Mountains, identity and the legend of King Brennus in the early modern English imaginary

This chapter explores Renaissance English attitudes towards mountains, focusing on the contrasting mountain ascents, and their Latin source texts, featured in John Higgins’s ‘Tragedy of King Brennus’ (1587). This text is used to posit two distinct models for reading mountains’ significance to early modern literary investigations of personal and national identity. Both see British/English nationhood defined in relation to ancient and contemporary Europe, and consider what was at stake in the early modern English negotiation of the translatio imperii in these texts’ reception of Roman literature and history. However, the first presents identity inhering in national landscapes: here, the chapter draws on Shakespeare’s Cymbeline to show the relationship of mountain terrain to ‘indigenous’ identities. The second, by contrast, considers mountain landscapes as both limits and conduits for international exchange. As such, mountains contribute to a composite understanding of Renaissance English national identity which both exploits and transcends the gloom/glory dichotomy.