Exciting news! I wrote a chapter, “Arthurian Literature and the Global Middle Ages,” for 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 as well as 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!

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?

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

In brief: Arthurian romance is quintessentially a literature of mobility–one that explores the ephemeral nature of love but that is also an apex of unnamed long-distance economic networks. Medieval romances celebrated and accelerated the exchange of prestige goods through the networks of the Global Middle Ages.

For further reading:

Anthony Bale, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes (2023).

Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe (1400). 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??