Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England

Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England offers a wide-ranging exploration of hybridity in medieval English literature. Anxiety about hybridity surfaces in characters of mixed ethnic identity in the romances. But anxiety is found also in the intersection of the natural and the supernatural and its site can be located inside the human body’s unstable physical frame, living and dead, as much as in the cultural and social forces at work upon the human body politic at large. Hybridity is unlike other constructs of difference in that, while it is grounded in difference, hybridity points toward sameness. The four types of hybridity studied in medieval English literature show that hybridity can resolve the problems caused by difference. Understanding medieval hybridity can help us to deal with our own contemporary struggles with the mixtures of our own lives and societies.

1. Introduction: Notions of Hybridity.- 2. Mixed Ethnicity in the Romances of Medieval England: The Hybridity of Identity.- 3. Fathers and Mothers: The Case for Hybrid Identity in Medieval Merlin and Melusine Romances.- 4. Monsters and Shapeshifters: The Hybrid Body in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis.- 5. The Living, the Dead, and Those In-Between: The Hybridity of Dying.- 6. Epilogue: Hybridity’s End?

Rosanne Gasse is Professor of English Literature at Brandon University, Canada. Her work has been published in journals such as The Chaucer Review, JEGP, and Enarratio and she is the Reviews Editor for The Canadian Journal of Native Studies.