THE BRITANNIAS: AN ARCHIPELAGO’S TALE BY ALICE ALBINIA

A revelatory portrait of Britain through its islands,The Britanniasweaves history, myth, and travelogue to rewrite the story of this island nation.

From Neolithic Orkney, Viking Shetland, and Druidical Anglesey to the joys and strangeness of modern Thanet,The Britanniasexplores the farthest reaches of Britains island topography, once known by the collective term Britanniae (the Britains). This expansive journey demonstrates how the smaller islands have wielded disproportionate influence on the mainland, becoming the fertile ground of political, cultural, and technological innovations that shaped history throughout the archipelago.

In an act of feminist inquiry, personal adventure, and literary quest, Alice Albinia embarks on a series of journeys that traverse Britain and reach beyond its contemporary bordersfrom Europe to the Caribbean, Ireland to Scandinavia. She walks the coastlines of Lindisfarne, sails through the Hebrides archipelago, and bikes into Westminster at dawn. As she takes us across extravagantly varied island topographies and surveys centuries of history, Albinia ranges between languages and genres, and through disparate island cultures. She talks to stubbornly independent islanders and searches for archaeological and linguistic traces of island identities, discovering distinct traditions and resistance to mainland control.

Trespassing into the past to understand the present,The Britanniasuncovers an enduring and subversive mythology of islands ruled by women. Albinia finds female independence woven through Roman colonial reports and Welsh medieval poetry, Restoration utopias and island folk songs. These neglected epics offer fierce feminist countercurrents to mainstream narratives of British identity and shed new light on womens status in the body politic today.

Vivid, perceptive, and disruptive,The Britanniasboldly upturns established truths about Britain while revealing its suppressed and forgotten beauty.

1 map; 14 black-and-white illustrations

HARDBACK BOOK