Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle Ages

The chapters contained in this volume explore lines of textual transmission, translation, and cultural contact, in a particular corner of north-western Europe in the later Middle Ages. They take as their focus the crossing of borders – linguistic, political and national – in evidence in literary activity in medieval Britain, Ireland and Iceland. They consider the movement of texts and ideas, and, on occasion, the people who brought them. This collection is, in many ways, a deeply historicist undertaking, engaged with the contexts of cross-border reception histories. However, it is also invested in crossing borders in a more contemporary sense: in the crossing of disciplinary and institutional boundaries, bringing together scholars working in the literatures and languages of these regions, at institutions across Europe. It is, in this modern respect, a particularly salient reminder of the importance of collaborative scholarship, and of thinking across academic divisions which themselves have a longstanding historical relationship to conceptualisations of ‘national’ literatures.