Middle English romance explored issues of selfhood and human connection that are still vital today as we navigate our individual and collective identities. People of medieval Britain were aware of their separation from mainland Europe, even as they forged connections across the known world. In a startling parallel with modern migrant experiences, characters in romance texts endured harrowing journeys in unseaworthy vessels, landing on foreign shores and hoping to find a welcoming home. Chaucer’s Custance in the Man of Law’s Tale, Emaré, Octavian’s empress, and many more fourteenth-century heroines are cast out to sea with their infant children. Tristan asks for a boat and a harp when he is sure that he is about to die, but instead washes up on Irish shores and falls in love with Isolde. Havelok, the Danish heir, is brought to Grimsby by sea to escape his wicked usurper and becomes king of both England and Denmark. In each of these tales, the sea is integral to a change of identity that sees these characters becoming part of a new community.
The late Middle Ages has long been understood as the era of the ‘medieval sea kings’, with the sea being instrumental in war, trade, and politics. But this ignores the contribution that women made to these important developments in Britain’s role in a burgeoning global society. Queens and noblewomen, such as Anne of Bohemia and Eleanor of Castile, also made significant sea journeys, as they travelled to marry, unite families, and secure territories. These women were a significant facet in the manoeuvrings of patriarchal society, but they also managed their own lands, created buildings and institutions, and forged relationships in their own rights.
The women characters in romance who travel by sea reflect the lives of their historical counterparts, albeit in a fantastical and fictional way. Custance, in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, is a Roman noblewoman sent to marry a Syrian sultan and convert him to Christianity; instead, she is shipwrecked and eventually washes up in Northumberland, where she marries the king and converts pagan Britain to Christianity. Her jealous mother-in-law banishes her and she sets sail with her infant son, coming to shore in Rome, where she earns her keep doing embroidery in a merchant’s house. She is reunited with both her father and her husband when they travel to Rome, and the family is restored.
Chaucer’s heroine is potentially based on the sixth-century Frankish princess, Bertha of Kent, who was instrumental in the conversion of Britain. Custance’s adventures show how important medieval women were to national and international politics, the development of nations, and the spread of Christianity. Additionally, we are drawn into Custance’s inner world, feeling pangs of empathy as she is sent to marry a strange sultan, forced to leave her family, and tries to survive with her infant son on hostile waters. Romance readers would see their own relationships reflected in the narrative, and recognise episodes from their own lives in her trials.
These stories are the basis of my Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship research, as I investigate how Middle English romance used the sea to explore connections between peoples and territories. While historians chart the practical repercussions of human interaction with the sea, I focus on what literature can reveal about how medieval men and women integrated the sea into their understanding of themselves, their communities, and the wider world. My research argues that the sea was integral to medieval English identity, both nationally and individually, and that analysing romances texts reveals much about women’s lives and how English readers understood themselves in relation to global concerns.
As part of my project, I commissioned Dr Teresa Pilgrim, a creative practitioner, intersectional transfeminist scholar, and activist with experience of working with refugee communities, to develop and deliver a series of creative-critical zine workshops with the Oxford-based charity, Refugee Resource. In their workshops, Dr Pilgrim combines medieval and modern texts, written by (and about) women and nonbinary people, especially women of colour and queer nonbinary people, to offer generative perspectives for inclusive audiences.
Zines are short, self-crafted magazines created using curated materials, original artwork, creative writing, and other text. In Dr Pilgrim’s workshops, zines function as transformative forms of resistance. The aim of these workshops is to give displaced women a creative medium to explore their experiences of migration, belonging, and community. We have been doing these workshops with the women’s group at Refugee Resource for two years, and plan to continue for the third year of my project. The positive impact that the workshops have had for the women is evident, and we’ve been welcomed into the group, drawing us into their community. In combining my research with public engagement, facilitated by Dr Pilgrim, and supported by the women’s generous and generative involvement, I show that the experiences, desires, and ideas of fourteenth-century people and communities are not that different to our own lives, connecting people across time and space.
— Dr Kirsty Bolton
