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Writing the North of England in the Middle Ages offers a literary
history of the North-South divide, examining the complexities of
the relationship - imaginative, material, and political - between
North and South in a wide range of texts. Through sustained
analysis of the North-South divide as it emerges in the literature
of medieval England, this study illustrates the convoluted dynamic
of desire and derision of the North by the rest of country. Joseph
Taylor dissects England's problematic sense of nationhood as one
which must be negotiated and renegotiated from within, rather than
beyond, national borders. Providing fresh readings of texts such as
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the fifteenth-century Robin Hood
ballads and the Towneley plays, this book argues for the North's
vital contribution to processes of imagining nation in the Middle
Ages and shows that that regionalism is both contained within and
constitutive of its apparent opposite, nationalism.
Early nineteenth-century farmers often sowed their crops on an
arbitrarily chosen day every year. Impatient with this practice,
naturalist Joseph Taylor (c.1761-1844) presents an alternative
method in this work, which first appeared in 1812. He argues that
by studying the atmosphere, the behaviour of animals and the
condition of local flora, a farmer can not only determine the
optimal time for sowing, but also forecast the weather. Including
the Shepherd of Banbury's famous rules for judging changes in the
weather, alongside remarks on the quality of this wisdom, Taylor's
book also draws on a wealth of wider countryside knowledge. He
observes, for example, that the flowering of primroses and lettuce
occurs at such precise times as to be useful for botanical clocks,
while the proximity of bees to their hives and the agitation of
dogs suggest oncoming weather conditions.
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