Writing the North of England in the Middle Ages
Regionalism and Nationalism in Medieval English Literature

Uncovering the medieval origin of England's North-South divide, Joseph Taylor examines the complex dynamics of regionalism and nationalism.

Joseph Taylor (Author)

9781009182119, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 December 2022

280 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.54 kg

Writing the North of England in the Middle Ages offers a literary history of the North-South divide, examining the complexities of the relationship – imaginative, material, and political – between North and South in a wide range of texts. Through sustained analysis of the North-South divide as it emerges in the literature of medieval England, this study illustrates the convoluted dynamic of desire and derision of the North by the rest of country. Joseph Taylor dissects England's problematic sense of nationhood as one which must be negotiated and renegotiated from within, rather than beyond, national borders. Providing fresh readings of texts such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the fifteenth-century Robin Hood ballads and the Towneley plays, this book argues for the North's vital contribution to processes of imagining nation in the Middle Ages and shows that that regionalism is both contained within and constitutive of its apparent opposite, nationalism.

1. William of Malmesbury, Bede, and the problem of the north
2. The north-south divide in the medieval English universities
3. Chaucer's northern consciousness in the Reeve's Tale
4. Centralization, resistance, and the north of England in A Gest of Robyn Hode
5. The Towneley plays, the pilgrimage of grace and northern Messianism.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]