Assoc. Professor Lee Manion's second book explores relationship between politics and storytelling
Associate Professor of English Lee Manion published his second book, The Recognition of Sovereignty: Politics of Empire in Early Anglo-Scottish Literature, with Cambridge University Press earlier this year.
Drawing on Scottish and English texts both familiar and obscure, Manion—recipient of the Kemper Award in 2023 and MU A&S Associate Professor of the Year in 2021—examines the fraught development of sovereignty discourse, paying particular attention to the role played by narratives of recognition.
In this timely work, Manion asserts that “sovereignty needs narrative because stories about the past provide the evidence that constitutes legitimacy and authority in the present.”
Situating medieval and early modern Scotland and England in a broader European milieu, The Recognition of Sovereignty shows how established discourse prevented more equitable political unions.
“The Recognition of Sovereignty investigates how governments, lawyers, and authors in the late medieval and early modern periods…supported sovereignty claims with what they considered to be evidence, not just raw force, through competing narratives of the past.” Manion explains in his book’s introduction.
Manion goes on to describe The Recognition of Sovereignty’s method as “interdisciplinary, combining aspects of formalism, intellectual history, international relations (IR), and empire studies across linguistic traditions.”
With this nuanced approach, The Recognition of Sovereignty steps into current debates over the relationship between politics and storytelling, shedding light on the consequential relationship between literary writing and political thinking, a relationship as significant in the world of medieval Europe as in the present.
The research behind this book also informs Manion’s teaching. As he notes, “Students studying stories of King Arthur with me learn about many of the wonderful oddities of the medieval past. One is how various English monarchs claimed to be descended from Arthur to justify their attempts to annex Scotland.” Such claims appear across a wide range of literature, art, manuscript illustrations, and historiography, creating further opportunities for student research.
In addition, the Scottish counterarguments, which feature in other of Manion’s classes that bridge the English Department and the MU Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, express principles of consent and equality in governance more commonly found in modern political thought, including during the American Revolution. The US national holiday “Tartan Day,” celebrated on April 6, celebrates this surprising parallel.
Manion’s teaching interests include romance, Chaucer, Older Scots verse and prose, Shakespeare, Spenser, Wroth, and topics in legal and political thought. He has taught courses on Monster Lit, Arthurian Legends, Shakespeare’s Comedies and Histories, and Medieval and Renaissance Romance among others.
