Literary Encounters in the Anglo-Welsh Borderlands, 1138--1400

"Literary Encounters in the Anglo-Welsh Borderland, 1138--1400" analyzes the vibrant multilingual literary culture of the Welsh March, the borderland between medieval England and Wales. Informed by recent work on the postcolonial Middle Ages, "Literary Encounters" shows how this fractious, dynamic area inspired literary representations of cultural conflict, produced unanticipated exchange between languages and cultures, and even helped to birth those enduring and wildly popular stories about King Arthur and his knights. Although the mixed society of the Welsh borderlands has long attracted the attention of political and legal historians, the March's linguistic diversity, including texts in Latin, French, English, and Welsh, has hindered literary scholars from fully recognizing its importance for medieval British literature. This dissertation is the first to study the March's literary responses to English and Norman colonialism, analyzing texts in all four of its languages. The results are provocative: this literature includes texts that belie inherited notions of ethnicity and nationality. Fouke Fitz Waryn, an early thirteenth-century Marcher lord who had fought against the Welsh and whose deeds are recorded in a French-language romance, was later memorialized in Welsh-language poetry as a positive example of martial prowess; St. Erkenwald, a fourteenth-century English poem closely associated with Richard II, used the ancient British past to imagine a stunning departure from the hostile relationship between England and Wales. This dissertation also shows how the creation of literary narratives about King Arthur and the deeds of the ancient Celtic Britons is closely tied to twelfth-century English colonial encroachment into Wales. Above all, "Literary Encounters" forcefully critiques the modern view of literary history wherein each nation possesses a single literature written in a single language. The multilingual literature of the Welsh March, at once transnational yet intensely regional, unravels this myth.