Three focuses of British travel writing from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were natural history, science, and recreation. Throughout this period and often independently of one another, widely separated writers on these topics utilised a set of consistent yet contradictory images to represent their experiences. In explicit detail they described beauty but also filth, and dangers to which they responded with expressions of awe, uncertainty, and disgust. From these contradictions emerge coherent ways to look at the modern world – especially the contrasts between Britain and Scandinavia – as well as to remember the world from which it developed. The collective impact of replicated tropes rendered visits to the modern-day Nordic regions as rides on a time machine to the British medieval past.

Northern Memories concerns how English writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries remembered Scandinavia, especially Iceland and Norway; how by remembering Scandinavia and its people they furthered contemporary sentiments not simply about that region but about the emerging global role of Great Britain; and how they often did so by selectively collapsing the contemporary world and the Middle Ages, providing memories of both in the process. More than simply a literary issue, the construction of an Anglo-Scandinavian ethnicity served as an organising principle for cultural politics, providing ways to read past and present alike as testaments to British exceptionalism. Much of what English critics of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries remembered about medieval English geography, history, religion, and literature, they remembered by means of Iceland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. As British visitors and thinkers encountered the Scandinavian ‘present’ in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, they similarly found evidence for the British past. Rather than a source study that traces the genealogy of cultural ideas, political contacts, or literary influences, this book is above all a theoretical inquiry about the persistence, independent imitation, and reproduction of Nordic tropes for the imagining of Britain and its medieval past.

Historical memory is situational, the result of a cultural process of construction and representation. As obviously ruinous, perverse, and even demonic as the Nazis’ methods and beliefs were, their use of Nordic imagery and ideas depends on many of the same kinds of historiographic manoeuvres and even some of the same tropes that are traced in this book. As much as the Nazis’ notions of world dominance differed from the aspirations of every English writer considered, both groups shared the strategy of incorporating a Nordic past in their cultural memories. What might be called a parallel descent from Germanic prehistory thus has unsettling epistemic implications. If memory is conditioned not only by what is being remembered but by who is doing the remembering, as many critics maintain, then the process itself – the tropes it uses and the fact that it combines them – is in some ways subject-neutral. It is such malleability and reproducibility that would allow for the creation of competing views from the same recirculated images – totalitarianism as well as fantasy. These may be the qualities that give historical memory its greatest power.

Chapter 2 investigates how translators reconstructed the parable of the Prodigal Son in light of sacramental penance. In the centuries following the Fourth Lateran Council, the parable clashed with church doctrine insofar as the Gospel story features forgiveness of sin before confession and without restitution for the son’s misdeeds. Consequently, when translating the Prodigal Son into devotional works like The South English Ministry and Passion, The Mirour of Mans Saluacioune, and Book to a Mother, authors incorporated confession and sometimes even satisfaction into their retellings. Based on this integration of contemporary doctrine, retellings may appear to subordinate a scriptural story to institutional teachings and ecclesiastical power. But the chapter shows that the parables emphasise divine agency and the power of the individual penitent far more than the role of a priest. It especially focuses on the retelling in Book to a Mother – a potentially Lollard form of living that includes the most extensive integration of sacramental teachings into the parable. Although the retelling affirms the contemporary sacrament, it suggests that by translating the parable’s events into acts of penance, lay men and women may become biblical exemplars who preach the gospel more authoritatively than many priests.

It is usually assumed that the maidens in Chaucer’s Sir Thopas who ‘mourn’ for him ‘when hem were bet to slepe’ are a parodic misunderstanding of the habit of romance knights of mourning for their ladies. This chapter argues that the maiden in love who passes sleepless nights lamenting is characteristic of a significant proportion of the metrical romances that Chaucer is imitating; it is the number of the maidens, the moralistic attitude to their sleep and the suppression of their agency that constitute the joke.

This chapter considers renderings of the fall of the angels narrative in the homilies of Ælfric and Archbishop Wulfstan of York. Ælfric explores the complex relationship between sovereigns and disobedient subjects, imagining the angelic fall as a crisis of individual agency. Wulfstan adopts Ælfric’s approach in the wake of the viking invasions. With Wulfstan, I work to overturn some predominant readings of his famous Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (namely, that he characterises the vikings as heralds of Antichrist). Armed with the doctrine of replacement as his rhetorical weapon, Wulfstan suggests that the English body politic has instead come to resemble the rebel order of angels, implying that the vikings could supplant them and take their place as ‘replacements,’ inbound colonisers destined for heavenly seats. Just as the originally pagan Anglo-Saxons had been replacements for the sinful Christian Britons, Wulfstan urges Anglo-Saxon Christians not to cede to the vikings their providential role in salvation history.

This chapter argues that the poet of Genesis B imagines Satan’s crime as a failure to accept sovereign checks on his power and limits upon his territorial ambitions. Irish vernacular adaptations similarly depict how Satan views humankind as rival-inheritors of lands to which he feels entitled. These accounts, found in texts such as Saltair na Rann and Lebor Gabála, derive from the apocryphal ‘Life of Adam and Eve’. We see how both Anglo-Saxon and Irish authors adapt apocryphal traditions for a powerful socio-political effect, imagining features of their own ecclesiastical and secular administrations as mimetic representations of divine structures.