Theorizing Insular Exceptionalism in the Early Medieval North Atlantic

Insularity, I posit, is an unfortunately under-examined term in Old English studies. Scholars trained in Western academic traditions often evoke the term in reference to the islands of the North Atlantic to mark the ways in which veins of Christianity, and subsequently material and literary culture, developed differently in the islands than they did on the European continent. Despite the frequent evocation of insularity, there is limited scholarship that takes seriously the colonial implications of what it means to be an island. In “No Island is an Island,” Vicente Diaz (Pacific Islander) claims that “[i]slands and ‘Islanders’ are, in a fundamentally disturbing way, products of continental and imperialist thinking” (102). The North Atlantic, whether medieval or modern, does not, however, suffer from these constructions in the same way that places like Micronesia and other Pacific Island nations do. The North Atlantic, indeed, is a colonizing force that prescribes “islandness” to these other islands, while claiming a sense of insular exceptionalism for itself

Ancient history · Atlantic World · Exceptionalism · Political science · Geology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Oceanography