Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn

This book recovers places in the mental mapping of medieval and Renaissance writers, from Chaucer to Aphra Behn. Beginning with Calais, peopled by the English from 1347 to 1558, and ending with Surinam, traded away for Manhattan in 1667, this well–illustrated book recreates the distinctive cultural life of a range of locations: from Flanders which led the world in technological innovations; to Somerset, which provided a fitting home for Dante; to the Canaries (the Fortunate Islands), which formed the limits of western dreaming.

The book s exploration of premodern places features fascinating vignettes, such as an English merchant learning love songs in Calais, coupled with insights into broader economic narratives of political, technological, religious, and economic change. In particular, it provides long geneaologies of blackness and whiteness, race and slavery, in the premodern world.

List of illustrations.

Introduction.

1. At Calais Gate.

2. In Flaunders.

3. Dante in Somerset.

4. Genoa.

5. Canaries (The Fortunate Islands).

6. Surinam.

Acknowledgments.

Index

David Wallace is Judith Rodin Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He has traveled extensively, exploring the importance of place both for print and documentary radio.

David Wallace s knowledge of European medieval literature is unequalled. His book is a cornucopia of illuminating details, insights and connections that are simply not to be found anywhere else. Terry Jones

My Cinderella prize for the year s most underrated book goes to David Wallace, whose Premodern Places mixes romance and bizarrerie in a study of medieval and Renaissance ideas about geography and locality. Jonathan Keates, The Spectator ′Book of the Year′ feature, 2004

This is one of the sharpest and most imaginative books of literary criticism I′ve read in many years. Peter Hulme, University of Essex

Offering illuminating genealogies for a range of authors and literary texts, Premodern Places radically questions many assumptions about historical as well as geographic boundaries. this book asks both premodernists and postcolonialists to rethink their disciplines and make urgent connections across space and time. Ania Loomba, University of Pennsylvania

a most brilliant representative of Postcolonial Medieval Studies. José Rabasa, University of California