Bede's Ecclesiastical History is in many ways the obvious place to begin a study of symbolic landscapes and the idea of England in medieval English literature. The opening description of Britannia announces the potent image of the idealised, Edenic island, and forms a primary source or perceived point of origin to which many later medieval texts – and even modern scholars – allude. Bede's representation of the Edenic island is hugely influential for the production of English identity in the medieval period and beyond, yet this iconic description is itself complicated and problematic. Far from being a true point of origin, it manipulates textual allusion, plays with source materials and historiographic traditions, and unsettles the established semiotics of the island image. As twenty-first-century audiences, we are also becoming less confident about how to read Bede. Re-appraised in the context of current critical interests such as the dynamics of intertextuality or the discourses of colonialism, the description of Britannia seems less honest and more evasive about its own textual and national politics.

Since Bede's description is so central to this study as a whole, a substantial portion is included here for close analysis.