Entangled Displacements

"Entangled Displacements" offers a new way of exploring medieval cultures through the refugees they create. The book examines lyrical texts, romances and epics from Western, Northern and Southern Europe of the ninth to the thirteenth centuries to uncover a literary discourse of displacement. Early medieval poetry in particular allows us to glimpse how individual refugees negotiated their place in textual and political communities. From their solitary efforts at belonging, the book moves to shared forms of displacement and queries the possibilities of being-in-common in exile. While bands of destitute outlaws experiment with alternative forms of communal life in isolation, exiled warlords develop imperial ambitions through aggressive conquests and crusades. Both individual and collective experiences imagined in medieval literature reveal how crucially displacement intersects with other critical interests such as authorship, textual form, gender, and postcolonial perspectives. As the book’s comparative, multilingual corpus shows, exile is not a marginal concern, but lies at the very heart of the medieval textual cultures we have reconstructed.