Narratives of medieval nation and national medievalism

Recent work in medieval studies, such as Thoriac Turville-Petre's England the Nation (1996), has successfully challenged assumptions that an sense of nationhood did not exist in the Middle Ages. My work contributes to this growing body of scholarship, as well as to studies of medievalism, by focusing on two main issues: the expression of nationalistic sentiment through the proliferation and dissemination of newly-created foundation myths in the fourteenth century; and the use of the Middle Ages as a foundation myth for subsequent expressions of national identity.
The first article focuses on the appropriation of the medieval past - both historical and fictional - to articulate a nationalistic agenda as presented in the mass media of film. D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) draws on the Middle Ages as a point of origin for its powerful narratives of nationhood from popular and from academic contexts. In this article, I examine the uses of the medieval in the articulation of Griffith's pro-South, pro-slavery agenda by discussing how the Middle Ages are evoked in conjunction with a range of different temporalities related, respectively, to modernity, race, the American South, the Anglo-Saxon American and female virginity. In these intersections, 1 show how the medieval both founds and undermines the providential vision of America that Griffiths proposes.

The second article considers the strategies of expressing and creating a sense of nationhood through the example of the Albina myth that emerged in the fourteenth century. Whereas previous chronicles, since the twelfth century, had drawn on the Brutus origin myth made popular by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the early-fourteenth century witnessed the emergence of an origin myth that narrates the founding of Albion by rebellious, sinful women, before Brutus arrived to make it Britain. This new foundation myth circulated widely, and in all of the three languages being used in England at the time. It comprises a host of different generic registers, tropes and themes. This article reads the Albina myth in relation to its contemporary socio-political and narrative contexts, particularly in relation to memorial practices and medieval theories of memory. It argues that the myth was not primarily meant to be read as 'historical' in the sense of an actual occurrence, but that it provides a mode of reading national history that offers its audiences a memorial framework within which to remember the nation in specific ways. As such, 1 argue that the Albina myth is to be understood primarily as a potent and effective mnemonic tool.
The third article moves on the from the second, focusing on the changes / both in the definition of Englishness and the understanding of the role origin myths played in national historiography / that took place in the fifteenth to the early-seventeenth centuries. 1 examine the questions: How did English chroniclers and antiquarians address national continuity in a period of profound change and rupture? How were these changes reflected in the ongoing use and growing debate about the truth value of English origin myths, such as those of Albina, Brutus and Arthur? In addition, 1 look at the emergence of the idea of "the Middle Ages' in this period as a point of origin in relation to which Englishness could increasingly be defined. This article departs from the idea that historical consciousness became more recognisable 'modem' in its methodology during this period; instead, I suggest that what changed was an understanding of memorial practices and the ways in which historical and mnemonic frameworks were capable of relaying and narrating the national past and also its present and future.