ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes the Middle English Mediterranean as a lost heritage that allows people to turn lostness itself to more productive literary ends. It traces debates about the Mediterranean across three late medieval Middle English works: Chaucer's House of Fame, the Digby Mary Magdalene, and The Boke of John Mandeville. For late medieval English writers, the political space of the Mediterranean is a site of networks that are simultaneously figurally central and frustratingly unavailable. By exploiting the Mediterranean as site, narrative agent, and organizing metaphor, late medieval Middle English texts speak to recent developments in Mediterranean studies that resist national and disciplinary boundaries. The Mediterranean is many things for Chaucer, depending on the historical period. The House of Fame’s Adriane joins hands with a number of abandoned or wandering Mediterranean women in the poem, all of whom exert a kind of compulsion over the narrator.
