The Presence of Rome in Medieval and Early Modern Britain

This book explores the cultural and intellectual stakes of medieval and renaissance Britain's sense of itself as living in the shadow of Rome: a city whose name could designate the ancient, fallen, quintessentially human power that had conquered and colonized Britain, and also the alternately sanctified and demonized Roman Church. Wallace takes medieval texts in a range of languages (including Latin, medieval Welsh, Old English and Old French) and places them in conversation with early modern English and humanistic Latin texts (including works by Gildas, Bede, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bacon, St. Augustine, Dante, Erasmus, Luther and Montaigne). 'The Ordinary', 'The Self', 'The Word', and 'The Dead' are taken as compass points by which individuals lived out their orientations to, and against, Rome, isolating important dimensions of Rome's enduring ability to shape and complicate the effort to come to terms with the nature of self and the structure of human community.

• Provides a nuanced and multi-disciplinary account of the persistence of Rome in Britain
• Puts the persistence of Rome in Britain in an extremely wide historical-cultural frame of reference, keeping texts written in Britain in dialogue with continental texts ranging from antiquity to the early modern period
• Places medieval texts in a range of languages (Latin, medieval Welsh, Old English, Old French) in conversation with texts written in early modern English and humanistic Latin