The trouble with Britain

Abstract

This essay argues that scholars have overlooked the analytical power, complexity, and useful mobility of the category of ‘Britain.’ I argue, accordingly, for a reconsideration of the ways that an attentive appreciation of the diverse medieval uses of ‘Britain’ or the ‘British Isles’ might defamiliarize geographic relations both within and among the islands of the British archipelago. Drawing on various works that trouble the singularity of those terms, I trace a few lines of association across areas usually understood as utterly different, culminating in a reading of the geographic confusions of the Middle Scots Arthurian text, The Knightly Tale of Sir Gologras and Gawain. In that text, European location emerges, plausibly, as a ‘British,’ that is, a Scottish, question.