Against all England
Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading two new books which are directly relevant to our project research: Jane Laughton’s Life in a Late Medieval City: Chester, 1275-1520 and Robert Barrett’s Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195-1656. I’m planning to share my thoughts on each of them here on the project blog. Today, I’m going to discuss my responses to Rob Barrett’s excellent book.
Rob is interested in the ways in which Cheshire texts ‘work together to complicate persistent academic binaries of metropole and margin, centre and periphery, and nation and region’ (p. 1). His study argues that, whilst the relationships between Cheshire and Wales have been investigated in various ways by medievalists, the complex interactions between Cheshire and the wider nation of England deserve further attention. The first publication in a new series, Reformations: Medieval and Early Modern, edited by David Aers, Sarah Beckwith and James Simpson, Rob’s book is explicit about its aim to challenge existing scholarly paradigms and assumptions. He asks new questions about how national and local identities are produced, emphasising inter-dependence, interaction and sometimes antagonism, and deliberately works across the transitions and continuities from medieval to early modern.
The book’s first chapter has the most striking relevance for our current work on the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ project. In ‘From Cloister to Corporation: Imagining Chester in Benedictine Encomium and Saint’s Life’, Rob explores Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie and Henry Bradshaw’s Life of St Werburge – two of our central project texts. I really like the way Rob describes Lucian’s vision of the city as a text needing explication, commenting on how ‘the simple act of walking around the city replicates the textual practice of the exegete’ (p. 42). Rob calls attention to the ways in which Lucian’s description appropriates the entire urban space, figuring and interpreting the city according to monastic ideology and authority. He notes that ‘Lucian… uses the vocabulary of monastic discourse to shift the abbey’s legal and political boundaries, to make them coterminous with those of Chester itself’ (p. 35).
Rob examines how Lucian invests the city landscape with symbolic potentials, and acknowledges the resulting ‘deliberate deformations his spatial hermeneutic works on the cityscape of Chester’ (p. 30). I’m also interested in Lucian’s spatial imagination – clearly influenced by the medieval mappae mundi tradition. Increasingly, I suspect there’s a link between Lucian’s cartographic imagination and the Easter Tables located at the beginning of the manuscript. We know that medieval maps and Easter Tables often travelled together – is this further evidence that Lucian imagines and constructs his text as a project in spatial (and temporal) mapping?
Rob sees a big difference in Henry Bradshaw’s later Life of St Werburge. Here he finds evidence of the power struggles between monastic and secular authorities within Chester, and the increasingly precarious insistence of St Werburgh’s on its role as guardian and centre of the city. Rob also comments interestingly on the London printing of the Life by Richard Pynson (the only text which now survives), exploring how this local hagiography is re-shaped and incorporated into ‘the emergent anti-Lutheran effort’ (p. 58) and is ‘mobilized… in defense of the national religious body against a foreign invader’ (p. 53). I think my work on the memory of Anglo-Saxon Mercia in the Life of St Werburge can bring some interesting new perspectives to this argument. There’s much more to say about how the text imagines an authentic, continuous religious tradition which shapes Cestrian (and wider national) identity, and also the ways in which Mercian identity may be contiguous with – or subtly different from – Englishness.
I particularly enjoyed the Epilogue, in which Rob looks at ongoing negotiations of Cheshire identity - often making use of pre-modern materials – in the twenty-first century. Rob draws together a range of sources such as the revived performances of the Cycle Plays, literary imaginings of Cheshire and political changes (including the establishment of the new unitary authority) which continue to demonstrate the positioning of Cheshire identity in response and counterpoint to national (and even global) trends and pressures.
Rob will be coming all the way from Chicago to Swansea this week for our Porject Co-ordination Team / Advisory Committee meeting. I’m looking forward to discussing our shared research interests then!
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March 13th, 2009 at 12:39 am
Thanks for the kind words about the book, Catherine. I’m glad you enjoyed it, and I think your work on Book 1 of Bradshaw is a perfect complement to my own arguments about his Life of Werburge. (Just as Mark’s work on Lucian promises to transform the way we see the monk’s encomium.)