AMONGST the basic interpretative strategies of cultural studies is the principle that, in Albrecht Classen's words, ‘the examination of [the] highly problematic clash between self and other represents a major vehicle to gain deeper insight into a people and its culture’. In recent studies of medieval history and culture, this examination has typically been undertaken with reference to extremes of otherness, either to the pagans, werewolves and monsters who inhabit the edges of the world or to the enemies within, in the shape of lepers, sodomites and Jews. However, a study of encounters with more mundane forms of otherness can be equally informative. Geographical writing, ‘the textualization of territories and the territorialization of texts’, is a literary genre of obvious value for such an investigation of localised identities. This chapter attempts to map some of the contours of East Anglia's distinctive and dynamic late medieval culture by examining how a few of its denizens read and wrote of places which were regular foreign destinations, in particular the city of Rome.

East Anglians were well placed to learn about the wider world. The region's literary culture included an interest in geographical writing, evident in the existence of a manuscript such as BL MS Harley 3954, a fifteenth-century East Anglian collection in a portable holster format which includes an illustrated version of Mandeville's Travels. Such textual knowledge would be supplemented by the reports of travellers. East Anglia's ports, cities, monastic houses and shrines were popular destinations for merchants and pilgrims from elsewhere in England and in Europe. Pilgrims from northern Europe heading for Walsingham landed at Lynn, and both Norwich and Lynn had settled communities of ‘strangers’. John Metham thought it plausible to claim that ‘as yt fortunyd, ther come rydyng/ To Norwyche a Greke’, and that this visitor helped him with the translation of the romance Amoryus and Cleopes. When East Anglians themselves travelled, as they often did, they might become all the more conscious of their regional loyalties when away from home. Derek Pearsall suggests that Londoners such as Chaucer and Langland regarded Norfolk people as ignorant parvenus: if so, the East Anglian visitors were capable of recognising and resisting such prejudice. Norwich’.9