Uncommon Fatherland: Medieval English Perceptions of Rome and Italy (Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1999, 317 pp.).

'This dissertation argues that the late medieval English literature depicts Rome and Italy with the same cultural anxieties found in works that imagine the Muslim world. Although partially Orientalizing Rome and Italy, however, the alliterative Morte Arture, John Lydgate's Fall of Princes and John Capgrave's Solace of Pilgrims also acknowledge their centrality in the European cultural imagination... The third chapter shows how in the Solace of Pilgrims Capgrave celebrates Christian Rome's triumph over its earlier pagan identity but also scorns the current barbarity, weak faith and confabulating tendencies of contemporary Romans. The chapter concludes by considering the two different ideas of Rome present in Capgrave's pilgrimage manual and the Book of Margery Kempe'.