Chapter 1 - Introduction: Region and Nation in England’s North–South Divide

Summary

The introductory chapter of this study parses the identity of the medieval North of England as a region desired for its role in defense at the Anglo-Scottish border and for the devotional culture cultivated, which significantly impacted the rest of England, and derided as a region defensive of its own autonomy, in frequent rebellion and, furthermore, a seat for lingering Catholicism in the wake of religious reform. For these reasons, this chapter claims, the North is necessary for understanding the larger negotiations of English identity and the English nation ongoing in the Middle Ages. The regionalism evident in the North of England and its literature both contests and, in a convoluted sense, enables an emergent English nationalism. If the English North–South divide is conceived by critics as a post-industrial phenomenon, then this chapter argues that the rift, and the discourse that makes it, grows out of these contests between region and nation in the Middle Ages.