In the two and a half centuries following the Norman Conquest of England, English identity was reassessed and renegotiated in a new cultural context. This English identity took many forms across the kingdom, however, and was defined not only through interaction with the Normans, but through contact with other cultures as well. This book establishes a link between cultural contact and the literary formation of English regional identities by analysing romances and histories from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. It articulates the role that other cultures, polities, and countries played in constructions of Englishness, and shows how English identities differed depending on a region's location, history, stories, and inhabitants.

The texts explored in this book suggest, in distinctive ways, that as English peoples come into contact with their neighbours, the cultural frictions that arise consolidate or alter existing identities – or forge new, intercultural ones. Peter McDonald asserts that this intercultural dynamism is universal: ‘since all cultures, including dominant ones, are less coherent and more mixed than we like to believe, or than the political pressures of a particular moment might require us to believe, the intercultural as an on-going, open-ended process is all-pervasive’. Although McDonald writes in reference to present-day culture, his claims are no less valid for medieval England. The medieval construction of English identity can be seen as an ongoing dialogic process, constantly unfolding, and created through interactions with itself and with other cultures. It is social and performative; because the practice of English identity varies throughout the kingdom, defined by local histories, cultural influences, ethnicities, and religious identities, among other factors, regional understandings and articulations of English identity are disparate. The richest, most intercultural medieval texts are found in areas that Robert Stein categorises as ‘border territories and areas of shifting sovereignties’, or which Mary Louise Pratt calls ‘contact zones’. These are places where cultures intersect, generating a new perspective that ‘treats the relations among colonizer and colonized, or travelers and “travelees”, not in terms of separateness, but in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking ideas and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical relations of power’.