem, 2001, 296–324). The mappaemundi that illustrate copies of the Polychronicon of Ranulf Higden in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries reinscribe and adapt this model. Higden himself began his chronicle of world history with a verbal mappamundi, including description of British and adjacent islands drawn primarily from Bede and Gerald. Higden’s account of other islands rounds up some usual suspects (Thule and the Fortunate Islands, with Pliny and Solinus as authorities), but notably includes Iceland (‘Islandia’) and ‘Wyntlandia insula,’ a sterile land located to the west of Denmark, occupied by a barbarous race that sells passing sailors the wind sealed in knots on a thread: when a knot is untied, the wind is augmented (Higden, 1865, 1.31, 320–328).6 The most elaborate of Polychronicon maps, drawn at Ramsey Abbey in the late fourteenth century, shows not only an enlarged England, but also a detailed run of islands in the northwest (see Figure 3). These islands begin with a lengthy inscription for Ireland before moving on to include Scotland (‘once part of Britain’), Man, Thanet, Norway, Wintland (‘gens ydolatra’), Iceland, and Thule (BL Royal MS 14.C.IX, fols 1v–2r). This rim, punctuated by windheads, shows the way medieval authorities such as Adam of Bremen and Gerald of Wales had supplemented the corpus of islands defined by Pliny, Solinus, and other antique authors, without altering their fundamental relationship to mainland Europe. Overall, then, although there are numerous depictions of islands on medieval maps of various genres, there are relatively few maps that depict something akin to a ‘sea of islands’. Maps and topographical diagrams produced in England often suggest or imply insular networks and connections between the periphery and mainland, but in this period their primary focus remained the land rather than the sea. Two partial exceptions should be noted to this statement, as well as a point of comparison. First, in the fifteenth century, the emergence of the isolario tradition in the Mediterranean offered a significantly different visual model in which the ‘sea of islands’ indeed emerged as the subject of cartographic and verbal description. The isolario of Christoforo Buondelmonti, which contains both maps and textual descriptions of around 70 Mediterranean islands, was certainly known in fifteenth-century England, where it was copied by William Worcester, who also recorded the Canary Islands and a long list of Atlantic islands off the coast of Guinea, the latter derived from a portolan

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5 See, for example, the Sawley world map (c. 1200): Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 66, 2.

6 Higden here seems to draw on Bartholomeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum.

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Figure 3: World map preceding Higden’s Polychronicon. East at top. British Library, Royal MS 14.C.IX, fols 1v–2r. The British Library Board.

chart (Buondelmonti, 2007; Worcester, 1969, 372–376; cf. Tolias, 2007, 265–268). The portolan chart tradition showed the way to a cartography of the sea rather than the land, in which islands arguably attained a greater significance and centrality. Such charts, which were produced in significant numbers from the fourteenth century in Venice, Genoa, and Mallorca, but (with one possible exception) never in England, took the Mediterranean and Black Sea as their core region. However, as Worcester’s notes show, they came to include extensive portions of the Atlantic littoral in both Europe and Africa and formed the template for the sixteenth-century mapping of the western ocean – now no longer ‘sine termino.’ In that revised picture of the world, Britain, like other western coastal kingdoms such as Portugal and Castile, was well placed to take advantage of a radically revised sea of islands. The point of comparison is a remarkable map of the Mediterranean that is found in an eleventh-century Fatimid geographical text, the Book of Curiosities (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arab. c. 90, fols 30v–31r; Rapoport, 2014, 447–454). This image, probably produced in Cairo, shows the Mediterranean as an oval, filled with dozens of islands. The placement of these islands conforms only roughly to their actual geographical positions, and the weighting is heavily towards the eastern Mediterranean: the purpose of the map seems to have been to gather together available evidence of interest and use to the author and his audience. Taken along with the portolan charts and the isolario, this image

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suggests that, in terms of visual representation, in the Middle Ages it was the Mediterranean, and perhaps specifically the Aegean, that constituted the primary sea of islands.

‘Brexit’ It has been difficult, while writing this essay, to ignore the contemporary reinscription of Colman’s debate with Wilfred in the form of the June 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union. Superficially at least, the terms remain unchanged after nearly one and a half millennia: should Britannia (and the north of Hibernia) consider itself ‘part of Europe,’ and therefore subject to and participant in European laws, regulations and institutions? Or should it ‘Brexit’ and strike out for ‘independence’ and the ‘sovereignty’ of its own institutions (the preferred terms of the ‘Brexiters’)? In place of King Oswiu stood a similarly nonplussed electorate, menaced on one side by threats of isolation and economic catastrophe, and on the other by the spectre of uncontrolled migration and a tyrannous superstate. Neither side seemed to be particularly keen on islands. The ‘Brexiters’ eschewed the charge of isolationism and talked about the global market; those in the ‘remain’ campaign emphasised the advantages of being part of a ‘bloc.’ When the actress Emma Thompson dared to describe Britain as a ‘rainy corner of sort-of Europe. A cake-filled […] grey old island’ to – of all people – a German audience, she generated a furiously misogynistic response from the largely pro-Brexit popular press: ‘Shut yer cakehole’ (Shut Yer Cakehole, 2016). The visual language of insularity returned, somewhat unimaginatively, in cartoons depicting Britain as a boat vainly attempting to row away from the European shore. More enigmatically, on the day after the then mayor of London announced his support for the ‘leave’ campaign, the Financial Times printed on its front page an image of a besuited man, presumably an anxious financier, perched on an upturned Union Jack umbrella, seemingly searching for land as a tide of anti-Europeanism swept him out to sea (Sterling Tumbles, 2016). In the distance, a zig-zagging graph showed the ominous decline in the value of Sterling against the US dollar. But between the claims of ‘union’ and ‘sovereignty,’ no vision of ‘a sea of islands,’ of community and connectivity across distance, appeared. Instead, in the morbid voices of the debate, it was not hard to detect something of Malinowski’s characterisation of the Trobriand Islanders’ attitude to their neighbours – ‘hostility and mistrust […] a wall of suspicion, misunderstanding and latent enmity’ – and little, from either side, of Hau‘ofa’s strategic optimism.

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Hiatt

About the Author Alfred Hiatt is a Reader in Medieval Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-Century England (2004) and Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600 (2008), as well as a number of articles on medieval maps. He is currently working on a book-length study of the reception of classical geography in the Middle Ages, as well as a collaborative volume on comparative approaches to European and Islamic cartography, 1100–1500 (Email: [email protected]).

References Adam of Bremen. 1853. Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae pontificum in Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina, ed. J.P. Migne, vol. 146. Paris, France. Adomna´n. 1961. Adomna´n’s Life of Columba, ed. and trans. A. O. Anderson and M. O. Anderson. London: Nelson. ‘Aethicus Ister.’ 2011. The Cosmography of Aethicus Ister, ed. and trans. M. W. Herren. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. Bartlett, R. 2000. England under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1070–1225. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Bede. 1969. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, eds. B. Colgrave and R.A.B, Mynors. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Buondelmonti, C. 2007. Liber insularum archipelagi: Transkription des Exemplars Universita¨ts und Landesbibliothek Du¨sseldorf Ms. G13, ed. and trans K. Bayer, Wiesbaden, Germany: Reichert. Chekin, L. 1999. Easter tables and the pseudo-Isidorean Vatican Map. Imago Mundi 51: 13–23. De situ orbis. 1974. Anonymi Leidensis De situ orbis libri duo, ed. R. Quadri. Padua, Italy: Antenor. Gautier Dalche´, P. 1988. Comment penser l’oce´an? Modes de connaissance des fines orbis terrarum du nord-ouest (de l’antiquite´ au XIIIe sie`cle). In L’Europe et l’oce´an au Moyen ˆ ge. Contribution a` l’histoire de la navigation, 217–233. Nantes: Cid. Repr. in L’Espace A ge´ographique au Moyen Aˆge, 203–226. Florence, Italy: Sismel, 2013. Gautier Dalche´. P. 2010. Eucher de Lyon, Iona, Bobbio: le destin d’une mappamundi de l’antiquite´ tardive. Viator 41: 1–22. Gerald of Wales. 1867. Topographia hibernica. In Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vol. 5, ed. J. F. Dimock. London: Longmans. Hau‘ofa, E. 2008. We Are the Ocean: Selected Works. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press. Higden, R. 1865. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis, ed. C. Babington, 9 vols. London: Longman. Isidore of Seville. 2011. E´tymologies, Livre 14: De terra, ed. O. Spevak. Paris, France: Les Belles Lettres.

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Malinowski, B. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge. Merrills, A.H. 2005. History and Geography in Late Antiquity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Michelet, F. 2006. Creation, Migration and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Milham, M.E. 1986. Solinus. In Catalogus translationum et commentariorum. Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries: Annotated Lists and Guides, vol. 6, ed. F.E. Cranz. Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press. Mund-Dopchie, M. 2009. Ultima Thule´: Histoire d’un lieu et gene`se d’un mythe. Geneva: Droz. O’Loughlin, T. 1999. An early thirteenth-century map in Dublin: A window into the world of Giraldus Cambrensis. Imago Mundi 51: 24–39. Orosius. 1889. Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII, ed. C. Zangemeister. Leipzig, Germany: Teubner. Parsons, E.J.S. 1958. The Map of Great Britain circa A.D. 1360 known as The Gough Map. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. Reprint in N. Millea, 2007. The Gough Map: The Earliest Road Map of Great Britain?, 59–80. Oxford, UK: Bodleian Library. Pliny the Elder. 1942. Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, Vol. 10. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rapoport, Y. 2014. An Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe: The Book of Curiosities, ed. and trans. Y. Rapoport and E. Savage-Smith. Leiden: Brill. Shut yer cakehole. 2016. The Sun. 17 February: p. 1. Solinus. 1895. C. Ivlii Solini Collectanea rerum memorabilium, ed. T. Mommsen. Berlin, Germany: Weidmann. Sterling tumbles as Cameron takes on Johnson over Brexit. 2016. The Financial Times. 23 February: p. 1. Tolias, G. 2007. Isolarii, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Century. In The History of Cartography, vol. 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance, 263–284, ed. D. Woodward. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press Westrem, S.D. 2001. The Hereford Map, ed. S. D. Westrem. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. Worcester, W. 1969. Itineraries, ed. J. H. Harvey. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.

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Article

Brendan meets Columbus: A more commodious islescape

James L. Smith Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, York, UK.

Abstract This paper proposes that we can reimagine insular literatures and medieval islescapes as commodious seas of cultural and intellectual loci that span time, culture, and text alike. By moving beyond the rhetoric of insular separation or connectivity, we can see that islands connect even when medieval minds saw separation. The essay focuses on the Brendan legend and the commodious cultural ‘sea of islands’ that it inhabits, a space that connects the modern reader to a history of other connections, fact to fancy, and the real and the imaginary. When sailing in this sea, Brendan meets Columbus, and the late medieval idea of a lost island spreads though space and time. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7, 526–538. doi:10.1057/s41280-016-0027-x

… telle me what mervaylles ye have seen in the grete see Ocean that compasseth al the world aboute, and alle other waters comen out of hym whyche renneth in al the partyes of th’erthe –Brendan to Barrind, in Caxton’s Golden Legend version of the Voyage of St. Brendan In The Corrupting Sea, Horden and Purcell argue that the notion of a monolithic geo-cultural entity, in their case the Mediterranean, is arbitrary (Horden and Purcell, 2000, 15). Drawing on Bismarck’s famous assertion that ‘[a]nyone who speaks of Europe is wrong – it is nothing but a geographical expression,’ they break down the black box notion of a single uniform body of water, building a complex web of microecologies and subtle interactions  2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

Vol. 7, 4, 526–538

Chapter 5 was originally published as Smith, J. L. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7: 526538. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-016-0027-x.

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between peoples and their environments. The received notions of the region that the reader may have held are dissolved – only the possibility for new connections can replace them. In this essay, I propose a more commodious notion of literary islescape, and yet this is far from simple to define. A ‘sea of islands’ often contradicts medieval and early modern notions of physical space, achieving a homeliness and ubiquity through culture, a rich and collaborative space that has always been with us and continues to link us across vast distances, both physical and cultural. It is a sea of intellectual islands rather than granular and isolated ideas in a sea of time. To find a theoretical analog, I turn to Epeli Hau‘ofa, a strong and compelling voice in the discourse surrounding insularity. In ‘Our Sea of Islands,’ Hau‘ofa asserts that ‘[w]e are the sea, we are the ocean, we must wake up to this ancient truth and together use it to overturn all hegemonic views that aim to confine us again, physically and psychologically’ (Hau‘ofa, 1993, 16). When this postcolonial reimagination is applied beyond its context, Hau‘ofa’s work encourages us to forget the islands in the sea of medieval culture and to see the sea of islands in which stories connect. This is not a world in which all islands connect and there are no obstructions at all, but a place of commonality and hospitality rather than alienation. To see beyond separation, we must look at insularity through a different lens. Jonathan Hsy has proposed that a ‘peregrine’ mode of reading enables ‘a transhistorical and cross-linguistic outlook that results in moments of wondrous estrangement from conventional disciplinary frameworks’ (Hsy, 2013, 205). In order to see the sea of islands within the late medieval and early modern oceanscape, I turn to a meta-narrative by way of case study – the reception history of the Brendan legend. Rather than focusing on textual analysis of medieval insular fiction, a task already diversely explored by Cohen (2008), Sobecki (2008), Sobecki (2011), and Pinet (2011), to name a few, I will instead focus on the idea of a temporal islescape and its role in the stitching together of loci through the rich substrate of a capacious cultural medium: the more commodious ocean of the title. Within this space, distinct cultural and textual spaces merge into something that blurs conventional categories, and connects islands in the sea.

The Challenges of Isle and Ocean Separation brings us together. When we talk of the gulfs between islands and ideas, we are making connections across space and time that form new relationships, permanently linking idea to idea and thinker to thinker. The ocean reveals this to be true: the putatively alienating space of the ocean is culturally constructed, and at first glance it is difficult to argue with the notion that we are not at home away from land. Indeed, we would be thinking in concert with

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many European civilizations were we to assert this. Yet one is making decidedly non-insular connections through the very act of arguing for insularity – discussing insularity brings with it a set of relationships and connections. If one proposes, as Gildas did in his De excidio Britonum, that Britain is ‘fortified on all sides by a vast and more or less uncrossable ring of sea,’ then it is correct to assert that this statement has cultural force (Sobecki, 2008, 73). As John Gillis has argued, islands are master symbols for an inexhaustible range of things, and their symbolism has helped to shape the oceans of the world (Gillis, 2009). By symbolizing, they connect, even when they argue for the impossibility of connection. The ocean participates in the dual reinforcement and disregard of insularity. We repeat a modern version of an old Christian trope, the shunning of the sea as a ‘corrupting oceanography,’ a space to be traversed yet kept apart. By arguing for separation, the ‘ambiguous merits’ of the islescape enable engagement with the sea as an object of cultural interconnection rather than as a barrier to it (Horden and Purcell, 2000, 438). The mentality of insular separation is far from universal, as anthropology demonstrates. For the Bajau Laut of Southeast Asia, for example, the sea is not a separator, but a home. Land is another realm in which certain necessities of human life must be acquired, but the human realm is a series of boats and houses on stilts placed upon the surface of saltwater estuaries (Mack, 2011, 13). For them the Other dwells on land, and a sense of commonality is defined by the water. The coast is a border, and the land exists beyond. For Hau‘ofa, ‘[t]he world of our ancestors was a large sea full of places to explore, to make their homes in, to breed generations of seafarers like themselves. People in this environment were at home in the sea’ (Hau‘ofa, 1993, 8). The question now remains as to how European insular identity in the late Middle Ages can be enriched through postcolonial insular knowledges. More importantly, how can all insular knowledges merge to enrich each other? The first step is to reconcile two alternative cultural views of the sea: one as an ‘unwelcome and unwelcoming wilderness,’ the other ‘entirely familiar and unthreatening’ (Mack, 2011, 74). It is important to begin by noting that the cultural space I depict in this essay is in many senses a sea of islands defined by intellectual colonialism. It was created through acts of appropriation, exploitation, and cruelty. This cannot be removed from the story, but in the twenty-first century, European literature can mingle with the stories of those it silenced to create a world of literatures, ideas, and worldviews that reflect the richness of global pre-modernity. The goal of our Hau‘ofa-esque rethinking of ocean space should not only allow Europe to find peace with its rhetoric of insular separation and oceanic inhospitality, but also to create an ocean that is the home of all seafaring imaginations, a place – as was the case in the Middle Ages – of trade, transaction, multilingualism, and human-nonhuman interaction. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues, there is space for a multi-ethnic, transoceanic, migratory, and accommodating oceanscape to form (DeLoughrey, 2007). When

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medieval narrative passes into the ocean and finds ‘the darksome bounds of failing world,’ as Adam of Bremen did, it reaches beyond, attempting to connect (quoted in Sobecki, 2008, 98). As Sebastian Sobecki has argued, ‘[w]hat has historically delimited and therefore defined insular Britons is the sea with its all-encircling boundary, the shoreline’ (Sobecki, 2011, 2). Boundaries are permeable, yet the encircling boundary of insular identity provides a receptacle for identity. In a world of community beyond insular delineation and oceanic separation, it is difficult to determine the limitations and affordances of ‘island.’ In an ecological and purely literal sense, the separating power of oceans is a key force in history. The idea of the British Isles is a form of ideological confinement, long modified through classical reception, medieval negotiation, and growing hegemony at the dawn of the early modern; one might say that Western intellectual history is addicted to insularity just as it has struggled with anthropocentrism, taxonomic fallacies, and a tendency toward binaries. The legacies of insular addiction haunt the present for, as John Gillis argues in the context of colonialism in the Pacific, for Europeans and Americans, ‘the sea was a void rather than a place [… f]or them the Pacific isles were not only spatially but temporally distant’ (Gillis, 2007, 21). Medievalists have repeated this notion while in search of novelty, a salient example being the assertion that ‘[i]slands and cities have several important features in common: they consist of bordered places with a definable inside and outside; they provide a sense of commonality for the inhabitants; and they form a barrier against the Other’ (Grafetsta¨tter, 2011, 7). Those from a Western background are so steeped in a distinct insular worldview that the separation of islands seems self-evident. Connections are fleeting, however profound, and barriers are the norm. The ocean carries the traveler from isle to isle, but it is not home. As in the case of Bismarck’s Europe, this is a geographical expression, for anyone who speaks of islands is wrong. Separation is a matter of perspective. When one set of eyes sees an inhospitable gulf peppered with self-contained spaces, another might see a space of shared ideas in which islands float like clumps or whorls of meaning in larger patterns. We should not forget that the isolation of islands has shaped their unique symbolism and cultural resonances, and yet separation is a discourse of connectivity. Separateness connects across space and time through the stories that we tell, and the insular recedes. I do not propose replacing the isolation of islands with the universal connection of islands, as Matthew Goldie’s survey of island theory cautions (Goldie, 2011, 9). Instead, it is more accurate to say that the rhetoric of insular separation creates part of a new and rich network of connections, some formed from the discussion of separateness itself. This essay is by no means an argument that medieval barriers within oceanic space – the impassable oceanus dissociabilis or the boundary of the littoral – lack power, but that ideas of limitation or transaction are themselves a form of

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transaction, communities of ideas of community and separateness in dialogue (Sobecki, 2008, esp. 16–24). Rather than succumbing to forces of what Hau‘ofa calls ‘belittlement’ of mentality, what might a medieval insular identity – or collection of identities – look like after undergoing a ‘world enlargement’ enabled by the mediating polis of the ocean (Hau‘ofa, 1993, 6)? Simone Pinet argues that insular fiction is a set of possible itineraries between islands, a grouping process for the emphasis of themes such as ontology, politics, or ethics (Pinet, 2011, 155). We can expand beyond this scope into a realm not only of groupings of distinct entities with ontological, political, or ethical transactions uniting them, but an enlarged entity that has its own ontology, generates its own politics (and political ecologies), and has its own ethical considerations. The power of world enlargement has been writ large upon world history discourse by Janet Abu-Lughod’s seminal monograph Before European Hegemony (Abu-Lughod, 1989). By exploring a pre-European network of trade circuits spanning the Mediterranean, Arabian, East African, Indian, and Asian coastlines of the Indian Ocean, Abu-Lughod revealed a lively system of cultural transaction and unimagined wealth, a world in which Europe was a peripheral node of a vast system centered on the Indian Ocean. Only with the fourteenthcentury colonial degradations of the Portuguese in East Africa did this system disintegrate. In her conclusion, Abu-Lughod reflects that ‘[w]orld systems do not rise and fall the same way that nations, empires, or civilizations do. Rather, they rise when integration increases, and they decline when those boundaries contract’ (Abu-Lughod, 1989, 367). To my mind, the same process occurs transtemporally: world systems decay within the historical imagination when links are forgotten and grow when integration is remediated.

Saint Brendan and Christopher Columbus Meet in the Sea of Islands From the early Middle Ages until the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the long-adapted tale of Brendan and his monks sailing beyond the familiar shore of Ireland into a realm of divine barriers and cultural connections provided meaning to generations of readers. It was a farrago of popular medieval tropes and cultural idioms studded in an imagined ocean: eschatological symbolism, topoi of Biblical legend, abundant marvels, and interconnected stories of moral behavior to be read by itineraries of travel. The legend exhibited tremendous longevity, creating a teeming cultural ocean-home of familiar yet alien marvels, meaning interpreted and re-interpreted, and – after many centuries of this process – a bold vision of Christian salvation in the fevered imagination of one late medieval mind, that of Christopher Columbus. As a medieval literary and (multi)cultural entity, Saint Brendan’s isles have connected and expanded across the barrier-sea of mythic and topographical distance.

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Insular fictions are not only about islands connected spatially or geographically, but also about temporal connection. The Brendan texts participate in a constellation of words, ideas, and adaptations that are themselves a sea, connected across time despite existing as a collection of distinct nodes. To read them is to float in a Hau’ofa-esque world of journeyings, forays, stories, itineraries, and obsessions. As we will see, the navigation of this commodious ocean – defined more by what it connects than by what it divides – spans centuries, crosses cultures, and provides a substrate by which ideas float from era to era like flotsam and jetsam, washing up on distant shores. The islands of this world are textual and cultural entities, distinct in and of themselves and yet porous and ecologically entangled. They are not universally connected, and indeed many of their interactions are predicated upon a rhetoric of alienation or impassability. We, the readers of the Brendan text, are this sea, and it is us. So are all of those who have traversed the spaces between their far-flung contexts. The medieval cultural translation and reception history of the Brendan legend is explored within Barron and Burgess’ (2002) critical edition, spanning the period from the eighth-century Latin Nauigatio Sancti Brendani abbatis to the age of print with Caxton’s 1484 edition of the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine. Originating with a precursor to the Irish Immram Ma´ele Du´in and passing into the proto-Nauigatio, the story of Brendan generates the Voyage and mature Nauigatio versions and floats through the entirety of the Middle Ages. The tale has a rich and varied stemma that reaches every corner of European imagination like a cultural wake (Strijbosch, 2000, 204–5). As the tale of Brendan meandered through centuries, it glided through Europe’s rich multilingualism, with versions of the tale – in its diverse forms – appearing in Latin, Anglo-Norman French, Dutch, German, Italian, Occitan, Catalan, and Old Norse, and in Middle English in the South English Legendary and Golden Legend. The Brendan tradition connects as it withdraws, the endless retelling of the story both emphasizing the inaccessibility of the wondrous isles encountered by the saint and his monks while constantly making new cultural, linguistic, and scriptural links. It spreads across time and spans space while loudly arguing that certain places cannot be touched. It places the reader in touch with the divine while severing the bond. Its connections ensnare generations of readers and scholars, fueling their obsessions. The lure of the legend is captured by the editors in their introduction, in which they highlight the historical appeal of the tale: From Columbus to Tim Severin [seekers of Brendan] were drawn to follow in his wake, often in search of self as much as foreign shores. What matter if Brendan never went where they followed him, so long as he lured them on from land to new-found land. As he has passed from island to island, so the legend passed from age to age, bringing to each the meaning of which it was capable, literal or metaphorical. (Barron and Burgess, 2002, viii)

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The multi-textual legend of Saint Brendan makes a rhetorical virtue of separation from the object of its desire, the Promised Land of the Saints. The fifteenth-century Book of Lismore states that Brendan asked God to ‘give him a land secret, hidden, secure, delightful, separated from men’ (as cited in Barron and Burgess, 2002, 6). The desire for peregrinatio pro amore Dei motivates the narrative, yet the reality is a sea of islands visited in turn, the manifold itineraries highlighted by Pinet. The historical and allegorical content form a rich tapestry of interactions – cultural, temporal, linguistic – evident in the manifold translations of the late Middle Ages. The islescape is held together by currents of connection that reach across literary history, that are multiple and migratory, fleeting and fluid. Interpreting the logic of these nebulous motions requires an escape from the Western dialectic obsession with a single, authoritative conclusion or interpretation reached by the reasoned defeat of ‘lesser’ arguments. Rather, we could favor what Barbadian poet Kamau Braithwaite has described as ‘tidalectics,’ in which a successful logical outcome is reached by radiating from the center and then back again rather than following a linear path of attack (cited in Shell, 2014, 20–21). Tidalectics circulate rather than circumscribe. Following a circular path of ebbing and flowing reason, we can freely navigate the internal logics of out literary islescape without the need for a definitive outcome, passing across time and space and back again to do so. A tale that was endlessly received and adapted is framed within the Nauigatio tradition as the next step in a further chain of receptions of paradisal knowledge stretching back through the ages, presumably to Adam and Eve themselves. Within the tradition of the Nauigatio, the story of Saint Brendan’s voyage begins with marvelous knowledge gleaned from a prior report. In the Nauigatio, Abbot Barrind visits Brendan and his fellow monastics at Clonfert and relates a tale of discovery. In the tale, he and the monks of Abbot Mernoc sailed from the remote monastic community of the Delightful Island, visiting the Promised Land of the Saints and returning with the scent of paradise still infused into their clothes (Barron and Burgess, 2002, 26–27). It is this tale that inspires Brendan and his 14 brothers to seek the isle in the distant ocean. This isle remains ever-present in the spiritual imagination of the faithful despite hiding within the wide sea. In the twelfth-century German vernacular Reise-fassung (journey version) of the legend, the story begins with another book, encountered by Brendan and his monks at the outset (Matthews, 2016, 57; Strijbosch, 2000, 4–5, 8). In this version of the story, Brendan reads a marvelous report that there are two paradises on earth, three heavens, a location where there is day when the reader has night, a giant fish carrying a wood on his back, and a place where Judas enjoys God’s mercy every Saturday night. Brendan refuses to believe what he has read unless he has seen it with his own eyes and burns the book in anger. An angel informs him that he must travel at the command of God to ascertain for himself what is truth and what is falsehood, sailing for nine years in order to

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rewrite the book and discharge his debt. Since his lack of faith has destroyed the wondrous text, he must recreate it, rewriting the islescape on the surface of medieval consciousness. He passes from quotidian life and into legend, going out to sea and eventually returning to Ireland with potent partial knowledge. The book that he is tasked to write, like the book in which he is written, is part of a greater trans-temporal pattern of intellectual wanderings within the sea of islands. Like the Reise Brendan, the textual history of the legend is an endless process of partial erasures, imperfect re-inscriptions, emotional reactions, and endless interpretations. Despite a complex rhetoric of inaccessibility and accessibility, the many medieval versions of the tale begin with the premise that nothing is truly disconnected from anything else by time or space, but only the will of God can determine what is hidden and what is revealed, what is known and what is prohibited. In the Caxton version, Brendan and his monks are greeted by the glorious sight of the promised land, ‘the fayrest contre eestward that ony man myght see.’ They cannot reach it, for it is separated from them by a stream that they dare not cross. A young man comes to them, admonishing them to ‘be ye now ioyeful,’ for they have reached the end of the temporal world, and ‘thys water that thou seest here departeth the world a sondre, for on the other syde of thys water may no man come that is in thys lyf.’ This final barrier bars all travel for Brendan, who is advised that he ‘shalte sayle ageyn into thyn owne contree,’ knowledge concealed until the appropriate time and place of apprehension (Barron and Burgess, 2002, 342). Brendan’s journey is over, his temporal limits defined, and yet the islescape of the Brendan legend teems with intellectual life that passed beyond the barriers of the world: it spreads from text to text, is transcribed and adapted, is retranscribed and translated, passed from culture to culture, from scribal production to the printing press. It continues to haunt us today. The spiritual and cultural ocean that it reveals is equally hospitable to thought, with even the inaccessibility of a time, a space, a fact opening up a new accessibility. When monastics seek herimum in oceano [‘a desert in the ocean’], they can never leave the world behind as long as their story is told (Sobecki, 2003, 199). Like a stylite upon a pillar accosted by admirers or a remote hermit visited by pilgrims, the seeker of an isolated religious life cannot escape. Their assertion of separation ensures their part in the story, and so it is for the Brendan legend itself. By following the lead of Hsy and taking a step back from the frame of the narrative, we see that the insular identity of the British Isles and the wider European world it connected to was far from limiting. When one reads from a distance, flying above the spaces within the text, the ocean appears as the cultural medium by which loci of power, be they moral, temporal, or topographic, are bonded together. Hsy’s peregrine reading takes the interpreter soaring through the tangles of the Brendan legend, with the occasional sojourn on a distinct historical and cultural isle within the sea.

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At the end of the fifteenth century, Brendan continues to explore the cultural sea of islands and meets Christopher Columbus, so to speak, passing on the blessing – or curse, given Columbus’ notorious megalomania – of insular obsession. Brendan’s tale, along with a me´lange of other classical, medieval, and late medieval texts, shaped a worldview that would have profound effects on the coming centuries. The tale of Brendan’s legendary isle passed into received wisdom, haunting the imagination of early transatlantic voyagers as they sought to traverse the Western ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Having failed to find the wonders they sought in more immediate Azores or Canaries, late medieval minds pierced the space beyond the shore, expecting a sea of familiar tropes mapped upon the forbidding face of the Atlantic. Their heads filled with visions of lost islands in the hidden sea; European minds such as that of Columbus were never culturally isolated as they ventured away from shore. As the late Middle Ages infused the imagination of Columbus and his contemporaries, so too did the ever-elusive promised land continue to elude explanation. In his writings on the Third Voyage, Columbus writes with a certain fanatical zeal that ‘I entered upon a new voyage to a new heaven and a new earth, which up to then had lain hidden’ (Columbus, 1988, 2.50). New, but also part of a vast mass of old things. Columbus attempted to pierce the veil of unknowing, making a logical interpretation of a wave-washed string of linked ideas spread across a fluid space in which linearity and singularity were meaningless. Tidalectic reasoning won out, and his reports were as mythical and multiple as the legends that lured him across the sea. The Spanish grandees back at home were thrilled but confused, in equal measure. The influences of medieval ideas on Columbus and his contemporaries were many and powerful. This was especially true of the islands he imagined beyond the horizon but which were close in cultural terms, intimately so. Valerie Flint makes a strong case for the influence of imagined islands (Flint, 1992, 87). Antilia was one of the most well known, ‘the Isle of the Seven Cities’ that appears on many fifteenth-century maps and was supposedly inhabited by the descendants of Visigothic Christians fleeing the eighth-century Islamic conquest of Iberia. The Isle of Saint Brendan also features repeatedly, a fabled destination still popularly believed in fifteenth-century Spain. It is commonly known that Columbus sought the isles at the Far East of medieval accounts and maps, the East Indies of the mind that became the West Indies instead. His fondness for Pierre d’Ailly and his 1410 Imago Mundi populated the Atlantic with an expanded islescape of legend, paradisal imagining, and eschatological aspiration – d’Ailly, like Brendan, dreamed of the Isles of the Blessed. When Westerners peered beyond the horizon, the next mystery was always waiting to be glimpsed. Flint lists many other appealing factors of the legend: Much of the [Brendan] story was to the taste of Columbus, from the renunciation of home and kindred (with its attendant rewards) to the

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Christian prophecies fulfilled and assured of fulfillment. The Navigatio may well occupy an especially crucial place in Columbus’ medieval cosmology. (Flint, 1992, 97) Many of the late medieval maps that Columbus would have had access to take the existence of the isle(s) as fact, marking them clearly. The 1367 portolan chart produced by the Venetian cartographers Domenico and Francesco Pizzigano clearly marks the Isle of Saint Brendan, stating that it was reached in 565 by Brendan and his brothers (Flint, 1992, 97). Newfoundland, the Antilles, Iceland: the list of potential candidates was long. The cartographers, encyclopaedists, and explorers of late medieval Europe were ever reaching out and colonizing the Atlantic with their imagination, just as others turned to the East and filled the lands beyond the Levant with monsters and marvels. The physical barrier of the ocean was no impediment to storytelling, nor was the barrier of time. The rhetoric of an adversarial relationship with the inhospitable sea is far from a complete rendering of the late medieval reality, failing to capture its rich interconnections. The caesurae and barriers remained, but their existence was part of the story. The temporal islescape that Columbus crossed in his fancy took him to the Americas before he ever set sail, separations and all. He did not find Antilia or Brendan’s isle, for they hid behind the intellectual horizon like the Amazons or the Cynocephali of the East. One could even say that Mandeville traversed a sea of islands of his own. The fact that land and cities replaced water and islands, that marvels and monstrous nations replaced oceanic wonders, was largely irrelevant. In many cases, insular interconnections and divisions were colonial in nature, the mapping of medieval imagination onto a perceived tabula rasa. The temporal sea of subtle connection was parted by a straight path of progressivism, Christian supremacism and unilineal cultural evolution. This trend has continued into the present in a seemingly innocuous form: the impulse to explain the voyage of Saint Brendan as an act of fact-based proto-exploration rather than a cultural artifact. Rather than seeking for tangled answers in an islescape of stories, this approach seeks to take the royal road from past to present, ignoring the terrain in between. As has long been the case with the mythic elements of maritime exploration, many writers have sought to explain Brendan’s voyage as fact rather than myth. There has been a tendency to read the narrative of technology-driven exploration and discovery onto Brendan, to make Brendan a medieval Irish Columbus. Surely, dialectic demands, there must be a neat and ‘real’ history? Surely there must be a factual voyage, a kernel of objective reality? Tim Severin – mentioned by Barron and Burgess – famously attempted to recreate Brendan’s voyage in 1976–1977, sailing a hand-crafted 35-foot leather currach 4,500 miles from Ireland to Peckford Island, Newfoundland, seeking to verify the possibility of Brendan’s legendary journey (Severin, 1978). A thrilling

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story to be sure, but a story that fails to entertain the possibility that Brendan’s voyage was, as Flint puts it, ‘one of pure imagination, constructed as an encouraging allegory of the voyage of the monk through the monastic life’ (Flint, 1992, 97). Out in the ocean, Brendan drifts in the sea of shared cultural transactions that globalize us all. To place him on the map, to historicize the events of the Nauigatio or the Voyage, is an expression of the very colonial attitude that the sea of islands approach hopes to modify.

A More Commodious Ocean To embrace Hau‘ofa, it is first necessary to place the European obsession with islands in the sea in context. The sea of islands is not a place for shaping, but for dwelling. It would be naı¨ve – especially in the context of medieval literature – to ignore barriers, be they fear of the ocean, tales of its perils, or the discourse on the separateness of islands. The answer is, in keeping with our themed issue, to propose a new approach to British insularity, a vision of the British Isles and their fellows as nodes of production in a rich global system of cultural forces that shape and mingle, shift and flow, where literary separation does not create cultural separation. We can still treat discourses of separation and alienation with respect and highlight their contradictions. Expressions of insular desire, be it a desire to connect or a desire to divide, are part of a larger complex. Time is no barrier, ideas long past mingling with progressive thinking in tidalectic ebbs and flows. Islands are what the powerful and powerless alike imagine them to be – community or prison, node or hermitage – and the oceans that separate archipelagos can be barriers in a physical or psychological sense but are a medium of transmission in cultural terms. Inspired by the scholarship of Hau‘ofa, DeLoughrey, McCusker and Soares, and other key scholars of postcolonial insularity mentioned in this essay, an awareness of insular connectivity across time, culture, and genre complements and enhances existing notions of connectivity, enlivening our vision of European insularity. Rhetorical expressions of isolation or separation, distance and proximity, cry out for connection, for a shared oceanic identity. By putting aside the Western notion of the insular, the sea of islands emerges. The knowledge it imparts is not totalizing or complete for, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has put it, ‘Current-crossed and relentless, the froth and flux of oceans bear shipwreck, effacement, a bare record of receding wakes, a cobbled fleet of appositions, words and things’ (Cohen, 2015, 134). It is, moreover, a sea of tropes beyond insularity, and it is a place where medievalists can be at home and form communities with other literary cultures at the littoral zones of the world. The isles can never be part of ‘the Continent,’ always floating in a liminal state of escape and embrace, yet the mystery of separation titillates literary

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imaginations to such a degree that they are forever caught in the web of literary attention. How can this contradiction be resolved? The answer is that it need not be resolved, for it never existed in the first place: the rhetoric of separation is a cherished component of cultural intimacy. What is visible when the literary ocean becomes commodious, spanning space and time? The answer is only possible via a Hau‘ofa-esque shift in insular mentality: we see that the encircling ocean holds identity as much as its isles, for the sea remembers what time and Empire forgets, what received insular wisdom severs. Britain and its literary culture have long struggled with this contradiction, an archipelago apart, yet intimately connected to the continent – and the wider world – through bonds of identity, history, and culture. The physical isolation of the British Isles has shaped them, yet so has the commodious connecting membrane of the ocean. Its stories – the Brendan legend being a notable exemplar – teach us to be culturally at home in the imagining of the ocean even when the physical practicalities of its vast and often alienating mass discourage connection.

About the Author James L. Smith is a Research Associate at the University of York Centre for Medieval Studies. His work focuses on intellectual history, medieval abstractions and visualization schemata, environmental humanities, and water history. He has also written on the themes of new materialism, the history of the senses, medieval maps and diagrams, medievalisms, and water management. His first book, entitled Fluid Models of Thought in Twelfth-Century Western Monasticism: Water as Medieval Intellectual Entity, is expected in 2017 in the Brepols Cursor Mundi series (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Abu-Lughod, J. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Barron, W.R.J. and Burgess, G. S. 2002. The Voyage of Saint Brendan: Representative Versions of the Legend in English Translation. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press. Cohen, J.J. 2008. Introduction: Infinite Realms. In Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England, ed. J. J. Cohen, 1–16. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohen, J.J. 2015. The Sea is a Conveyance-Machine. In Oceanic New York, ed. S. Mentz, 132–141. Brooklyn, NY: punctum books.

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Columbus, C. 1988. The Four Voyages of Columbus: A History in Eight Documents, Including Five by Christopher Columbus, in the Original Spanish, with English Translations. Ed. C. Jane. New York: Dover Publications. DeLoughrey, E.M. 2007. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Flint, V.I.J. 1992. The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gillis, J.R. 2007. Islands in the Making of an Atlantic Oceania, 1500–1800. In Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, eds. J. H. Bentley, R. Bridenthal and K. Wigen, 21–37. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Gillis, J.R. 2009. Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Goldie, M.B. 2011. Island Theory – The Antipodes. In Islanded Identities: Constructions of Postcolonial Cultural Insularity, eds. M. McCusker and A. Soares, 1–40. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Editions Rodopi. Grafetsta¨tter, A. 2011. Editor’s Preface. In Islands and Cities in Medieval Myth, Literature, and History: Papers Delivered at the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, in 2005, 2006, and 2007, eds. A. Grafetsta¨tter, S. Hartmann, and J. M. Ogier, 7–8. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang. Hau‘ofa, E. 1993. This Sea of Islands. In A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, eds. E. Waddell, V. Naidu and E. Hau‘ofa, 2–16. Suva, Fiji: School of Social and Economic Development, University of the South Pacific. Horden, E. and N. Purcell. 2000. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Hsy, J. 2013. Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Mack, J. 2011. The Sea: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Books. Matthews, A. 2016. The Ends of Polemic and the Beginning of Lohengrin. In Polemic: Language as Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Discourse, eds. A. Suerbaum, G. Southcombe, and B. Thompson, 43–64. Oxford, UK: Routledge. Pinet, S. 2011. Archipelagos: Insular Fiction from Chivalric Romance to the Novel. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Severin, T. 1978. The Brendan Voyage: The Seafaring Classic That Followed St. Brendan to America. Dublin, Ireland: Gill and Macmillan. Shell, M. 2014. Islandology: Geography, Rhetoric, Politics. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Sobecki, S.I. 2003. From the de´sert liquide to the Sea of Romance: Benedeit’s Voyage de saint Brandan and the Irish immrama. Neophilologus 87:193–207. Sobecki, S.I. 2008. The Sea and Medieval English Literature. Woodbridge, UK: D.S. Brewer. Sobecki, S.I. 2011. Introduction: Edgar’s Archipelago. In The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity, and Culture, ed. S. I. Sobecki, 1–30. Woodbridge, UK: D.S. Brewer. Strijbosch, C. 2000. The Seafaring Saint: Sources and Analogues of the Twelfth-Century Voyage of Saint Brendan, trans. T. Summerfield. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts Press.

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Article

Fictions of the Island: Girdling the sea

Lynn Staley Department of English, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, USA.

Abstract Like the sea, its highway, trade’s fluctuation threatens attempts to fix value, demanding a narrative by which the restless and insatiable can appear domesticated. This essay explores late medieval texts that provide an imaginary of mercantile perspective during a crucial period of Britain’s urban history. Through their depictions of the sea, they trace the growing power of merchant ideology, suggesting something of how merchants sought to create an identity for themselves within an existing social model, a model no more stable than the sea road of merchant ambition and endeavor. In so doing, the texts also offer ways in which the sea’s indeterminacy was harnessed or made to appear so. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7, 539–550. doi:10.1057/s41280-016-0028-9

From the sea, the land is a curving smudge of ports and estuaries. Encircling the land, the sea blurs boundaries that change with erosion and accretion, a process Spenser describes in Faerie Queene V.iv.7–8, where the effects of the devouring sea require Artegall’s adjudication. Spenser’s reminder that watery borders resist definition locates Britain, surrounded by water, in uncertainty. In The Man of Law’s Tale, Chaucer’s narrator both evokes the uncertainties attending the sea and attempts to neutralize them when he says of Custance, ‘She dryveth forth into oure occian / Thurghout oure wilde see’ until the waves cast her rudderless boat under a nameless castle far in Northumbria (II.505–6). The place name fixes (temporarily) the sea over which the Man of Law implies a degree of control, and a sovereignty the tale itself denies. Paradoxically, the active verb  2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

Vol. 7, 4, 539–550

Chapter 6 was originally published as Staley, L. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7: 539550. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-016-0028-9.

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1 On the relatively late attempt to exert dominion over the sea around Britain, see Goldie (2015, 704). 2 For ways in which Britain’s insular status influenced both open and closed English perspectives upon the sea, see Staley (2012).

(‘dryveth’) gives both direction and force to a woman in a powerless vessel, and the two first person plural pronouns (‘oure’) claim dominion over a part of the sea only contiguous to a named region of England.1 This sea connecting Syria to Northumbria, like seas connecting England to Ireland in King Horn or Denmark to England in Havelok the Dane or Britain to Europe and the East in the Libelle of Englyshe Policye, as well as in late medieval and early modern civic pageantry, is a body that surrounds Britain, giving it both protection and vulnerability, dotting its borders with natural harbors, using its rivers as points of entry for ships of war and trade.2 Of these ancient human preoccupations, trade may be more troubling or need the most justification for medieval writers. Trade, which promises great prosperity, both emerges from and is the origin for the cities used as evidence of civilization. Like the sea, its highway, trade’s fluctuation threatens attempts to fix value, demanding a narrative by which the restless, the greedy, the insatiable can appear to rest, tamed by the native hearth. The works mentioned above provide an imaginary of mercantile perspective, an off-shore calculus, during a crucial period of Britain’s urban history. Through their depictions of the sea, they trace the growing power of merchant ideology, but they also suggest something of the dynamics of that power and the anxieties that accompanied it. The writings of Marco Polo or Francesco Datini evidence the far-flung networks of medieval merchant empires, the wealth they accrued, the impact of such wealth, and the movements of the goods that produced that wealth. There are testimonials in stained glass and stone throughout Britain and Europe to merchants’ need to create reminders of their piety and civic care, just as there is evidence in sermon and satire of the contemporary association between merchandising and avarice. Both the testimonials and the satires attempt to construct an identity for merchants that either memorializes or admonishes. I am interested here in texts that suggest something of how merchants were presented or wished to see themselves presented in relation to a corporate whole, how they sought to create an identity for themselves within an existing social model, a model no more stable than the sea road of merchant ambition and endeavor. In so doing, the texts also offer ways in which the sea’s indeterminacy was harnessed or made to appear so. To think about the view of the land from the sea, English poets offered perspectives upon mercantile activities that wedded their sea-bound motion with the professed ideals of the land they called their own. Custance is perhaps the most complicated of these attempts. Written by a merchant’s son and a customs official, and put in the mouth of a man of law, her story prompts questions about the relationship between land and sea and the modes of exchange that bring them together that reverberate in English fictions of the sea. Chaucer’s focus on sea-motion in the Man of Law’s Tale is a focus upon trade. The Custance of the Man of Law is an object of trade, valued for her beauty and virtue, shuttled from Rome to Syria to Northumbria and back to Rome, amazingly retaining her value throughout tempestuous reverses of

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fortune. More passive than the Constance found in Nicholas Trevet, she is rendered by the Man of Law as mostly silent and always virtuous, saved from numerous accidents by a God whose index of value relates worthiness to good fortune and wealth.3 Robert Hanning and Sarah Stanbury have explored ways in which the Man of Law’s tale commodifies Custance, reducing her to an object of desire and thus an object of commercial activity (Hanning, 2000; Stanbury, 2010). She is bidded upon, bought, lost, found, lost again, and found again in a cycle that passes her from the hands of her noble father in Rome throughout the navigable waters of mercantile Europe and the East. Custance, however, resists the Man of Law’s effort to simplify her: behind her stands the Constance of Nicholas Trevet and her shadow self, the cheerfully amoral Alatiel of the Decameron’s second day of tales, who, like Custance, is a passenger upon the sea. If we compare Chaucer’s account of Custance to its source in Nicholas Trevet’s Les Cronicles, Chaucer’s re-fashioning of the story emphasizes Custance’s passivity in contrast to the terrifying forcefulness of the sea upon which she rides. Chaucer streamlines Trevet’s narrative in ways that portray her as both more holy and more passive, thus underlining God’s providential care. Trevet’s account of Constance is filled with details that would have been significant to the woman to whom he dedicated the Cronicles, Mary of Woodstock (1278–1332), daughter of Edward I, who was a nun at Amesbury. He begins with Maurice, the son of Constance the Roman and Alla the Saxon, who has ties to Rome, to England, and to Cappadocia. Trevet then details Constance’s education in the Christian faith, in the seven sciences, and in languages. Learned and devout, when pagan merchants come to her father’s court with riches, Constance asks them about their country and religion. She preaches the Christian faith, and they are baptized and instructed. They return with praise for the maid Constance, who converts them, for her very high and noble mind, her wisdom, wondrous beauty, gentility, and noble lineage. Their words inflame the Sultan, who sends these merchants back to entreat for Constance in marriage and for alliance between Christians and Saracens. In the cosmopolitan opening of this tale, Mary of Woodstock would have found allusions to England’s relations with the world, references to the education of royal women, and a picture of a royal woman whose eloquence, wisdom, and intelligence precede her beauty in a catalog of praise. That marriages are alliances between nations would come as no surprise to the sixth daughter of that world-travelled king, Edward I. Trevet’s account of Constance in Northumbria is the story of a woman who converts and teaches by informed argument, who wins the trust of rulers, who brings a bishop from deepest Wales to baptize the new Christians, who reproves three times the lustful Saxon knight who solicits her, who is articulate in the cause of faith, and who is beloved and trusted by Alla’s people. In the face of her Saxon mother-in-law Domild’s manipulation of documents threatening her and

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3 For a reading that emphasizes Custance’s passivity, see Wetherbee (1989).

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her child, Constance announces her decision to return to a sail-less and oar-less boat rather than destroy the land with dissension. Trevet describes her young son as learning ‘marinage’ at a young age. He also must have learned something of his mother’s diplomatic skill and canny self-preservation, for she tricks a would-be rapist and pushes him overboard to his death. Had Trevet’s Constance entered the Canterbury Tales, she would have embodied ideals of integrity, learning, faith, intelligence, nobility, and beauty that would have overshadowed Prudence, Griselda, and Cecilia. In addition, what would the Man of Law, with his praise for female submissiveness, have done with this larger-than-life female protagonist? The sea upon which she is cast is also different, not as empty and lawless as that in the Man of Law’s account. In the Man of Law’s tale, Custance is the only survivor of the slaughter at the Sultan’s court. Trevet has three Christian courtiers escape and return to Rome. Later in Trevet, when Constance is on the return leg of her second journey and in the Mediterranean once more, she sees what she thinks is a forest – a forest of masts of a large Roman navy deployed to Syria to avenge her treatment. Constance gives the commander a version of her plight without revealing her identity and asks protection back to Rome, where she lives for 12 years until Alla comes to Rome on pilgrimage. Constance then plays a careful hand. She instructs her son in getting the attention of his royal father Alla, allows Alla to find and recognize her, and, once joined by royal husband and royal son, greets her father, the Emperor of Rome. Maurice becomes ‘Maurice the Christian Emperor’ (l.585). Constance returns to England with her husband, who dies nine months later and is buried in Winchester, the seat of Saxon kingship, in the church of England’s proto-martyr Saint Amphibal. After Alla’s death, Constance goes to Rome for her father’s illness; they both die soon thereafter. The Man of Law shifts the emphasis to Constance’s providential rescue. Custance does not plan her would-be rapist’s death; he goes overboard while struggling with her. Custance does not negotiate her return to Rome with the senator but is taken there. Custance is silent for most of her time in Rome, where she is loved for her beauty, submissiveness, and virtue. She returns to Rome from England after Alla’s death to live happily at her father’s court. Trevet’s Constance is not only a strong woman who manages to survive on sea and land, but also one who uses her intelligence to bring good fortune out of bad and dynastic success out of apparent disaster. The tale anchors English kingship to England’s sacred history and, moreover, links it to Roman might and wealth, which extends to Syria and, through the Mediterranean, to all of England. The incipient chaos of human hatred and greed, and the sea’s fearsome power, are tempered by Rome’s imperial Christian presence, which acts as a providential force that uses the sea as a means. The Man of Law strips Constance of her force and Rome of its power, installing a divine power that brings joy after woe,

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conferring queenship and prosperity upon noble, virtuous, pious, and submissive women, and checks the sea’s indeterminacy by magic. The shadow side of the Man of Law’s tale of ultimately fortunate exchange is Boccaccio’s tale of Alatiel in Decameron 2.7, which catalogs a sexual romp in the Mediterranean. As the merchant of her own body, Alatiel is peerless. Winthrop Wetherbee, Robert Hanning, and Sharon Kinoshita and Jason Jacobs have linked the tales, focusing upon systems of international exchange and their accompanying anxieties, anxieties figured in Alatiel’s mastery of sexual exchange (Wetherbee, 2004; Hanning, 2000; Kinoshita and Jacobs, 2007); or, as Boccaccio’s narrator puts it, Alatiel ‘slept with eight men perhaps ten thousand times’ (156), but she finally lies down a virgin. Alatiel’s story reads like that of Constance in reverse: a Saracen princess, the daughter of the emperor of Babylon, she is bound for her wedding with the king of Africa when she is shipwrecked. Saved near Majorca, she is seduced after a winey dinner and discovers sexual pleasure. Thereafter, Alatiel goes around the Mediterranean from powerful man to powerful man, as each is killed by another who sees and covets ‘so fair an object’ (146). She loves them all, makes no distinction between Christian or Saracen, is never predatory, allowing herself to enjoy each adventure as she passes from hand to hand until she recognizes a friend of her father’s, and they create a letter explaining how her chastity was preserved. Her father is then able, finally, to marry his still-valuable daughter to the king of Africa. As a fantasy of endlessly renewing virginity, Alatiel’s romp probes not simply male anxiety (she enjoys the sex and then helps craft the document establishing her purity), but the anxiety about Mediterranean exchange, likewise rooted in documentary culture, that can also be found in the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council.4 The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 sought to establish a conformity of faith for the western Church and to sharpen the outlines of a European Christian society that appeared to be threatened by heterodox beliefs and practices and by ecclesiastical ignorance and laxity. The canons of Lateran IV begin with the Trinity, the one principle of the universe (Rothwell, 1975, 643–76; Alberigo et al, 1973, 227–71). From this declaration of unity follows the one universal church. Most of the seventy canons of the council concern the administrative, doctrinal, and sacramental life of the church, covering heresy, the correction of ecclesiastical abuses, clerical instruction, and sacramental observance. However, because the council sought to establish the boundaries of European Christian society, the canons also include rulings on those to be excluded from ecclesiastical (and hence social) consideration. Canons like that decreeing no new religious orders excluded women from creating alternatives to a fully cloistered vowed life. Rules on what constituted the degrees of consanguinity to be allowed in a lawful marriage tightened marriage laws to prevent incest. The two canons that mandated that Jews and Saracens wear distinctive dress and that Jews be disallowed from holding public offices

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4 For explorations of the degree of anxiety the Mediterranean ‘borderlands’ produced, see Birk (2005) and Abulafia (1990).

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excluded those not Christian from a society defined along strict lines. Throughout the canons there is a marked awareness of the deleterious effects of trade upon the Christian social body – relics are not to be sold, sacraments are not to be sold, clerical offices are not to be sold – suggesting just how dependent upon merchandising was the social body, a body now identified as the body of Christ. The final two canons concern the Crusades, especially the fiscal details pertaining to Crusaders’ financial needs and the commercial networks that defined Mediterranean life. Here, Alatiel and Innocent III converge upon the ambiguities of this sea of islands, where the only register for value is the going value of the object in question. If Alatiel moves indiscriminately from Saracen to Christian, from Majorcan to Greek to Turk, to Rhodian, to Cypriot, Lateran IV draws a picture of equal lack of discrimination since it forbids Christians to sell arms to infidels or to engage in profiteering that will damage the Christian effort to conquer the Holy Land. It forbids ‘all Christians for four years to send or take their ships across to the lands of Saracens in eastern parts, in order that by this a greater supply of shipping may be got ready for those wanting to cross to the help of the Holy Land and the said Saracens deprived of the not inconsiderable help they have been used to getting from it’; it also forbids tournaments and mandates peace in the Christian world for four years lest strife lessen the European cause (Rothwell, 1975, 675–76). Lateran IV prohibits practices already in place that signify the ambiguous relationships among the peoples of the Mediterranean Sea and, instead, seeks to erect boundaries between peoples, faiths, and practices, thereby attempting to obliterate the network of a sophisticated multicultural commercial system. These are boundaries Boccaccio has Alatiel discount as she sails on the many boats that carry her to the next man who thinks to possess what cannot be possessed, what is, in fact, as fluid as the sea. Like money, frequently signified or guaranteed by documents, that pays for weapons to the infidel or for the ships of profiteers, Alatiel is owned by none, desired by all, and by means of a letter of credit, recreated as a virgin of still priceless worth in Mediterranean ports of call where she circulates. If the cheerful amorality of this unitary sea is the underworld of medieval Christian society, it is also the underworld that supports the overworld, which cannot exist without its commercial pilings. The Man of Law sacramentalizes exchange within the Christian community. Although he ‘spares’ Custance from consummating a marriage to a Saracen, he does not hesitate to reveal her wedding night with Alla: For thogh that wyves be ful hooly thynges, They moste take in pacience at nyght Swiche manere necessaries as been plesynges To folk that han ywedded hem with rynges. (II.709–11)

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The Man of Law does not describe an exchange of pleasures, but describes marriage as an exchange of goods for services: purchased with rings, holy things must take with patience what is necessary for the pleasure of those who marry them. The Man of Law rules out indeterminacy. He disallows Custance’s awakening to sexual pleasure and physical delight, just as he attempts to control the sea with Providence. He similarly glosses over Trevet’s alarming portrait of Constance the power woman, favoring sexuality tamed by marriage, the sea, and its perils by God. Both Boccaccio’s and Trevet’s depictions of women and the sea are potentially disruptive to the social systems on the land. While Chaucer gives the Shipman (probably originally the Wife of Bath) a tale of commercial exchange whose shell game plays itself out across borders both home and abroad, he has the Man of Law interpose providential control as the means of checking a system that is otherwise unfettered. If this sounds like a twenty-first century dilemma, John Lydgate got there first, comprehended Chaucer’s deadly aim on a world he knew all too well, and domesticated that restless and driving sea for the fictions of fifteenth-century civic festivity. Custance’s route from Syria to Northumbria was a well-sailed commercial highway in the Middle Ages, a highway Lydgate uses in his ‘Mumming for the Mercers of London,’ which he was commissioned to write for the Twelfth Night festivities for Mayor Estfeld on 6 January, 1430. On this night that commemorates the arrival of the Wise Men in Bethlehem, Lydgate recounts Jupiter’s greeting to the mayor of London, a prominent member of the most prominent of the city’s livery guilds.5 The greeting arrives by messenger from Syria. Lydgate traces the messenger’s journey – by ship from Jaffa to Venice, Genoa, on through the straits of Gibraltar, north from Spain, through the ‘rokkes of Bretaygne’ (l. 69), now on the ‘Brettysshe See’ (l. 70) towards Calais, then ‘Entryng the see of Brutes Albyon, / Nowe called Themse thoroughe al this regyon’ (ll. 76–77). As Maura Nolan has pointed out, the account of the messenger’s journey underlines London’s importance as an international trading hub (Nolan, 2005, 101–3). Lydgate’s narrative, however, goes well beyond compliment, either to London or to the Mayor, hinting at the anxieties the mumming itself seems to mask. The ‘Mumming for the Mercers’ raises the specter of the violence on land that the sea enables, and it attempts to elide it even as it seeks to domesticate that sea by having it bear a letter from Jupiter to London’s mayor. In saying that Jupiter has sent his ‘letters,’ or his rays, throughout Europe, Lydgate reminds his audience that there once Jupiter ‘did lande, / And frome the heven came doune of entent, / To ravisshe shortly in sentement / Fayre Europe…After whame yit al Europe berethe the name’ (ll. 38–42). Lydgate does not suggest that the naming of a landmass is recompense for rape, which by his use of ‘intent’ cannot be casual; nor does he explain the rape of Europa or his reasons for mentioning it. Instead, the messenger continues, encountering a fishing boat whose nets are empty and, later, near England, one whose nets are full. The verses upon these

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5 For a comprehensive study of the Mercers, see Sutton (2005), especially chapter 7, ‘‘Success on All Sides: The Mercers in Fifteenth-Century London,’’ 161–200.

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6 For a scrutiny of the trans-national dialects of medieval merchants, see Hsy (2013).

7 See Bell (1925) and Gaimar (2009).

boats proclaim equal efforts and different results, or the hazards of winning a living from the sea that have presumably been overcome by the rich merchants attending the mumming (Lydgate, 2010, 121). Though Custance follows this route in her passage to Northumbria, Lydgate mentions neither Custance nor Chaucer, even when he describes Helicon and lists laureate poets. However, like the Man of Law, Lydgate claims the sea around Britain for Britain, calling it the ‘see of Brutes Albyon’ (l. 76), now the Thames, the tidal river that melds land and sea and makes of London a mighty port, where the messenger ‘came to lande’ (l. 98) among vessels riding at anchor to visit the ‘noble Mayr / Of this cytee’ (l. 102–3). The uncertain world of Custance dissolves into a celebration of national wealth and well-being in a safe harbor. The multitude of tongues, the dialect of commerce, the gritty realities of buying and selling that underlie the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council and Boccaccio’s account of Alatiel, are resolved at the watery threshold of prosperity, fifteenth-century London.6 Lydgate captures the desire to domesticate the sea connecting kingdoms through both trade and violence that is also apparent in King Horn, Havelok the Dane, and The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye. His pacific ending in mayoral festivity elides danger that the earlier texts of Horn and Havelok control with heroic action and wise diplomacy. King Horn presents a picture of the sea as a highway among regions, linking them for good or ill. The ‘se side’ (l. 35) is the borderland between water and land, but also the borderland between known and unknown. As a well-spoken, courteous, and valiant knight, Horn masters the sea using this borderland as a springboard, creating a network of alliances among those kingdoms to which he has also brought peace, including his own reclaimed kingdom. The picture of the sea as a subway open to all riders that prevails in King Horn is focused by the late thirteenth-century Havelok and the later Libelle, which depict the sea as a tradesman’s highway. Havelok is a tale with regional roots in Lincolnshire, and both the English and Anglo-Norman versions are alive to ‘Englishness’ and to the Danish antecedents of Lincolnshire’s regional culture as they recount a romance of displaced royal children, lost and found identities, and alliances between England and Denmark (Crane, 1986, 13–52; Staley, 2012, 145–51). The English-language poet, however, creates a romance whose details give a mercantile slant to a tale of two thrones reclaimed and united. He points up the class difference between the orphaned Havelok and Grim, who saves him and takes him to England. The Anglo-Norman Grim is a courtier, who turns fish-salter when he is shipwrecked on the English coast.7 The Grim of Havelok the Dane is a fisherman by trade with a sense of economics: he converts his Danish goods into cash, takes to the sea with his family and Havelok and, in England, trades the fish he catches in Grimsby in the larger Lincoln, feeding his family and Havelok until famine strikes, when Havelok becomes a laborer. Upon returning to Denmark with his wife and Grim’s children, Havelok first secures a license to sell his goods in Denmark. When he returns triumphant to England and restores his wife to her

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throne, Grim’s children become royal vassals, the new nobility. The poet describes alliance with a foundation in mercantile exchange. The English poem contains a dream not in the Anglo-Norman story that likewise gestures to the sea as cementing commercial alliances. Havelok dreams that his long arms encompass Denmark and England, bringing his Danish henchmen and their wives to England, where he closes his hand and gives it all to his royal English wife, Goldeborw (ll. 1286–1312). The dream comes true: his Danish allies join him in returning the English throne to its rightful heir; fishermen become noblemen; Danes become English as the sea, which Havelok controls, collapses distance and identity. Both Havelok and the Libelle join commercial venture to royal patronage. David Staines has linked Havelok to Edward I, like Havelok known for his long limbs (Staines, 1976). Edward was also involved with issues regarding foreign merchants in England and English merchants abroad, customs on goods and the maintenance of the sea, all of which related to his needs for money (Prestwich, 1988, 88–100, 277–78, 530). With the increasing importance of merchant wealth came increasing crown interest, and the London first celebrated by William FitzStephens in the twelfth century for its trade and goods became evermore identified with mercantile power, wealth, and exclusivity wrung from crown privileges because of the crown’s constant need for loans throughout the Hundred Years’ War. The Libelle, with its encomia to England’s ‘keeping of the sea’ (l. 53), to nation as a vast emporium, to London’s rags-to-riches mayor Richard Whittington, to the goods of peace and profit and to Henry V, ‘master mariner,’ proclaims the alignment of regal and mercantile power as the driving force of nation. Sebastian Sobecki’s argument that the poem was composed within the private circle of Henry VI, using the authority of Henry V to ‘forge a set of lasting doctrines for his young successor,’ underlines the intertwined values of merchants and kings (Sobecki, 2010). If the poem did emerge from the Privy Seal, it offered England’s merchants a view of themselves as girdling the sea by their ‘besinesse’ (l. 1106), banishing war among ‘brothers’ joined by this highway of profit. Merchants travelled and were described in terms of motion that served the good of all: they ‘goo thorough euery londe to seche thyngis of euery sorte which they disperpule all aboute the worlde’ (de Pisan, 1977, 185). In affirming the place of the merchant in the body politic, Christine de Pisan follows thinkers like John of Salisbury and Ptolemy of Lucca in locating the merchant as serving the common good by providing possessions for necessities and ‘on account of their pleasantness for reviving the spirit’ (Ptolemy of Lucca, 1997, 249). John of Salisbury describes those who aid the prince as the ‘flanks’ of the body politic. In the fourteenth-century Avis aux Roys, the left flank of this body is labeled ‘merchants’ (Nederman, 1990, V.10; Pierpont Morgan MS M. 456. fol. 5r.). Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester in the late fourteenth century, calls the merchants and faithful artisans the left hand of the body politic (Devlin, 1954,

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I.111). But limbs are bounded by a body, and merchants moved on the seas; at least by 1435, water processions on the Thames were in use in Lord Mayor’s pageants (Fairholt, 1754, I.7), figuratively joining London’s new mayor and the good of the city to the goods of the world. John Stow, in fact compared London to a vast wetland, describing all the waters that formerly watered the city as ‘now paved over’ and running through conduits, finally to join the Thames; he also referred to London’s warren of streets leading to the river as ‘conduits for merchandise’ (Stow, 1754, I, 2407). Though paved over, London, through its merchants, blends into a watery world, giving Thomas Heywood his title for the 1633 pageant ‘Londini Emporia or Londons Mercatura.’ By that time, merchant power over land and sea was on its way to collapsing all boundaries. Andrew Marvell’s pilgrims describe the sea between England and the Bermudas as rowable, singing of the riches of the land as their oars beat the time; for these, praising their paradise of satiety and pleasure, there is no distance island to island. By 1653–1654, those ‘God-given’ fruits from the Bermudas were plucked for commercial ventures, a commerce these happy singers in ‘the English boat’ do not mention. They anticipate that their song of praise to an indulgent deity may ‘Echo beyond the Mexic Bay,’ as the world now becomes a sea of islands, market leading on to market. Any worries earlier raised by Alatiel’s joyous merchandising, her matchless performance of the principles of trade, dissolve like drops of water on a boat that cleaves the sea to claim and harvest its islands.

About the Author Lynn Staley is the Harrington and Shirley Drake Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English at Colgate University. Her publications include The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell; Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II; The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Literature (with David Aers); The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. and trans; Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Abulafia, D. 1990. The End of Muslim Sicily. In Muslims Under Latin Rule: 1100–1300, ed. J.M. Powell, 103–133. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Alberigo, J., J.A. Dossetti, P.P. Joannou, C. Leonardi, and P. Prodi, eds. 1973. Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decrete, 3rd ed. Bologna, Italy: Instituo per le Scienze Religiose.

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Avis aux Roys. Pierpont Morgan MS M. 456. Bell, A., ed. 1925. Le Lai d’Haveloc and Gaimar’s Haveloc Episode. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Birk, J.C. 2005. From Borderlands to Borderlines: Narrating the Past of Twelfth-Century Sicily. In Multicultural Europe and Cultural Exchange in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. J.P. Helfers, 9–32. Brepols, Belgium: Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Boccaccio, G. 2013. The Decameron. Trans. W.A. Rebhorn. New York: W.W. Norton. Chaucer, G. 1987. The Man of Law’s Tale. In The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. L.D. Benson. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Crane, S. 1986. Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman Middle English Literature. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. de Pisan, C. 1977. The Middle English Translation of Christine de Pisan’s ‘Livre du corps de policie’, ed. D. Bornstein. Heidelberg, Germany: Winter. Devlin, S.M.A., ed. 1954. The Sermons of Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester, 1373– 1389, 2 vols. London: Royal Historical Society. Fairholt, F.W. 1754. Lord Mayor’s Pageants, 2 vols. London: Percy Society. Gaimar, G. 2009. Estoire des Engleis. Geffrei Gaimar, ed. and trans. I. Short. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Goldie, M.B. 2015. An Early English Rutter: The Sea and Spatial Hermeneutics in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. Speculum 90: 701–727. Hanning, R.W. 2000. Custance and Ciappelletto in the Middle of it All: Problems of Mediation in the Man of Law’s Tale and Decameron 1.1. In The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, 177–211, ed. L.M. Koff and B.D. Schildgen. Plainsboro, NJ: Associated University Presses. Herzman, R.B., G. Drake, and E. Salisbury, eds. 1999. Four Romances of England. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications. Hsy, J. 2013. Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilinualism, and Medieval Literature. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Kinoshita, S. and J. Jacobs. 2007. Ports of Call: Boccaccio’s Alatiel in the Medieval Mediterranean. JMEMS 37: 163–195. Lydgate, J. 2010. Mumming for the Mercers of London. In Mummings and Entertainments, ed. C. Sponsler. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications. Marvell, A. 2003. The Poems of Andrew Marvell. Ed. N. Smith. New York: Pearson Longman. Nederman, C.J. 1990. John of Salisbury. Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nolan, M. 2005. John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prestwich, M. 1988. Edward I. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ptolemy of Lucca. 1997. On the Governance of Rulers. De Regimine Principium. Ptolemy of Lucca with portions attributed to Thomas Aquinas, trans. J.M. Blythe. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rothwell, H. 1975. English Historical Documents, 1189–1327. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Sobecki, S. 2010. Bureaucratic Verse: William Lyndwood, the Privy Seal, and the Form of The Libelle of Englysche Polycye. New Medieval Literatures 12: 251–288. Staines, D. 1976. Havelok the Dane: A Thirteenth-Century Handbook for Princes. Speculum 51: 602–623. Staley, L. 2012. The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Stanbury, S. 2010. The Man of Law’s Tale and Rome. Exemplaria 22: 119–137. Stow, J. 1754. A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, and the Borough of Southwark. London. Sutton, A.F. 2005. The Mercery of London: Trade, Goods and People, 1130–1578. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Trevet, N. 2005. Les Cronicles, ed. and trans. R.M. Correale. In Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales, 2 vols., 2:296–329, ed. R.M. Correale and M. Hamel. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: D.S. Brewer. Wetherbee, W. 1989. Constance and the World in Chaucer and Gower. In John Gower: Recent Readings, ed. R.F. Yeager, 65–94. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications. Wetherbee, W. 2004. The Man of Law’s Tale. The Canterbury Tales. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Article

The Bermuda assemblage: Toward a posthuman globalization

Steve Mentz Department of English, St. John’s University, Queens, NY, USA.

Abstract Taking Bermuda as an exemplary case for European expansion into the Atlantic rim, this essay re-narrates the discovery, mapping, and settlement of that island with attention to nonhuman as well as human forces. Rather than repeating or inverting simplistic, monocausal narratives about triumphant discoverers or evil colonizers, this multipolar and multiagent version of premodern history reframes the history of islands. The resulting narrative combines nonhuman forces such as the Gulf Stream and a summer hurricane in 1609 with the human histories of the Jamestown and Bermuda colonies. It juxtaposes mercantile expansion in the Anglophone Atlantic Rim with chance encounters with coral, ambergris, hogs, and other nonhuman actants in or around Bermuda. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7, 551–564. doi:10.1057/s41280-016-0026-y

The global island-hopping expansion that accelerated out of Western Europe from the medieval period through the seventeenth century needs to be reimagined in posthuman terms. Taking as my subject the peculiar case of Bermuda, perhaps the most isolated of English-settled Atlantic islands in the early modern period, this rearticulation of the Age of Discovery de-emphasizes the power of human discoverers to emphasize the nonhuman oceanic networks that structured European entry into non-European waters. Bermuda’s story humbles human narratives of colonial expansion. Familiar figures such as Spanish, French, and English sailors, colonists, pirates, poets, and ideological champions of transatlantic settlement recede to the background, with Ó 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

Vol. 7, 4, 551–564

Chapter 7 was originally published as Mentz, S. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7: 551564. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-016-0026-y.

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1 I adapt the term ‘actant’ from Latour (2005, 54).

2 For a broader study, see Mentz (2015).

nonhuman actants such as rock and coral peeking out above the surf.1 The resulting ‘Bermuda assemblage’ retells the story of English colonization as the product of multiple alliances between human and nonhuman forces. Posthuman globalization reframes the major narratives of the early history of European expansion. The narrative of Bermuda’s settlement follows well-known generic patterns, and in fact the ancient masterplot of shipwreck, disorientation, and deliverance could be considered a co-author of this history.2 In its dominant literary form, the Virgilian epic of shipwreck imperialism takes Aeneas from North African surf to the founding of Rome; this narrative template provided the accepted script for Europeans entering the New World. But rather than reiterating the fictional trajectory of the translatio imperii, my analysis will unpack the narrative influences of non-narrating bodies. Giving priority to a series of objects that comprise the Bermuda assemblage instead of more familiar human factors reveals the confined structures through which sailors brought European culture across the vast global ocean. The Bermuda colony was settled by English men and women, as well as Africans, Native Americans, and others, but its history is not only a human history. My posthuman portrait of Bermuda focuses on 13 nonhuman agents assembled in roughly chronological order that together estrange traditional human histories of colonial settlement. These items also serve to reframe island encounters as ecological harbingers. As Grove has shown, the most clearly visible examples of environmental devastation in the early historical record appear in island stories, starting in the Canaries and Cape Verde Islands and eventually traveling across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific basins (Grove, 1995). The late medieval narrative Le Canarien makes a romance epic out of the settlement of the Canaries by Norman colonists and provides a chivalric template that would inform the expansionary zeal which undergirds the settlement of Bermuda (see Wallace, 2004). As Sobecki has shown, voyage narratives were in no way new to post-1492 Europe (Sobecki, 2015). Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and other voyagers acted out established medieval scripts for maritime expansion. The imperialist project, however, changed oceanic space by subjecting islands to political control in a European manner. In the influential formulation of the Fiji-born anthropologist and theorist Epeli Hau’ofa, the precontact geography of ‘our sea of islands’ placed human activity in an oceanic context that resisted the ‘imaginary lines across the sea’ that European explorers drew as part of their colonial project (Hau’ofa, 2008, 31). The work of medieval and early modern historical and cultural scholarship in relation to oceanic expansion, however, has largely focused on human factors. My reading of Bermuda in its early colonial history aims to emphasize the shaping force of nonhumans in early globalization. In re-interpreting Bermuda, I argue for a posthuman turn in premodern global and maritime studies.

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Dehumanizing the colonial experience trims the sails of both old-fashioned triumphalist narratives and more recent anti-imperialist critiques. It also asks for a historical view that obviates the supposed divide between the medieval and early modern periods. The human and nonhuman networks through which the ecologies of the Americas, Europe, and Africa reintegrated themselves over the course of the late medieval and early modern periods – an event that the ecologist Crosby has called ‘one of the most important aspects of the history of life on this planet since the retreat of the continental glaciers’ (Crosby, 2003, 3) – create a lens through which the ocean-story of cultural disorientation can be reseen. The consequences of what I have elsewhere called ‘wet globalization’ (Mentz, 2015, 1–24) include unthinkable human suffering, in particular among Native American and transplanted African populations. My hope in this essay’s exploration of nonhuman agency is to unpack the alien pressure of the term ‘wet.’ European, African, and American mariners encountered the alien environment of the oceanic world through an unsettling mixture of profound familiarity and fundamental incompatibility. Nearly all human cultures are maritime cultures, though the so-called ‘oceanic turn’ in European history shows itself most clearly in Atlantic-facing communities, as Cunliffe has demonstrated (Cunliffe, 2001). But no humans can live long on the sea, and all maritime cultures evince a healthy fear of the ocean. In what follows, the story of the English settlement on Bermuda reorients itself around 13 human and nonhuman actants. Some of these forces are material and others ideological, some local and others global, but all exert a shaping pressure on the second-oldest of England’s American colonies. The nonhuman additions to the story, I hope, will provide material turnings through which we can reimagine old and new narratives of maritime and colonial history. The progressive encounter of European cultures with the world ocean and its islands emerges as the central collective narrative of premodern history.

The Gulf Stream The single most important geophysical feature affecting Bermuda’s history is not part of the island chain at all, but instead the Gulf Stream ocean current that runs just north of them. This ‘narrow, fast, and deep’ current comprises part of the western boundary of the North Atlantic Gyre, whose clockwise-rotating system of prevailing winds and ocean currents fundamentally shaped traffic between Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the Age of Sail (Ulanski, 2008). In addition to being a significant contributor to the relatively mild climate of northern Europe, the Gulf Stream and the other currents in the Gyre structured the standard routes of the Spanish flota to and from the New World in the sixteenth century and beyond.3 As Quinn has noted, the return route from the Americas for most Europe-bound ships in the sixteenth century followed the

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3 On the controversial question of the Gulf Stream’s warming of Europe, see Ulanski (2008, 31, 32).

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Gulf Stream north out of the Caribbean before heading east with the current somewhere just past Bermuda (Quinn, 1988). Ships heading north along the North American coast would often encounter headwinds, and if they turned east too soon during hurricane season, Bermuda’s reefs lurked. Quinn notes that during the sixteenth century, wrecks on the island are ‘estimated cautiously as over 30 before 1600’ (Quinn, 1988, 3). The location of this island in relation to the North Atlantic Gyre brought its ships and shipwrecks. The English settlers who unexpectedly arrived on Bermuda in 1609 did not directly ride this current to the island, since they were sailing west from England bound for Jamestown when they wrecked, but the island’s interaction with the larger Atlantic system was controlled by the Gyre and the Gulf Stream.

Hogs During the first century of Atlantic exploration and settlement by Europeans, between the initial sighting of Bermuda by a Spanish ship captained by Juan Bermudez in 1503 and permanent English settlement of the island after 1612, a population of feral hogs appears to have grown up on the island. These hogs, I submit, were key actors in making Bermuda habitable for English settlement. Stranding hogs on islands on which ships might subsequently become shipwrecked was standard practice for Spanish sailors in the sixteenth-century Atlantic world. The hog populations were designed to provide food for potential future castaways. It is not clear when hogs were landed on Bermuda; the Spanish historian Gonzalo Ferdinandez d’Oviedo y Valdez noted in 1515 that he wanted to land on the islands ‘to leave in the island certain hogs for increase’ but was prevented by ‘contrary winds.’ (quoted in Wilkerson, 1933, 23). Feral hogs were powerful ecological invaders, whose rapid population growth provided food for later European castaways while terraforming fragile island ecosystems. Even before the first permanent English settlement started in 1612, European contact had already released nonhuman agents that were changing Bermuda.

‘No Island is an Island’: Peter Martyr’s 1511 Map The first published image of Bermuda in Europe appears in a map of the Caribbean, published by Peter Martyr and printed in Seville in 1511. ‘La Bermuda’ appears in a corner of the map, far from larger islands such as Hispaniola and Cuba, and even more distant from the American mainland. Perhaps coincidentally, the orientation of the map forces readers who are looking at the names of better-known islands to encounter the words ‘La Bermuda’ upside down. The marginal place of this island in the Caribbeancentered arc of European colonial interest seems visually clear in this map. One

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reason the English could plant a colony on Bermuda as late as 1612 is that no previous European power had bothered to do so, though some evidence of a failed Spanish settlement in the mid-sixteenth-century has been found. In the apt phrase of historian Jarvis (Jarvis, 2010, 1), Bermuda surveyed the North Atlantic like the view from the ‘deck of a ship.’ It was the most oceanic and least connected of the Atlantic islands colonized by early modern Europeans.4 From this vantage point, oceanic circulation would become the central feature of Bermuda’s place in European transatlantic colonization. Bermuda’s marginal history suggests a possible inversion of John Donne’s famous phrase that ‘no man is an island.’ Bermuda is maximally island-like, distant from other settlements and, by the mid-seventeenth century, relatively poor, despite a brief tobacco boom in the 1620s. Even so, Bermuda was never as isolated as Donne’s famous sermon implies that islands are. The poet’s wellknown phrase – ‘every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main’ – describes human coexistence as a landed, continental phenomenon, in which each individual’s participation in a divine whole obviates separation. But the sailor in the poet – Donne sailed on two voyages with Drake against the Spanish between Europe and the Azores – perhaps recognized an oceanic counter meaning in which even isolated islands such as Bermuda are not really islands in the sense of being alone in the ocean. As Hau’ofa’s notion of ‘our sea of islands’ implies, oceanic islands should be considered as connected spaces, especially in pre-contact societies (Bermuda, however, unlike the Pacific islands about which Hau’ofa writes, appears to have been uninhabited before the arrival of Europeans). The massive nonhuman system of currents and winds, populated in the sixteenth century by sailing ships, structured a network of connections inside which the human and nonhuman populations of Europe, Africa, and the Americas interacted.

4 See Mentz (2015, 51–74).

Utopia One of the most influential islands in early modern European politics and culture never existed. Thomas More coined the word Utopia in 1516 to describe an imaginary island, invoking a Greek etymology of impossibility – ou + topia = ‘no place’ – that also puns on a different Greek compound signifying desire, eu + topia = ‘happy or fortunate place’ (More, 2002, 11). As Gillis observes in his study Islands of the Mind, the settlement of Atlantic islands entailed imaginative as well as geophysical labors. Island settlements were imagined as utopian experiments, in particular after More’s fiction provided a blueprint (Gillis, 2004). Islomania – the obsessive love of islands – was a premodern as well as Romantic phenomenon.5 The association of islands with wondrous and idealized spaces was not new to the sixteenth century; Pinet has explored the medieval turn to islands as sites of cultural fantasy, from the North

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5 See Gillis (2004) and Durrell (1960).

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Sea locations of Irish monasteries to the circulation of isolarii or island-books to, eventually, Sancho Panza’s ‘island’ government in part two of Don Quixote (Pinet, 2011). Expansion into the Atlantic rim, like expansion in the island chains of the Indian and Pacific basins, led to historical experiences that would shape and be shaped by powerful utopian fictions of insularity.

A n At l a n t i c H u r r i c a n e : J u ly 1 6 0 9

6 See Mentz (2015, 166–71).

Hurricanes are American storms. They very rarely reach even the Irish and British island outposts off the European continent.6 Created inside the North Atlantic Gyre, these storms usually form off the west coast of Africa. They gain force as they circulate westward into the warm waters of the Caribbean before turning either north toward the Gulf of Mexico or northeast up the North American coastline. Eventually the storms turn out to sea, where they usually weaken before they can circulate all the way back east to the Azores, the British isles, or the European continent. As Hulme has observed, these storms represented a radically new weather pattern for European explorers in the early modern period; the integration of the native Caribbean word ‘hurricane’ into Spanish, French, and English epitomizes the arrival of New Word meanings into Old World systems (Hulme, 1986, 93). The storm that shaped Bermuda’s colonial history struck in July 1609. It wrecked the Sea-Venture, flagship of a Virginia Company fleet bound from Plymouth to Jamestown. While other vessels in the fleet continued on to Virginia, the Sea-Venture was driven onto the reefs surrounding Bermuda. All 150 passengers survived the wreck, including John Rolfe and his pregnant wife, who would give birth to a daughter, named ‘Bermuda,’ during the castaways’ nine-month sojourn on the island. These castaways represented the first semipermanent English settlers on the island. They were followed by a permanent colony in 1612. The history of early modern Bermuda, Virginia, and the English presence in the Atlantic owes much to the meteorological happenstance of this storm.

Coral Coral stopped the Sea-Venture’s transatlantic voyage. Coral reefs, now bleaching in the global ocean’s warming temperatures, thrive mainly in tropical waters. Bermuda’s reefs are northern outliers that grow in waters warmed by the Gulf Stream. Early modern European sailors would have encountered coral primarily in the Caribbean or in Southeast Asia, though reefs also exist in midAtlantic islands such as the Azores and the Canaries. Coral surrounds Bermuda like a hidden mouth, the teeth of which scraped the bottoms of dozens of

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European ships during the sixteenth century and against which the Sea-Venture came to rest. An imagined coral-free history of Bermuda would lack many of the features that shaped the colony’s history: no shipwrecks, no Spanish hogs, perhaps no castaways to prime the island for English settlement.

The Starving Time The survivors of the Sea-Venture wreck spent the fall of 1609 and winter of 1610 on the island, eating hogs stranded by Spanish privateers and assorted fruits and seafood available for harvest. During that winter, the English colony at Jamestown, toward which the Sea-Venture had been bound, starved. Though Virginia was the fleet’s goal, Bermuda proved an easier place to thrive. The historian Virginia Bernhard, in her parallel study of the Virginia and Bermuda settlements, emphasizes the lack of competing native populations and the mild climate of the island as contributing to the easier time the first settlers had on the island as compared to the mainland (Bernhard, 2012). Through the mid-1620s, Bermuda’s good fortune continued, starting with an ambergris windfall and the colony’s early tobacco crop’s well-timed arrival on a hungry English market.7 As Jarvis notes, ‘Bermuda’s healthy environment and lack of a native population were perhaps most critical to its success,’ though he also notes the arrival even before 1619 of slave labor, probably including African veterans of the Spanish tobacco trade in the Angolan coast (Jarvis, 2010, 29–33). Visions of the paradisiacal ‘Summer Isles,’ the name under which the fledgling Bermuda colony promoted itself to potential settlers in the early seventeenth century, tended to exaggerate the pleasant conditions on the island.

Devils When the English first arrived in Bermuda, the storm-tossed island was thought to be the home of devils. Even Shakespeare, who adapted descriptions of the storm that wrecked the Sea-Venture in The Tempest (1611), seems to have thought so. From the decks of a burning ship in the play’s second scene, Prince Ferdinand cries, ‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here’ (Shakespeare, 2011, 186). Even though Shakespeare’s magic isle positions itself somewhat askew of geographic Bermuda, the long-circulated notion that this stormy place constituted an ‘Isle of Devils’ appears in his play and in numerous early accounts of the island, including the first edition of Sylvester Jourdain’s A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Isle of Devils (Jourdain, 1610). In the aftermath of the Virginia Company propaganda promoting the English settlement of Bermuda, Jourdain’s history would be retitled when it was republished in 1613, without the author’s name, as A Plain Description of the Bermudas, now called

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7 The expansion of tobacco production during the late 1620s in Virginia led that market to bust by 1630, after which Bermuda never quite lived up to its early promise.

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the Summer Isles (Wright, 2013). The shift from devils to summer defines Bermuda’s changing meanings in early seventeenth-century England. The crucial letter, both in Jourdain’s first title and in Shakespeare’s line, is the ‘s’ in devils; the overflowing plurality of stormy devils threatens both Shakespeare’s prince and English mariners alike. The purpose of the Somers Isles Company’s propaganda was to expel the devils from these islands and make them safe for English colonization. At least in print, they did so for a while.

The Deliverance and the Patience These two vessels sailed from Bermuda to Virginia in May 1610, carrying nearly all of the survivors of the Sea-Venture wreck (The only exceptions were three castaways, who I discuss in relation to ambergris in the next entry). In the 10 months after the July 1609 wreck, two smaller ships were built out of Bermuda cedar and salvaged rigging from the wreck. Their sea-worthiness testifies to the technical skills of the mariners and artisans who were sailing for Virginia with the Company fleet. It would become a point of Virginia Company propaganda that the castaways from Bermuda saved Jamestown; Richard Rich’s twenty-two stanza verse pamphlet Newes from Virginia trumpeted the arrival of the castaways’ two ships to the mainland as ‘The Lost Flock Triumphant’ (Rich, 1610). While the starving mainland colony was arguably saved also by the nearsimultaneous arrival of supplies from England, the colonists who were shipwrecked on Bermuda certainly owed their escape from isolation to these two boats. The boats’ physical make-up combined local and salvaged elements; castaway William Strachey described the Deliverance, the first-built of the two: ‘The most part of her timber was cedar,’ but ‘her beams were all oak of our ruined ship’ (quoted in Woodward, 2009, 93). The ships that carried the castaways to Virginia brought together Old World technology to create an OldNew hybrid structure.

Ambergris It may be an exaggeration to say that the English settlement on Bermuda thrived in its early years because of ambergris, a byproduct of the digestion of sperm whales, but the statement is not entirely false. This rare waxy by-product, generally found on beaches, was highly valued for its use in manufacturing perfume. In July 1612, after the Virginia Company had expanded its charter to include Bermuda, the first group of settlers arrived on the island under the command of Governor Richard Moore. As had been the case in the settlement of Jamestown, the Company’s ships, including the Plough, arrived with unclear plans to support the colonists arriving from England and grand illusions about

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the wealth of the New World. The 50–60 settlers who made landfall on Bermuda in 1612 included ‘diverse gentlemen and men of fashion’ as well as a variety of artisans with more practical skills (Jarvis, 2010, 17–19). On the island, they encountered three veterans of the 1609 Sea-Venture wreck, the socalled ‘Three Kings of Bermuda,’ who had mutinied against the rule of Sir Thomas Gates and been marooned there when Gates’s party sailed for Jamestown on the Deliverance and Patience in 1610. These three mutineers, in addition to raising crops, harvesting shellfish and hunting the feral hogs that had been left on the island by Spanish ships, had discovered a massive lump of ambergris, worth as much as £12,000. This windfall became the property of the cash-starved Virginia Company, the Bermuda chapters of which would later separate into the Somers Isles Company, though at least one of the three marooned sailors received land on Bermuda in compensation. The so-called ‘ambergris affair’ motivated some complex in-fighting among Governor Moore, Captain Robert Davis of the Plough, and members of Moore’s Council, including Edwin Kendell, a cousin of Sir Edwin Sandys and prominent sharer in the Virginia Company. Of the three men who had remained on Bermuda from 1609 and who had discovered the ambergris, Edward Chard appears to have been, in Moore’s words, ‘the most masterful spirit’ and the primary negotiator with the Company (Wilkinson, 1933, 68). The wealth that the ambergris provided when sold in London supported the Bermuda colony in its vulnerable early days. Moore himself considered that the ambergris windfall was ‘the only loadstone to draw from England still more supplies’ to support the colony (Wilkinson, 1933, 71–73). In the medium term, Bermuda would survive and prosper because of its mild climate and plentiful seafood, and also because it was the first English colony to produce commercial tobacco in 1614 (Jarvis, 2010, 18). (The source of the tobacco remains unclear, as I discuss below, but it is likely to be the same Spanish plants or seeds with which John Rolfe was then experimenting in Virginia.) Moore kept careful control of the ambergris, which he sent back to England piece by piece, husbanding the fledgling settlement. It was the ambergris itself, discovered by three marooned sailors on the island between 1610 and 1612, that enabled Bermuda to thrive.

Quo Fata Ferunt The motto of the Somers Isles Company transformed a humanist reading of Virgil into a colonialist program. The motto adapts Aeneid 5.709, in which Aeneas is advised to voyage ‘where the fates draw us in their ebb and flow’ [‘quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur’] (Virgil, 1999, 520). This Latin tag imagined the founding of the Bermuda colony as part of a providential humanist narrative that transformed wandering exile into settlement and empire. This classical ‘westing’ model was substantially Christianized from the Middle Ages

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to the early modern period. In Renaissance emblem culture especially, it epitomized the central purpose of the relentless expansionary narrative of progress and divine favor.

Richard Norwood’s 1616 Map My posthuman history has attempted to avoid placing humans at the center of Bermuda’s story, but in this case I will use Richard Norwood’s name to represent his 1616 map of the island, which he made after conducting a survey in 1615–1616. As D. K. Smith has observed, Norwood’s map, which parcels out the island into geometrically regular sections, each with an English name attached to it, serves as a striking visual ‘act of settlement’ that would make this exotic island English (Smith, 2008, 157–188). The project of cartographic settlement that Smith describes would extend to literary and cultural domestication of Bermuda by English poets such as Edmund Waller and Andrew Marvell in the seventeenth century. But Norwood’s map also points to the continuing need for technical skills, tools, and practices to make sense of this oceanic island. Norwood, whose other books included A Seaman’s Practice (1637) and Trigonometrie, or the Doctrine of Triangles (1631), was an author and mathematical teacher who also served as schoolmaster on Bermuda from 1638–1649 and again from 1658–1661 (Bendall, 2004). His technical expertise, both mathematical and nautical, provided tools for the young colony to make use of its oceanic position. After ambergris and tobacco were exhausted, Bermuda would turn to maritime trade. Figures like Norwood would be essential to the colony’s future.

To b a c c o It is not clear exactly where the first tobacco grown in Bermuda came from. It seems likely that the ultimate source of the seeds was Spanish and the most likely transmitter was John Rolfe, who spent 10 months on Bermuda with the SeaVenture’s castaways in 1609–1610. Rolfe would go on to cultivate tobacco in Virginia. In the early years of the Bermuda colony, from 1612 through the mid 1620s, tobacco replaced the ambergris windfall as a source of cash for the settlement. Fortuitous market timing and a few good harvests in the early 1620s supported a brief boom in Somers Isles Company finances. Tobacco was not a long-term source of economic support for the colony; the market turned down in the 1630s, in part because of increased competition from Virginia, and Bermuda tobacco proved to be of inferior quality to that from the mainland. In some ways, tobacco worked like a slow-motion repetition of the ambergris find: the crop propped the settlement up for several years but did not provide long-term

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footing. The island’s ability to produce a tobacco crop before 1620 also strongly implies the presence of Africans with experience in the Angolan tobacco trade, which suggests that Bermuda, like Virginia, played an early part in integrating the British Atlantic into the African slave trade. Over time, the relatively poor soil of the island and its distance from the mainland shifted the economic basis of the settlement away from slave agriculture toward maritime trade. As Jarvis notes, ‘the colony came to resemble Massachusetts more than Virginia’ by the late seventeenth century (Jarvis, 2010, 49). This isolated outpost in the middle of the Atlantic remains a British holding today, and it still leverages its geographic position and mild climate, though now more for tourism and banking than tobacco, ambergris, and trade.

Three Conclusions The selection of 13 nonhuman and human actants in the early modern history of Bermuda has been on some level arbitrary. The list could proliferate, perhaps infinitely. As a large-ish but not unimaginable prime number with a poetic pedigree,8 the number 13 signals my argument that a posthuman history must embrace multiplicity, even at the risk of making our historical narratives messy. It is possible to gather the 13 actants I have discussed into groups. One set emerges through the collaboration of nonhuman resources with skilled human labor (ships, maps, tobacco). Another emphasizes human imaginative invention (Utopia, devils, a Virgilian motto). Still others are essentially geographic facts (coral, the Gulf Stream). A last group emerges through the considerable power of random chance (a particular hurricane at a particular time and place). Most histories of premodern colonialism include some or indeed most of these elements as background to the more familiar stories of human actors, whether triumphant colonists or blackhearted imperialists. In bringing the background forward and asking human actors to retire into the shadows, a posthuman ecological history of maritime expansion enables new narratives and new understandings. In brief, I will sketch three possible conclusions that can emerge from this kind of posthuman analysis.

Anti-ideological Globalization A posthuman reading of early modern transatlantic expansion supports neither the European triumphalism that once dominated the field nor the antiimperialist critique that epitomizes contemporary attitudes toward colonialism. Retelling this story to emphasize nonhuman actants reduces the centrality of both heroes and villains. Turning away from familiar melodramatic stories of exploration and tragic tales of destruction entails some loss of emotional force.

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8 See Stevens (1972, 20–22).

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It is hard to feel as deeply about ocean currents as we do about Sir Francis Drake, Native Americans being slaughtered, or Africans enslaved. But the payoff for refusing familiar stories is being able to reframe the ideological debates that such stories raise. After decades or indeed centuries of debate about the legacies of early globalization, a new perspective can be useful. Geography may not quite be destiny, but in today’s era of environmental uncertainty, a history that embraces nonhuman ecological systems seems essential. Limiting the ideological force of historical narratives provides space for nonhuman elements to shape our understanding of historical change.

Humans as Objects and Histories of Slavery The largest risk of a posthuman approach is that it may muffle our moral perspective on the past. In the case of the greatest crime of early modern history, the Atlantic slave trade, emphasizing the nonhuman factors in Bermuda’s history might enable a partial reimagining of tragic facts. Bermuda was home to some of the earliest transported African slaves of any English colony. The shifting presence of slave labor and the mixing of populations on the isolated island contribute to Bermuda’s being a particularly instructive case to evaluate the role of slavery in New World societies. To be thoroughly posthuman requires that we consider African slaves and the tobacco plants they cultivated as equally agents of historical change. This perspective jars our moral senses, but it may also enable a new line of response to American slaveholding societies. While the slaveholders’ basic assumption was that only some humans were objects, and the abolitionists’ response that no humans could possibly be objects, a theoretical commitment to treating all humans and nonhumans as objects and subjects might re-open the slave economy’s representation of human-nonhuman relations. Marxist historians argue that slave labor represents the secret desire of capitalism, but a posthuman ecological understanding of slavery might extend the object-nature of slave laborer into a general theory of the agency of objects. If all objects are ontologically equal, from hurricanes to the Virginia Company to each transported African slave to the Gulf Stream, the slave trade may take its place inside a complex human and nonhuman network of forces and actants. Slavery remains Atlantic modernity’s original sin, but slavery also challenges the boundaries of human and nonhuman identities.

Dynamism and Change in Global Systems Nonhuman actants lack coherent biographies, motivations, and other elements that make narratives matter to human readers. It is hard to write the history of coral or hurricanes without either turning it into a story about how these objects

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interact with humans, as in Daniel Defoe’s history of the Great Storm of 1703 (Defoe, 1704), or anthropomorphizing them, as in the subtitle of Iain McCalman’s recent study The Reef: A Passionate History (McCalman, 2015). Nonhuman histories, however, enable us to reconsider the role of change in global history, including the random changes that contribute to a hurricane forming on one day rather than another. Winds, storms, and ocean currents tend to follow predictable patterns, and given the structure of the North Atlantic system, it was likely that shipwreck would precede settlement on Bermuda as trans-Atlantic traffic increased during the early modern period. That this settlement was English, rather than Spanish or French, however, owes itself to a series of coincidences and in particular to one mid-summer storm in 1609. It is not often a part of human nature, and even less often a part of colonial propaganda, to treat such occurrences as arbitrary. But random forces and nonhuman actants control more of our history than we like to admit.

About the Author Steve Mentz is Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City. He is the author of three books: Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 (2015), At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009), and Romance for Sale in Early Modern England (2006). He has also published many articles on ecocriticism, early modern English literature, maritime culture, Shakespeare, and other matters. He blogs at The Bookfish (www.stevementz. com) (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Bendall, S. 2004. Norwood, Richard (1590–1675), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/ 20365. Bernhard, V. 2012. A Tale of Two Colonies: What Really Happened in Virginia and Bermuda. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Crosby, A.W. 2003. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 30th anniversary ed. New York: Praeger. Cunliffe, B. 2001. Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000 BC–AD 1500. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Defoe, D. 1704. The Storm. London. Durrell, L. 1960. Reflections of a Marine Venus. New York: Penguin. Gillis, J. 2004. Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Grove, R.H. 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hau’ofa, E. 2008. Our Sea of Islands. In We Are the Ocean: Selected Works, 27–40. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Hulme, P. 1986. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1787. New York: Methuen. Jarvis, M.J. 2010. In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Jourdain, S. 1610. A Discovery of the Bermudas. London. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005. McCalman, I. 2015. The Reef: A Passionate History. New York: FSG. Mentz, S. 2015. Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. More, T. 2002. Utopia. Ed. G.M. Logan and R.M. Adams. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pinet, S. 2011. Archipelagoes: Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Quinn, D.B. 1988. Bermuda in the Age of Exploration and Early Settlement. Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Colloquia. Rich, R. 1610. Newes from Virginia. London: Da Capo Press. Shakespeare, W. 2011. The Tempest, eds. V.M. Vaughan and A. Vaughan. London: Arden. Sobecki, S. 2015. New World Discovery. In Oxford Handbooks Online: Literature, Literary Studies, 1500–1700. Groningen: University of Groningen. Smith, D.K. 2008. The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Stevens, W. 1972. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. In The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, ed. H. Stevens, 20–22. New York: Vintage. Ulanski, S. 2008. The Gulf Stream: Tiny Plankton, Giant Bluefish, and the Amazing Story of the Powerful River in the Atlantic. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Virgil. 1999. Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, ed. H.R. Fairclough, trans. G. P. Goold, rev. Cambridge, MA: Loeb-Harvard University Press. Wallace, D. 2004. Premodern Places, Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Wilkinson, H. 1933. The Adventurers of Bermuda. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Woodward, H. 2009. A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest.’ New York: Viking. Wright, L.B. ed. 2013. A Voyage to Virginia in 1609: Strachey’s ‘True Reportory’ and Jourdain’s Discovery of the Bermudas, 2nd edn. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.

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Peregrine Horden Department of History, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, UK.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7, 565–571. doi:10.1057/s41280-016-0024-0

I never thought I might be called upon to Mediterraneanize the British Isles. Yet that is what these concluding reflections on connectivity must in a sense amount to. It may not be possible to respond fully to Jonathan Hsy’s call for a ‘peregrine’ mode of reading and achieve any of those ‘moments of wondrous estrangement from conventional disciplinary frameworks’ that ideally accompanies it (Hsy, 2013, cited by Smith). What I can do, because some of the preceding essays deploy the concept, is set out my understanding of ‘connectivity,’ show how Nicholas Purcell and I came to it in our collaboration, and suggest some ways in which it could be illuminating when applied to the British Isles. ‘Routes et villes, villes et routes.’ That was Lucien Febvre’s response to reading Braudel’s chapter on the Mediterranean as a human unit, and Braudel returned the compliment by making those words his chapter title. ‘The Mediterranean,’ Braudel wrote, ‘has no unity but that created by the movements of men. [… T]he whole Mediterranean consists of movement in space’ (Braudel, 1972, 276–277). That was movement above all along fairly well-defined routes linking ports, towns, and cities – points and lines on the map. Within Mediterranean studies, ‘connectivity’ has become a way of characterizing the ease of communications between one place and another in a much broader sense. As a term of art in the field, it seems to have been given currency

 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

Vol. 7, 4, 565–571

Chapter 8 was originally published as Horden, P. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7: 565571. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-016-0024-0.

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by Purcell and myself in The Corrupting Sea (Horden and Purcell, 2000). Some reviewers of that book pointed to the political overtones that the word had gained during the 1990s, when the Corrupting Sea was being written, and a range of other meanings have since been adduced, not least in information technology and neuroscience. Yet, so far as either of us can recall, we borrowed the term from locational analysis in human geography, inspired by the way it had already been taken up by some archaeologists. Ultimately the term originated, around 1960, in mathematical graph theory. Its initial geographical application was apparently to the analysis of regional road networks, with the measure of connectivity being the ratio between the number of edges (lines) and the number of vertices (nodes) in the network. Thus, any space that can be modelled by one line joining two nodes is – trivially – connective. The degree zero of connectivity would be an utter singularity. From that definition, it is only a short step to Febvre’s and Braudel’s ‘routes et villes.’ Purcell and I used connectivity, however, in a way that involved much more than ‘joining up the dots,’ and we tended to treat it as shorthand for quite intense connectivity, well above that absolute zero. Connectivity became a crucial ingredient in our view of the Mediterranean environment and the way humanity has interacted with it. As we saw it, the Mediterranean has been overall a zone of intense topographical fragmentation, overlaid by a kaleidoscope of human ‘microecologies,’ which are in turn densely interconnected. Connectivity describes the way micro-regions cohere, both internally and one with another. Throughout much of Mediterranean history, this coherence has been more than a matter of fixed routes, whether these reflect planners’ pointed defiance of nature (as with Roman roads) or are prompted by geography or property rights. Indeed, the point of bringing a then relatively unusual term into the discussion of the Mediterranean past was, in the first place, to get away from the idea that communications are, like graph theory, only a matter of nodes and straight lines, or that they are, in some deterministic way, the product of geography or climate. Stable routes there of course have been, over water and land. Roads, tracks, mountain paths, shipping lanes, and river channels should, however, at least according to The Corrupting Sea, be envisaged as particular instances of a much broader phenomenon – the potentially all-round, sometimes nearly frictionless, communication between Mediterranean micro-regions. Sea travel has not, in pre-modern times, been as constrained by wind, current and season as has often been made out – nor as uniformly fearful and hazardous. There was much confident hors piste sailing – and in winter too. Nor must we overstate the difficulties of transport over land, even over mountain ranges in severe weather. One advantage of thinking in terms of connectivity may be to help us avoid the unthinking privileging of certain forms or patterns of communication. By both land and sea, the determining capacity of the environment was weak. In many cases, one could not predict the choice of lines or corridors of communication simply by studying a physical map.

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Mediterranean micro-regions ‘connect’ in many kinds of ways. They connect in the movements of peoples and goods and information – the last two, apart from the occasional use of carrier pigeons as message bearers, epiphenomenal to the first. Some of these movements will of course have involved well-trodden tracks and their nautical equivalents. Others will have been more variable; hence the poor predictive power of maps. Yet micro-ecologies connect by mutual visibility and audibility as well. So we must reckon with lines of sight and lines of sound as well as shifting terrestrial or maritime networks. Connectivities may thus be genuinely all-round. They may also be far-reaching. Thanks to seaborne contacts – not to be emphasised unduly but still of course vital to Mediterranean peoples – a given micro-region may connect more intensely to another a hundred miles away than to its geographical neighbour. The high levels of connectivity characteristic of much of the region’s history help define the Mediterranean. If we could only plot all the connections, we would find that the Mediterranean region possesses unity and distinctiveness, partly in virtue of being an area of net introversion. That is, connectivity between micro-regions has generally been more intense around and across the sea’s coastlands than between those coastlands and their continental neighbours. The first development of such intense connectivity in prehistory thus makes the beginning of Mediterranean history, just as the very different configurations of connectivity across Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries may, in that sense, mark its end (although the ‘end of the Mediterranean’ remains highly debated). Clearly, there are many meanings that can be attached to the term ‘connectivity’ and correspondingly many ways of studying it historically within a given geographical area. But if it is to be studied in a way that takes Corrupting Sea as its starting point, then (to attempt a crisp summary): • it is essentially to do with the geography of the movement of people and of communication; • that communication might be visual or auditory; it might have to do with the transmission of culture; but the movement of people is usually fundamental; • the geography of movement may be far more than a matter of routes and their nodes; • it is terrestrial as well as riverine or maritime: that the concept was used in a study of the Mediterranean should not be taken to imply that it must primarily be to do with seaborne motion; • connectivity means on the whole high connectivity, intense levels of human communication and contact; yet, part of the point of the exercise of studying it should be to arrive at a differential geography and chronology – addressing the question of which areas and periods have been more joined up in this way than others.

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1 For what follows, see Brand (2007).

A part of my current work involves comparing regimes or types of connectivity, as just defined, on the grand scale, asking how Mediterranean connectivity might differ from that of its continental neighbours. This is part of a continuing project to explore the ways, and the chronological periods, in which the Mediterranean could have been a distinctive region. The particular incitement was the way in which historians and ethnographers of the Sahara were using the term ‘connectivity’ as a means of characterizing the desert space as more than a transit zone, empty of all interesting human phenomena apart from long-distance caravans (McDougall and Scheele, 2012; Scheele, 2012). Comparison between Mediterranean and Sahara led to further transcontinental forays, Asian and European (Horden, 2016). The attempt to get at least something of the measure of European connectivity (with the eventual aim of seeing if any differences between Mediterranean and northern Europe might be detectible) brings me to the British Isles. Except that, in terms of historical investigation, I was already there. In a volume I edited, Freedom of Movement in the Middle Ages (Horden, 2007), a number of approaches were made to the question of British connectivity under a different, but clearly related, heading. For instance, what excuses did litigants or their attorneys produce retrospectively for ‘default’, failure to appear before a court on the appointed day? These were cases where unexplained absence would lead to the loss of the land that was the subject of the suit.1 The excuses had to be, if not true, then at least plausible. It is therefore of considerable interest that the surviving evidence from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries suggests that three main types of excuse were regularly proffered for default: flood, imprisonment, and capture by thieves. Of these, both flood and capture tell us something about the circumstances of journeying in the England of the period, but perhaps flood is the more pertinent. As Brand shows, in one of the earliest cases of purported flood known, we find an attorney for a Kentish litigant citing the flooding of the Thames as having prevented him from crossing it between Eton and Windsor (whether by bridge, ford or boat) on two successive days (18 and 19 January 1256) while on his way to Winchester, where he was supposed to have appeared on 20 January (Brand, 2007, 218). He claimed that he had then gone up to London to find that point at which he could successfully cross. In a second case, also of 1256, a man was apparently on his way from his home county of Essex to the court at Winchester, where he had been scheduled to appear on 14 January. As his reason for failing to appear at Winchester before 17 January, he cited the flooding of the River Hart at Hartford Bridge on the main road from London to Basingstoke on 15 January and his consequent inability to cross it either by horse or on foot until the flood had subsided. In a third case, a man and his wife were being sued for land in Cornwall. He asserted at the 1285 Oxfordshire eyre that his default at Reading in the Berkshire eyre on the morrow of All Souls (3

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November), 1284, had been caused by the fact that, as he was on his way to the court from Wales, on the eve of All Souls (1 November) he had come to the River Tean between Farley and ‘Borewell’ in Staffordshire, which he had found could not be crossed without danger. In the fourth case, when an attorney appeared in court on 31 January 1290, he claimed that he and a second attorney had set out from Cornwall together for Westminster (where they were scheduled to appear on 27 January) but, on 19 January, had found the River Tamar in flood at (North) Tamerton and had been delayed beyond the Tamar for six days. During that period, they had lodged in (North) Tamerton, Wyke, and Launceston, awaiting their chance to cross. Only after six days had the river subsided sufficiently to allow them to do so. In a fifth case, the river is not named in the record but it can be identified from its location (Cobham in Surrey) as the Mole. John of Leicester and his wife were scheduled to appear in the common bench at Westminster on 27 January 1306 but did not appear until the following day, 28 January. They claimed that, while on the way to court, perhaps from their home county of Cornwall, they had come to Cobham and found the bridge ‘broken.’ They had been delayed there until they were able to find a cart to take them across. The sixth and final case Brand outlines stands apart from the others since it involves the crossing of the tidal stretch of water (the Swale), which separates the Isle of Sheppey from the rest of Kent. Two men were scheduled to appear on 10 April 1279, in a session of the Kent eyre at Canterbury to hear the verdict of a jury but had failed to arrive at the hour of pleading. On their eventual appearance, they claimed to have been impeded on 10 April by the difficulties of crossing from Sheppey on that day, perhaps caused by an exceptionally high tide. Imagine a full-scale commentary on such material. It would have to begin with the road network, literally its highways and byways, on which there has been curiously little work since a fundamental article by Frank Stenton (1936).2 It would have to include the distribution of bridges (Harrison, 2004): I have long wondered if there might not be an index of relative connectivity in the geography of ‘bridge piety,’ the varying extent to which construction or maintenance of bridges and the stretches of road associated with them became a frequent object of charitable donation or bequest.3 It would have to extend across Britain, whereas most of the work done to date has been restricted to England and its obvious focus in the capital. It would weigh up the accessibility of passage by river as well as by road and the challenges presented by natural obstacles and brigands (Childs, 2006, esp. 265 for rivers). All this needs to be undertaken region by region in a comparative spirit. We know, for instance, that the capillaries of the English road network facilitated later medieval royal itineration, movement of people and goods on a mighty scale, to some surprisingly remote spots. How would that viabilita` have compared with lowland Scotland’s?

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2 Though see also Hindle (1976) and now Evans and Allen (2016).

3 For a possible example from Kingston upon Thames, see Saul (2011, 90–91).

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Proxy measures of connectivity, of the extent to which one area was in contact with another, have to be sought without preconception as to the type of evidence that will count. Plague, the Black Death, spread to and across the country, as it spread across Europe as a whole, with astonishing but variable speed (Benedictow, 2004, map 1 and 123–145). That variation is an index of connectivity, even though on this topic the Scottish evidence is so exiguous as to make British-wide comparison impossible (Benedictow, 2004, 145; cf. Kelly, 2001 for Ireland). Another proxy might be found in the density and distribution of markets. Already in the mid-thirteenth century, most places in England would be on average no more than five miles from one. That figure not only tells us much about the integration of the English economy and about the expected scale of local movement; the regional differences that the average hides also need to be investigated since they point to the degree of accessibility of flows of goods to and from the major centres (Masschaele, 1997). The list of possibilities is large, and these are only hints of topics for further research. The examples are all terrestrial. But that is intended simply as counterbalance to the maritime emphasis on the ‘sea of islands’ in preceding contributions. Include all islands, great and small (as does Ingham). Decenter the British world; see it as did some of the medieval cartographers discussed by Hiatt as but the large gateway to an insular world reaching to Iceland and Scandinavia as well as Thule – and, eventually, the Americas (Mentz; Smith). Make sub-regions out of the Irish or North Sea (Squatriti, 2001). In effect, Philippinize Britain. By all means, use this strategy to reconfigure and postcolonialize the cultural history of the Middle Ages. But genuinely to Mediterraneanize these islands, at least in the way proposed by Corrupting Sea, requires more: attention to terrestrial connectivity. Feet on the ground.

About the Author Peregrine Horden is a Professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway University of London and also an Extraordinary Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is the co-author, with Nicholas Purcell, of The Corrupting Sea (2000) and its forthcoming sequel, and has co-edited, with Sharon Kinoshita, A Companion to Mediterranean History (2014) (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Benedictow, O.J. 2004. The Black Death: The Complete History. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell.

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Brand, P. 2007. The Travails of Travel: The Difficulties of Getting to Court in Later Medieval England. In Freedom of Movement in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2003 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. P. Horden, 215–228. Donington, UK: Shaun Tyas. Braudel, F. 1972. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (La Me´diterranne´e et le Monde Me´diterrane´en a` l’e´poque de Philippe II), 2 vols. London: Collins. Childs, W.R. 2006. Moving Around. In A Social History of England, 1200–1500, 261–275, eds. R. Horrox and W. M. Ormrod. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Evans, R., and V. Allen, eds. 2016. Roadworks: Medieval Roads, Medieval Britain. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Harrison, D. 2004. The Bridges of Medieval England: Transport and Society, 400–1800. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hindle, B.P. 1976. The Road Network of Medieval England and Wales. Journal of Historical Geography 2: 207–221. Horden, P., ed. 2007. Freedom of Movement in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2003 Harlaxton Symposium. Donington, UK: Shaun Tyas. Horden, P. 2016. Mediterranean Connectivity: a Comparative Approach. In New Horizons: Mediterranean Research in the 21st Century, eds. M. Dabag, D. Halle, N. Jaspert, and A. Lichtenberger, 211–24. Paderborn, Germany: Wilhelm Fink/Ferdinand Scho¨ningh. Horden, P., and N. Purcell, 2000. The Corrupting Sea. Oxford, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley. Kelly, M. 2001. A History of the Black Death in Ireland. Stroud, UK: Tempus. Masschaele, J. 1997. Peasants, Merchants, and Markets: Inland Trade in Medieval England, 1150–1350. Houndmills, UK: Macmillan. McDougall, J., and J. Scheele, eds. 2012. Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwest Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Saul, N. 2011. The Lovekyns and the Lovekyn Chapel at Kingston upon Thames. Surrey Archaeological Collections 96: 85–108. Scheele, J. 2012. Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara: Regional Connectivity in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Squatriti, P. 2001. How the Irish Sea (May Have) Saved Irish Civilization: A Review Article. Comparative Studies in Society and History 43: 615–30. Stenton, F. 1936. The Road System of Medieval England. Economic History Review 7: 1–21.

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Book Review Essay

Dynamic fluidity and wet ontology: Current work on the archipelagic Nor th Sea Rober t Rouse Department of English, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7, 572–580. doi:10.1057/s41280-016-0030-2

Dorsey Armstrong and Kenneth Hodges Mapping Malory: Regional Identities and National Geographies. New York, Palgrave, 2014, xii + 232 pp., $95.00. ISBN: 978-1137443274 Aisling Byrne Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, 224 pp., £55.00. ISBN: 978-0198746003 Michael Pye The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are. Harmondsworth, UK, Penguin, 2014, 400 pp., £9.99. ISBN: 978-0241963838 In the opening chapter of Place: A Short Introduction, the cultural geographer Tim Cresswell highlights an oversight, a kind of cultural myopia that is typical of terrestrial attitudes toward place, when he relates the story of the early European explorers of coastal British Columbia (Cresswell, 2004, 8–9). As Captain Vancouver and the crew of the HMS Discovery sailed through the Salish Sea off the coast of what is now British Columbia in 1792, they observed a land that they understood as wilderness: the coastal rainforest, a lack of cultivated fields, few permanent dwellings, with no visible roads. For them this seemed to be terra nullius, an empty land, ripe for colonization and exploitation. Ó 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

Vol. 7, 4, 572–580

Chapter 9 was originally published as Rouse, R. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7: 572580. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-016-0030-2.

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However, invisible to the acquisitive European eye were the cultivated berry groves, the rock-constructed coastal fish gardens, and the highly efficient Salish travel network system of the sea itself – as complex and as culturally regulated as any European road system. For the First Nations of the region, the multiple coasts and islands of the Salish Sea, reaching from what is now Seattle in the south to the coasts of Vancouver Island and the mainland of British Columbia in the north, existed as a web of interconnections, weaving land and sea together into a complex economic and social archipelagic geography. Today, we recognize this as characteristic of the Eurocentric colonial gaze, seeing this ‘new world’ as undeveloped in terms of the cultural expectations of the old. But this is also a terra-centric view, privileging the land as a meaningful space, while the sea is understood merely as fluid, unfixed, and transitory. The sea, viewed by the eighteenth-century British as a geographical boundary, a defensive ditch, or a ‘moat defensive’ from the often-querulous continent, represents division rather than a means of connection (Sobecki, 2008, 4). Sebastian Sobecki, in The Sea and Medieval English Literature, has examined the role that the insular sea plays in medieval English literature and how it ‘becomes a part of the vernacular discourse of Englishness’ (Sobecki, 2008, 4). For Sobecki, in the centuries between the Norman Conquest and the end of the Hundred Years War, ‘the sea oscillates between being rejected, feared, braved and allegorized until it is finally accepted and utilized as a determining constituent of Englishness’ (Sobecki, 2008, 4). Sobecki is not alone in his reading of medieval British insularity: Kathy Lavezzo’s masterful Angels on the Edge of the World examines how medieval and early modern English and British writers turned their geographical marginality into a virtue, arguing for a sense of exceptionalism that marked them out from the rest of Christendom. However, the fiction of British maritime insularity has been increasingly critiqued in recent years. While the sea has operated as a symbol of insular differentiation for the English and British over the centuries, it has also acted as a key connective tissue, first linking the various islands of the British archipelago together in what has been termed by Peter Brown as the ‘Celtic Mediterranean of the North’ (cited in Sobecki, 2008, 12), later connecting the various lands bordering the North Sea from the transmarine Viking kingdoms to the Angevin Empire, and later still binding the British empire itself from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries. This archipelagic understanding of the sea, focusing on the flows of people, power, knowledge, and goods that circulate upon its waters, has become an increasingly common framework for seeking to understand the political and cultural interconnections within northern medieval Europe. Taking its cue from the rise of Mediterranean studies, North Sea archipelagic studies highlight the connections, rather than the differences, between the disparate islands and territories bordering the North Sea. The spatial turn in the humanities has also encouraged a theoretical reconsideration of the space of the sea. The cultural geographers Kimberly

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Peters and Philip Steinberg, in their article ‘Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking,’ propose a way of thinking both about and with the sea ‘in order to explore how thinking with the sea can assist in reconceptualising our geographical understandings’ (Peters and Steinberg, 2015, 248). They call for a ‘wet ontology not merely to endorse the perspective of a world of flows, connections, liquidities, and becomings, but also to propose a means by which the sea’s material and phenomenological distinctiveness can facilitate the reimagining and reenlivening of a world ever on the move’ (Peters and Steinberg, 2015, 248). What might such a wet ontology look like from the point of view of the North Sea? What might it mean to read – and re-read – the literature of the medieval North through such a watery lens? To view it, not like Captain Vancouver from on top of the waves, but rather from within them, from a point of immersion? The scholarly studies reviewed here all engage, to a lesser or greater extent, with this question of re-centering the sea, taking what has been called an oceanic or an archipelagic viewpoint. Here the sea not only acts to facilitate archipelagic networks of places; it is also a constituent part of the archipelago. In these studies the sea does not merely lie between the terrestrial locations, but exists in itself as a place and site of meaning.

The North Sea Michael Pye, in his eminently readable The Edge of the World: The Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe, makes explicit claims for the role of the North Sea as just this type of interconnected archipelagic space: ‘Around the Mediterranean we take for granted links and influences, back and forth: the biblical stories, the epic voyages in Homer and Hesiod, the trade routes from east to west and back again. The North Sea had most of those things, and the consequences were remarkable’ (13). For Pye, this role of the North Sea as a transformative space has been overshadowed in the grand narrative of European history by the ‘screen of the Southern Renaissance’ (12), which figures the North as having been civilized by the South with the spread of the Roman Church. In contrast to this grand narrative, Pye’s book is ‘about rediscovering that lost world, and what it means to us: the life around the North Sea in times when water was the easiest way to travel, when the sea connected and carried peoples, belief and ideas, as well as pots and wine and coal’ (8). The North-Sea world that Pye reveals in his book is part cultural, part political, and part economic. One might wonder about maritime ecology and the role of the natural world, but Pye is writing primarily in the mode of a journalist interested in economic history. Accordingly, his focus is primarily on the trade networks that structured the movement of peoples and goods. Pye begins on the Frisian shore, textually excavating the lost trading town of Domburg, once the center of a thriving network of Frisian trade routes. He reads the fortunes of the

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now lost-beneath-the-sand-dunes Domburg as synecdochal for the trade dominance that the Frisian traders enjoyed from the seventh to the mid-ninth centuries. Taking full advantage of both their geographical position at the mouth of the Rhine and of the nautical skills honed in their hard maritime existence, the Frisians traded far and wide across the early-medieval North, carrying out ‘the trade of half a continent’ (29). With this trade came ideas, and chief amongst them was the concept of money. Money – here in the form of official coinage from Frisian mints – is the idea-made-solid that permits the trade of goods for the concept of transferable abstract value rather than the simple barter exchange of material goods for other material goods. With the fall of the Roman Empire and its currency system, much of Europe had reverted back to a non-money economy, and it was Frisians who established the most trusted sources of a new international currency. As important as their seafaring abilities were to the Frisian trade networks, of even greater importance was their minting of deniers and sceattas from silver acquired along their far-flung trade routes, with the archeological record suggesting that ‘Frisia was the centre if not the home of practical cash’ (41). During this period ‘[t]he name of Frisian came to mean merchant, overseas trader, the perfect example of the long-distance seaman. The sea was truly ‘‘the Frisian sea’’’ (33). The networks controlled by the Frisians were not just maritime, but also riverine. Chief amongst these for the Frisians was of course the Rhine, and the Frisians established the port-town of Dorestad upstream on the Rhine. From here they controlled trade moving down the Rhine from the interior of the continent, and during the time of Charlemagne, Dorestad possessed the second most important coinage mint after the one in the Emperor’s own court. The integration of the Rhine into the North Sea networks illustrates an important point about the interconnectedness of water and travel. In a very real way, the rivers that flowed into the North Sea were extensions of the sea itself, providing navigable conduits far inland, reaching watery tendrils of influence far from what we might consider the well-delineated shore of the lands around the sea. Here we see laid bare and challenged the terrestrial myth of the bounded nature of the land, reminding us again that rivers and estuaries, inlets and fens, all provide ingress. The land is permeable, repeatedly punctured and ruptured by tide and river, ebb and flow. By the mid-ninth century, however, the time of the Frisians – and of Domsburg – was waning. Increasingly pressed between the encroaching Franks from the south and the increasing competition – both mercantile and martial – of the Vikings from the north, the Frisian domination of the trade routes of the North Sea was well on the wane by the time Domburg was raided by the Vikings in 837. Here the Viking armies encountered Frankish troops, signaling the increasing political incorporation of Frisian into the Frankish territories. The raiders struck across the Frisian territories repeatedly during the ninth century, increasingly confident and bold, signaling not just to the Frisians that a new power now controlled the North Sea: the age of the Viking had come.

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Pye goes on to examine next the rise of the Viking Scandinavians (primarily Norwegians and Danes), whose maritime and riverine trade networks were to dwarf those established by the Frisians. By way of their dragonheaded long ships, North Sea tendrils extended eastward into Russia (via the Volga) and the Byzantine Empire, southward to North Africa and the Mediterranean, and westward to Iceland, Greenland, and to the forested shores of Baffin Island and Newfoundland (Vinland). The archipelagic world of the Vikings was broad indeed, with their settlements connected by the sleek hulls of ocean-going ships and the sinews of the men who sailed them, spanning from the Baltic sea westward to the archipelago of Britain – the Kingdoms of York, East Anglia, and the Danelaw, the islands of what would be northwest Scotland, the Kingdom of Dublin, Iceland, the Greenland settlements, and beyond. In this account, too, Pye stresses not simply the Vikings’ fearsome conquests, but the impact that their trade, settlement, exploration, and ideas had upon the ever-fluid North Sea world. After his discussion of the Vikings, Pye turns to the third of his major case studies, one that – once more – played a key mercantile role in the North Sea: the Hanseatic League. Interwoven into his chapters narrating the ongoing progression of politico-mercantile power in the region, Pye addresses the movement of cultural ideas that spread across the North Sea world: money, books and literacy, fashion, law, science, love, and capital are tracked as they make their way along the routes of trade and influence, creating not just an evertransforming maritime world, but one that shared common elements among all the lands and islands that comprised the North Sea archipelago. For Pye, this project of reclaiming the archipelagic North Sea is no mere scholarly corrective, but rather a part of an anti-nationalist historiography that is eerily prescient of our Brexit-afflicted present. History, Pye argues, following Ernest Renan, is a danger to the isolationist and insular rhetoric of nationalism. Eric Hobsbawm goes further, adding that ‘I regard it as the primary duty of modern historians to be such a danger’ (cited in Pye, 19). The importance of remembering the medieval North Sea and the archipelagic culture that it facilitated, Pye suggests, lies in its implications for a more complex and nuanced understanding of European identity to this day. Despite the fantasies of ‘pure English’ identity espoused by the pro-Brexit UKIP party and their supporters, and by other Northern European right-wing political movements, this imagined ‘separate identity turns out to be an error, even a lie’ (25). Pye’s popular study of the medieval North Sea convincingly reveals the insular fallacy that lies at the heart of much contemporary European identity politics. In the archipelagic North, ‘[i]dentity became a matter of where you were and where you last came from, not some abstract notion of race’ (12). Pye goes on: ‘Instead of the dark mistakes about pure blood, racial identity, homogenous nations with their own soul and spirit and distinct nature, we have something far more exciting: the story of people making choices, not always freely, sometimes under fearsome pressure, but still choosing and inventing and making lives for themselves’ (12).

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Europeans, The Edge of the World contends, have always been a product of the unending flows of peoples, goods, and ideas that have circulated, and continue to circulate, through the terrestrial and watery spaces of the continent. Pye’s study, ultimately, sacrifices focus for coverage, and in charting the wide expanse of the archipelagic North Sea leaves may of its depths unplumbed. But this is far from a criticism, and the longue dure´e approach succeeds in making visible and showing the importance of the persistent role of the sea as connective tissue over the space of many centuries.

Arthurian Archipelagoes The archipelagic model of the North Sea can be read not only in the history of the medieval North, but also in the literature and legendary histories that its cultures produced. In one of the most widespread of these legendary histories, that of King Arthur, the sea again both divides and connects, acting as a malleable signifier and a mutable space alternately to isolate Britain as an island and to bind together an imperial archipelagic polity. The model of an archipelagic empire is, of course, one that held real-world political utility in the Middle Ages. R.R. Davies, in The First English Empire, describes the creation and operation of the transmarine Angevin empire, binding together Anjou, Aquitaine, Gascony, Normandy, England, Cornwall, parts of Wales, and the Pale in Ireland. The empire was a deeply heterogeneous set of territories, operating under at least ten different languages, bound together by political will and the seaborne routes connecting these disparate lands. For the Angevins, and for the later iterations of archipelagic English/British polity that succeeded them, the Arthurian legends deployed Arthur’s ‘historical’ domination of the North Sea to suture together imperial fantasy. Dorsey Armstrong and Kenneth Hodges, in their Mapping Malory: Regional Identities and National Geographies, identify the dual structural role of water in Malory: ‘Rivers, channels, seas, oceans – they all help define borders and contain peoples, while simultaneously providing quick access across and beyond them’ (157). Discussing Malory’s geography, they deploy Meg Roland’s evocative turn of phrase ‘the more fluid landscape of romance,’ which is taken here for its literal fluidity. They suggest that ‘[h]er use of ‘‘fluid’’ is of course deliberate: as important as identifying places is understanding the connections among them, and these places are frequently connected by water’ (3). There are many sea crossings in Malory, from Arthur’s crossing to the continent to defeat Rome, to Tristram’s sea-born visitations, through to the multiple crossings and re-crossings in the final books. Among these, Tristram’s narrative is particularly apt to be considered through the ‘lens of the sea’ (3). He crosses and recrosses the Irish sea numerous times, and ‘[w]ater runs through all the key moments of Tristram’s life’ (3).

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For all this watery rhetoric, however, Mapping Malory concerns itself for the most part with the terrestrial lands of Arthur’s realm. But here, too, the archipelagic model is invoked, figuring Arthur’s Britain as an island comprised of smaller distinct regions such as Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and the literal Isles of the Orkneys. In this Armstrong and Hodges invoke the approach taken by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in his edited collection Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England. Here, and elsewhere, Cohen has argued for an understanding of English identity as reflective of the tensions and anxieties that a culturally and linguistically diverse Britain represent. As the English domination of the islands of Britain increases, so does their interaction and hybridization with the other communities such as the Welsh, Cornish, Irish, and Scots. Added to this mix is the continual seaborne influx of continental peoples such as the Flemings and the Lombards, once again highlighting the connectedness and ease of movement across the North Sea. In this context, reading the heterogeneity of Britain through the metaphor of geographic archipelagic politics reveals both a longstanding generative anxiety about the fluidity of the Isles and the rhetorical ingenuity of writers who sought to articulate a stable identity for their rulers. Armstrong and Hodges highlight the importance of spatial expectations for the readers of literary texts: ‘What sense of space we bring to a text helps determine what we see. Medievalists are therefore increasingly grappling with geographic imaginings’ (2). This observation reveals the stakes in the analysis of medieval spatial modes and practices. ‘Malory’s boats,’ they suggest, ‘bear witness to strikingly different geographical modes’ (3), ranging from the quotidian journeys of Arthur’s troop ships crossing to the continent to face Rome, to the mysterious ship-borne corpses and objects that frequently interject themselves into the narrative. Ultimately, however, Armstrong and Hodges acknowledge the contradictory and vexed nature of the Malorian geographic imaginary (172). Perhaps unsurprisingly for the sprawling narrative that draws upon such a varied cultural and linguistic range of source material, there is little in the way of geographical consistency to be established from Le Morte. Nonetheless, the archipelagic nature of both Britain itself and of Arthur’s wider transmarine empire remain essential aspects of the Arthurian world, speaking perhaps to the translatability and portability of the Arthurian legends to the continent and beyond.

Celtic Otherworlds and Supernatural Islands Aisling Byrne’s fine study of medieval Otherworlds takes our engagement with the concept of the archipelagic in new and exciting directions. First, and most obviously, its chapter on ‘Archipelagic Otherworlds’ (141–83) examines the ‘use of otherworldly imagery to describe lands that are not only indisputably ‘‘actual’’ to the writer, but also geographically proximate and easily reachable’ (141). This use of the trope of the otherworld produces what Alfred Siewers has

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termed a ‘geographical doppelga¨nger’ of the real world (cited in Byrne, 142). Drawing from Siewers’s use of the idea of the archipelago ‘as a framework for thinking about the otherworlds of early Irish literature’ (142), Byrne proposes a way of thinking about otherworld narratives across the multilingual archipelago as a shared imaginative output. While accounts of otherworldly spaces and places vary across the cultures and languages of the medieval British Islands, Byrne suggests that ‘it is arguable that part of the interest insular writers evince in otherworld accounts in the first place is a result of the distinctive nature of archipelagic geography’ (143). A world of shifting sea mists, stormy isles, and strong currents, situated on the western edge of the known world, provides for its writers the raw material of the mysterious. The marginality of Britain and Ireland also held implications for their place in Christian history, situating them temporally at the end of the world, as sunset lands with all the exceptionality that this implied. Like the monstrous east, the western margins of the world were ripe with wonders, but also with connotations of an ‘other Eden,’ an association found in both medieval English and Irish literature (154). In a compelling analysis of the late medieval romance The Turke and Sir Gawain (177–83), Byrne examines how the poem’s associations with the Stanley family and their title as the Kings of Man reveal the negative operation of the trope of the otherworld upon the territories of the real British archipelago. This tale of Gawain’s defeat of the barbarous ‘Turke’ – the King of the Isle of Man – and of his subsequent incorporation into the Arthurian world as Sir Gromer, is read by Byrne as a critique of the rule of the Stanley family (titular Kings of Man from 1405–1504). The romance’s derision of the King of Man as a ‘heathen soldan [sultan]’ and its narrative of the territorial incorporation of the island into Arthur’s realm point towards the real-world value of the demonization and othering of the peoples and lands that fall under the colonial eye. The Isle of Man, and its King, are treated here in a manner similar to the cultural assassination performed by Gerald of Wales on the Irish, marking them as bestial and unfit to rule their own lands. ‘Reimagining another territory in terms of the otherworld’, Byrne suggests, ‘can both distance it and draw it closer, it can render such a land more desirable and so worthy of acquisition or more barbaric and so ripe for conquest’ (183). Byrne’s study demonstrates the political and ideological force of the otherworldly construction of the Atlantic archipelago of Britain and Ireland, and the ways in which it is used by the multilingual and multicultural population that washes up on its shores over the course of the medieval period. These studies all engage, in different ways, with the concept of the archipelagic North Sea. To these we can add other recent voices: Jonathan Hsy’s Trading Tongues, which deals in part with the ‘oceanic trajectories’ and ‘channel crossings’ (Hsy, 2013, 87, 79) of late medieval English literary culture; Simone Pinet’s Archipelagoes: Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel, a study of the islands and island-books of Spanish medieval literature;

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and Lynn Staley’s The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell, a comprehensive study of the permeable national body imagined as insular garden. Just as the interconnecting sea washes up new things with each tide, so ‘wet ontology,’ or the critical stance of reading from within the archipelagic sea, facilitates a flow of new ideas, innovative readings, and unforeseen textual engagements.

About the Author Robert Rouse teaches medieval literature, spatial studies, and ecocritical studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He has published widely on medieval romance, sexuality, nationalism, geocritical hermeneutics, Arthurian literature, manuscript medievalisms, and the late-medieval English geographical imaginary (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Cohen, J.J., ed. 2008. Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England. New York: Palgrave. Cresswell, T. 2004. Place: A Short Introduction. London: Blackwell. Hsy, J. 2013. Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press. Lavezzo, K. 2006. Angels on the Edge of the World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Peters, K. and P. Steinberg. 2015. Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume Through Oceanic Thinking. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(2): 247–264. Pinet, S. 2011. Archipelagoes: Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Sobecki, S. 2008. The Sea and Medieval English Literature. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer. Staley, L. 2012. The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell. Bloomington, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

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