Essays examining the way in which the sea has shaped medieval and later ideas of what it is to be English.Local and imperial, insular and expansive, both English yet British: geographically and culturally, the sea continues to shape changing models of Englishness. This volume traces the many literary origins of insular identity from local communities to the entire archipelago, laying open the continuities and disruptions in the sea's relationship with English identity in a British context. Ranging from the beginnings of insular literature to Victorian medievalisms, the subjects treated include King Arthur's struggle with muddy banks, the afterlife of Edgar's forged charters, Old English homilies and narratives of migration, Welsh and English ideas about Chester, Anglo-Norman views of the sea in the Vie de St Edmund and Waldef, post-Conquest cartography, The Book of Margery Kempe, the works of the Irish Stopford Brooke, and the making of an Anglo-British identity in Victorian Britain. SEBASTIAN SOBECKI is Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. Contributors: Sebastian Sobecki, Winfried Rudolf, Fabienne Michelet, Catherine A.M. Clarke, Judith Weiss, Kathy Lavezzo, Alfred Hiatt, Jonathan Hsy, Chris Jones, Joanne Parker, David Wallace

Introduction: Edgar's Archipelago - Sebastian SobeckiThe Spiritual Islescape of the Anglo-Saxons - Winfried RudolfLost at Sea: Nautical Travels in the Old English Exodus, the Old English Andreas, and Accounts of the adventus Saxonum - Fabienne MicheletEdges and Otherworlds: Imagining Tidal Spaces in Early Medieval Britain - Catherine A M ClarkeEast Anglia and the Sea in the Narratives of the Vie de St Edmund and Waldef - Judith WeissThe Sea and Border Crossings in the Alliterative Morte Arthure - Kathy Lavezzo'From Hulle to Cartage': Maps, England, and the Sea - Alfred HiattLingua Franca: Overseas Travel and Language Contact in The Book of Margery Kempe - Jonathan Hsy'Birthplace for the poetry of the sea-ruling nation': Stopford Brooke and Old English - Chris JonesRuling the Waves: Saxons, Vikings, and the Sea in the Formation of an Anglo-British Identity in the Nineteenth Century - Joanne ParkerAfterword: Sea, Island, Mud - David WallaceBibliography