This book argues that the image of medieval England created by writers of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries was deeply informed by medieval and modern Scandinavia. Protestant and monarchical, the Scandinavian region became an image of Britain's noble past and an affirmation of its current global status.

Northern memories provocatively argues that much of what English writers of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries remembered about medieval England in fact came by way of medieval and modern Scandinavia. These memories, in turn, figured into something even broader.

Protestant and fundamentally monarchical, the Nordic countries constituted a politically kindred spirit, in contrast with France, Italy, and Spain. Along with the so-called Celtic fringe and overseas colonies, Scandinavia became one of the external reference points for the forging of the United Kingdom, providing both an image of Britain's noble past and an affirmation of its current global status, and turning trips there into rides on a time machine. The book's approach to the Anglo-Scandinavian past addresses the role of Nordic materials in framing conceptions of the English Middle Ages and positions the literature of medievalism not as the origin of modern Anglo-Nordic interests but as a recurrence of cultural concerns that animated early modern politics, science, and natural history.

Emphasizing multilingual non-literary traditions such as travel writing and ethnography, and focusing on four topics - natural history, ethnography, moral character, and literature - Northern memories examines how texts reproduced shared tropes and outlooks and on how this reproduction cumulatively furthered larger cultural ideas.