Exciting news! I wrote a chapter for a new book, The Cambridge History of Arthurian Literature and Culture, just out from Cambridge University Press (2026). Related to this blog, I explore the global economic links of various luxuries that are an integral part of medieval romances: silks, spices, armor, golden grails, lapis lazuli, etc. In turn, the stories (romances) that reference these lux items created greater demand for these global goods and interest in the faraway places from which they came.

Even in medieval times, there was a global economy. Merchants, diplomats, itinerate storytellers, warriors, slaves, pilgrims–medieval people did not all stay in one place!

For further reading: Anthony Bale, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes (2023). See also, Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe. This is an “as told to” book from around 1400 and isn’t easy to read–it is digressive, a little crazy, religious–there are episodic crying jags– but it is also the first autobiography written in English. It is written by a woman who was a brewer, a wife, had 12 children, possibly suffered a psychotic break after one of her childbirths, and then . . . took off for a pilgrimage to Rome. Wouldn’t you??

For now, you can find a summary of my essay, “Arthurian Romance in the Global Middle Ages,” here.

The two-volume series is titled The Cambridge History of Arthurian Literature and Culture, ed. by Raluca L. Radulescu and Andrew Lynch (Cambridge University Press, 2026), 2 vols. There are many wonderful essays in this collection. Perhaps you can request it for your library?

Here is an academic summary of my essay:

Arthurian romance is quintessentially a literature of mobility; not only a literature of the transportive and ephemeral nature of love, but also an apex of unnamed long-distance economic networks. These networks provided an understructure for the Arthurian corpus, one that reinforced an appetite for global luxury goods and that fuelled an economy of pleasure. While narrating the physical mobility of knights and the emotional mobility of the desire for, attainment and loss of love, Arthurian romance also celebrated and accelerated the exchange of prestige goods through the networks of the Global Middle Ages. The acquisition and ephemerality of material objects and literary motifs from diverse cultures links the local and imaginative spaces of Arthurian narratives with global commerce.