Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle Ages, edited by Aisling Byrne and Victoria Flood, is a very welcome collection of high-quality essays focused on multilingualism in texts from the insular northwest Atlantic region (Britain, Ireland, and Iceland) during the high medieval period. The editors' decision to concentrateon "a zone of contact which has for a long time been understood as possessing a particular coherence" (2) has resulted in a satisfying unity for the volume that is not always achieved in edited collections. Crossing Borders centers largely around texts from Wales (three chapters), Ireland (four chapters), and Iceland (five chapters), with one (excellent) outlier examining Anglo-French relations via Latin abuse poetry from the Hundred Years War. The "borders" of the volume's title are "linguistic, political, and national" (1). This is certainly true in the scope of the collection's focus, but the overwhelming impression left by individual essays is of the importance of multilingualism in the region under study. As Byrne and Flood write in their fineintroduction, such "cross-border" scholarship has historically been fraught with both practical and political difficulties. Crossing Borders pairs nicely with an earlier Brepols volume, Conceptualizing Multilingualism in England, c.800-c. 1200, ed. Elizabeth M. Tyler (2011), to give a fuller picture of multilingualism in the insular world throughout the medieval period. The essays in Crossing Borders are well-balanced across Wales, Ireland, and Iceland, and the dialogue that emerges from the volume as a whole is a stimulating one. Not every chapter in this collection necessarily takes the same approach or speaks to the same set of concerns, yet combined, they make a compelling case for the insular northwest as an intellectually cohesive region of study. Crossing Borders will no doubt be welcomed by specialists in the regions under study, but I also hope that it will be appreciated by a wider audience as an example of the value of taking a comparative approach.
The volume opens with a set of three essays on Wales. They are focused on three very different topics but together provide a portrait of vibrant intellectual activity, much of which involved multilingualism, in the region. Helen Fulton provides an excellent survey of gentry libraries in medieval Wales and in doing so suggests a new context for two very important anthologies of medieval Welsh literature, the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest. As Fulton notes, investigations of individual libraries in medieval Britain have been patchy and have tended to focus largely on England or Marcher families. Her important study fills this gap and underscores the vibrancy of literary activity among the Welsh gentry, including its "multilingual and multicultural" nature (23). Elena Parina's contribution discusses the translation of two medical texts on complexion and diet, Y Pedwar Gwlybwr and Rhinweddau Bwydydd, into Welsh. Her essay demonstrates not only the vibrancy of medieval Welsh medicinal and scientific interests, but also the utility of multilingualism at work as authors adapted their source texts for local use: a Latin antidote for a scorpion sting, for instance, becomes the understandably desirable Welsh-language treatment for the bite of an adder. Victoria Flood's contribution on "Early Tudor Translation of English Prophecy in Wales" presents a careful study of the political context for such translations, asking "Why then, were these prophecies translated at all?" (70) when the vast majority were quite faithful to their source texts. Flood argues that these translations were "an act of cultural reclaiming," "an assertion of Welsh as a political language," and "an act of geopolitical recentring" (70) that affirmed Welsh political identity even in the face of English source material. Joanna Bellis's engaging study of Latin abuse poetry from the Hundred Years War pairs nicely with Flood's piece, illustrating another facet of multilingual texts in the political sphere. Asking whether these works were "propaganda or parody," Bellis suggests that their ironic multilingualism works to collapse the "ostensible difference between the 'otherness' and 'similitude' that they establish" (91).
Four chapters on translated works in later medieval Ireland form a second natural cluster. Erich Poppe's thoughtful piece focuses on the Gabháltais Shearluis Mhóir, an Early Modern Irish translation of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle. Like Flood, Poppe asks what we can learn from a text which is "a fairly literal, or perhaps better faithful, translation of the Latin source" which leaves "little scope for an analysis in terms or adaptation and rewriting" (134). Poppe turns to the contemporary context of this work's translation to demonstrate a vibrant intellectual climate in the insular world at the time during which it was produced. Aisling Byrne likewise considers the broader context of multilingual translation activity in her examination of "Translating the Crusades in Late Medieval Ireland," focusing mainly on late medieval Irish translations of popular romances Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, Octavian, and Fierabras as well as the translation of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle also discussed by Poppe. Byrne provides the political and intellectual context for Irish interest in these works and concludes that there is evidence for the production of an Irish "Charlemagne cycle" in the decades surrounding the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. The Irish section concludes with a pair of essays by Mariamne Briggs and Julie LeBlanc which consider the translation of classical material into an Irish context. Briggs's focus is the Middle Irish prose translation of Statius's Thebaid [also known by its editorial title Togail na Tebe]. This text differs greatly from its source, and Briggs focuses on the Irish author's omission of passages invoking the Muses, arguing that this decision marks "a move towards a more objective narrative" (197). LeBlanc also examines differences between a source text (Virgil's Aeneid) and its Irish translation (Imtheachta Aeniasa), though this essay considers additions rather than subtractions, focusing on four scenes added by the translator. In taking into accountwhat these scenes reveal of the redactor's—and audience's—interests, LeBlanc concludes that "Imtheachta Aeniasa is more than a mere translation or sufficient adaptation: it is a work of Irish literature in its own right" (220).
Finally, a group of essays concerned with Old Norse / Icelandic literature forms the third significant intellectual cluster in this volume. Chapters bridging multiple sections are offered by Rory McTurk and Matthias Egeler, the first of which focuses on "Contrapuntal Alliteration in Piers Plowman and Skaldic Poetry." McTurk uses a study of contrapuntal alliteration (two stressed syllables in the first half-line alliterate with the first stressed syllable in the second half-line) in the Middle English Piers Plowman to highlight the same phenomenon in skaldic poetry, concluding that "a study of Langland's poetry in relation to skaldic poetry may help to bring to light certain hitherto unnoticed features of the latter" (129). Egeler offers a comparative study with a different methodology, arguing for the direct influence of medieval Irish literature on Icelandic texts. Picking up on a suggestion initially made by Sophus Bugge, Egeler argues that the concept of the Ódáinsakr ("Field of the Not-Dead"), a paradisiacal land where one can gain immortality which is found in several Old Norse texts, was originally derived from early medieval Irish immrama or voyage tales due to the frequency of contact with Ireland during Iceland's settlement period. Sif Rikhardsdottir's study uses the lens of emotion to examine French and Anglo-Norman cultural imperium in the insular North. By examining how emotion is depicted in both native sagas and translated romances in Iceland, Rikhardsdottir concludes that "by curtailing and adapting the emotive scripts to suit the sociocultural or literary conventions of their receiving audiences, the translated romances shifted the fundamental tenet of the emotive subtext of their sources" (272). Sarah Baccianti examines the Old Norse translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's De gestis Britonum—Breta sǫgur—as an act of Scandinavian appropriation. The translator, attentive to his audience's interests, created "a text with its own authority that fits within a medieval pan-European vogue for the translation and the creation of world histories that traced national and dynastic roots to the ancient Trojans" (294). Finally, Sabine Heidi Walther studies the transformation undergone by classical hero Hercules during the translation of De excidio Troiae historia by "Dares Phrygius" into Old Norse as the Trójumanna saga. Trójumanna saga gives Hercules a far greater role than its source material, and Walther's study of one redaction of this text concludes that its author augmented the character of Hercules under the influence of French sources, transforming him into a model of chivalric aristocratic virtues as he did so.
Crossing Borders is a cohesive collection that makes a compelling case for both the intellectual vibrancy of the insular northwest Atlantic as a region and the importance of multilingualism in it. This volume will be welcomed by specialists and newcomers to the field alike. I expect that it will be widely cited and hope that it will inspire similar studies in the future.