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Bates David, Liddiard Robert (dir.), East Anglia and its North Sea world in the Middle Ages, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2013, XIV-349 p. ISBN: 9781843838463Compte rendu par/Review by : Richard C. HoffmannThe Medieval ReviewDate : 17 Apr 2014The common intent of this collection's seventeen essays may seem straightforward enough: how did the medieval regional community of East Anglia, the easternmost projection of England, engage with its maritime frontiers? Or is it all that clear? A potentially fecund ambiguity surfaces when the preface announces that "this book sets out to discuss medieval East Anglia" (xiii), while co-editor Robert Liddiard's introduction claims that "this collection... takes the North Sea during the Middle Ages as its central theme..." (3) So, land or sea? Just two paragraphs in Liddiard's fifteen pages do actually discuss the sea; all else is devoted to medieval human connections across it. This is, to be sure, a fair representation of the book itself, where "the North Sea world" is no marine environment but a barren stage where only human actors and artifacts move.Continue la lecture →