The English Isles

Cultural transmission and political conflict in Britain and Ireland, 1100–1500

Seán Duffy & Susan Foran, editors

Leading medieval scholars discuss the impact of English imperialism and the ways in which English and wider European cultural norms were transmitted outwards towards Ireland, Scotland and Wales from the Norman Conquest onwards. Subjects examined include, in the field of language and literature, the resilience of the English language in the face of the forced imposition of French culture by the Normans; national identity in the chivalric literature of late 14th-century Scotland; foreign apologues in the bardic verse of late medieval Ireland, and, in history, Irish perceptions of the Normans from the mid-11th to the mid-12th century; external influences on Welsh saints’ cults; native Welsh colonization in Ireland; the survival of monarchy in Scotland in the face of English assault; and the anomaly that was the medieval Lordship of the Isles.

Contributors: Steve Boardman (U Edinburgh), Dauvit Broun (U Glasgow), John Reuben Davies (U Glasgow), Seán Duffy (TCD), Susan Foran (U Bergen), Niav Gallagher (TCD), John Gillingham (LSE), Matthew Hammond (U Glasgow), Katharine Simms (TCD), Freya Verstraten Veach (U Hull), Patrick Wadden (Belmont Abbey College).

Seán Duffy is a fellow of Trinity College Dublin where he is associate professor of medieval history. He is editor of the Medieval Dublin series. Susan Foran is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Bergen, where she works on chivalry and national historical writing in late medieval Scotland.