Book contents
- Landscape in Middle English Romance
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature
- Landscape in Middle English Romance
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Copyright
- Abbreviations
- Digging into Romance
- Chapter 1 A (Disappearing?) World of Opportunity
- Chapter 2 Chasing the Surf
- Chapter 3 Across the Sea
- Chapter 4 “In His Contrie at Hame”
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature
Chapter 3 - Across the Sea
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2021
- Landscape in Middle English Romance
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature
- Landscape in Middle English Romance
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Copyright
- Abbreviations
- Digging into Romance
- Chapter 1 A (Disappearing?) World of Opportunity
- Chapter 2 Chasing the Surf
- Chapter 3 Across the Sea
- Chapter 4 “In His Contrie at Hame”
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature
Summary
Chapter 3 moves beyond the boundary space of the sea to consider the landscape descriptions of “foreign” lands in medieval English romance. Despite the allure of fantasy and exotic settings endemic to the genre of romance, many Middle English texts create imaginative landscapes that delineate recognizably English topography. Intriguingly, such passages of landscape description also focus primarily on urban landscapes, emphasizing the economic and political interconnectedness of town and countryside. I look at similarities between these scenes, and consider why certain details come to be associated with these imaginative landscape settings in the texts of Titus and Vespasian and Kyng Alisaunder surviving in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 622, a manuscript saturated with tales of the Holy Land and the Far East. These texts may champion the ability of landscape engineers to reshape the base clay of Creation, but they also use the distant lands of the Middle and Far East as spaces to contemplate the hubris of such actions in a Christian universe – especially in the increasingly hazardous ecological events English readers experienced at the close of the Middle Ages.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Landscape in Middle English RomanceThe Medieval Imagination and the Natural World, pp. 99 - 132Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021