Literary Culture in the Medieval Welsh Marches: Networks, Places, Politics

The Welsh Marches, a name that today refers to the borderland regions between England and Wales, are often coupled with images of idealized rusticity, of ‘blue remembered hills’. Yet, in the Middle Ages, the Marches stretched from the borders into much of modern-day Mid and South Wales and were important spaces of conflict, colonization, and contact; of complex, shifting, strategic politics and identities; and, crucially, of vibrant literary activity. An exploration of the Marches’ multilingual literary cultures, this book is structured around three geotemporal case studies: Hereford, c. 1170–c. 1210; Ludlow, c. 1310–c. 1350; and Ynysforgan, c. 1380–c. 1410. Analysing texts and manuscripts composed, copied, compiled, translated, or otherwise circulated in these locales, this study crosses linguistic and disciplinary boundaries to formulate readings of works in French, Welsh, English, and Latin. These readings are developed through an extended engagement with the philosophy of Bruno Latour, particularly his work on Actor-Network Theory and modes of existence. From these perspectives, this book not only situates the March within wider literary networks but also reads its texts as networking narratives that deconstruct binaries of centre and periphery, of local and global, of human and nonhuman, and even of reality and fiction themselves.