UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Troubled Identities:

Saracen Alterity and Cultural Hybridity in Middle English Romance

By

Jenna Louise Stook

A THESIS

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DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

OCTOBER, 2010

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1+1 Canada ABSTRACT

Middle English romances usually cast the Saracen, the medieval western term for

Muslim, as a figure of absolute difference who is diametrically opposed to the heroic

Christian knight. The conventional Saracen has up to now most frequently been interpreted in the context of crusading propaganda, incipient English nationalism, and England's proto- colonial enterprise. This study responds to this previous scholarship, and argues that such nationalist and colonialist projects are attended with identity uncertainty.

Middle English romances dramatize the moment of cross-cultural contact through their depictions of Saracen conversion, intermarriage between Christians and Saracens, and acculturation to a new community. Contact with the other calls into question the rigidity of the (imagined) boundaries delimiting identity. This study examines the complexity of medieval identity formation through representations of Saracen alterity. Rather than focusing on the stereotypical Saracen, this study instead examines depictions of the desirable Saracen and the Saracenized Christian found in The King of Tars, Beues ofHamtoun, the Otuel and

Ferumbras romances, and Richard Coer de Lyon. These characters are best understood as figures of hybridity who frustrate neat categorizations of identity, and who expose the fragility of classificatory boundaries because they threaten to dissolve the border between self and other.

This study, in its consideration of identity and differentiation, takes up Bruce

Holsinger's challenge to medievalists to make "a significant impact on the methods, historical purview, and theoretical lexicon of postcolonialism." Animated by the theoretical problematics derived from contemporary postcolonial theory, such as the representation of the other and the dynamics of cross-cultural contact, this study reexamines the disciplinary boundaries of postcolonial studies; explores the complexities of medieval considerations of ii selfhood, community and alterity; and historicizes concepts such as race and racial difference. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ii

Table of Contents iv

Chapter One Introduction

Chapter Two The Genesis of an Idea: The Saracen Other 16

Chapter Three Medieval Categories of Difference and the Discourse of Race 31

Chapter Four Transgressive Unions: Female Conversion and Interfaith Marriage in The King of Tars and Beues ofHamtoun 66

Chapter Five "Had he been a Christian, he would have been a worthy baron": The Chivalrous Saracen Warrior in the Otuel and Ferumbras Romances 106

Chapter Six "Going Saracen": Problematic Avatars of Englishness in Beues ofHamtoun and Richard Coer de Lyon 141

Chapter Seven Conclusion 182

Bibliography 191

Appendix A: Romances Discussed in this Study 210

IV 1 Introduction

The term "Saracen," according to Jeffrey Cohen, has "a long history in the Christian vocabulary for the negative representation of difference" ("On Saracen Enjoyment" 114).

While "Saracen" connotes difference, the precise meaning of the word in its medieval context is difficult to ascertain. As Katharine Scarfe Beckett notes, the genuine etymology of the word "Saracen" remains obscure, but Latin authors likely adopted the term "Saraceni" from the Greek in order to refer to nomads of northern Arabia (93). The term "Saraceni" was a "useful term which inhabitants of the Roman Empire used to describe the combination of nomadism and Arab ethnicity" (Beckett 94). Medieval authors developed their own etymology derived from the Old Testament story of Abraham and his wife, Sarah. According to St. Jerome, Saracens erroneously claimed descent from Sarah; consequently, he etymologizes the name "Saraceni" as the "false genealogical claim [made] by the Saracens themselves" (Beckett 97).

The term "Saracen" was used, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED),

"[a]mong the later Greeks and Romans [as] a name for the nomadic peoples of the Syro-

Arabian desert which harassed the Syrian confines of the Empire; hence, an Arab; by extension, a Muslim, esp. with reference to the Crusades" ("Saracen," def. la). According to

Diane Speed, the word "Saracene" referred to an Arab or Muslim, and was present in Old

English as a Latin borrowing from the ninth century onwards. The Middle English word

"Sarasin," and its variant spellings, appears in the mid-thirteenth century. According to the

Middle English Dictionary (MED), "Sarasin" primary refers to a Turk, Arab or Muslim, although it also has the generic meaning of pagan or non-Christian ("Saracen(e), def. a, b, 2 and c).' The MED suggests the meaning of Saracen as Turk, Arab or Muslim was only current from c. 1300 onwards, associating earlier occurrences of the word with "pagan."

Diane Speed, in her article "The Saracens of King Horn" challenges the MED's assertion that "Sarasin" did not connote Muslim until 1300, citing the word's original meaning in

Latin and Old English. Indeed, the terms "Saracen" and "pagan" become, as Tolan observes, interchangeable throughout the Middle Ages (128). The problem of definition is further complicated when we consider "Saracen" referred to both ethnic and religious identity. The term, according to Suzanne Conklin Akbari, "identified its object as religiously different (not a follower of Christ, but of Muhammad), and ethnically or racially different (from Oriental regions)," though she notes that it was never used to identify Christian Arabs (Idols 155).

The term "Saracen" thus "contain[s] within reductive flesh the diversity of the non-Christian world, especially - but not exclusively - Islam" (Cohen, "On Saracen Enjoyment" 114). The

Saracen stands as a figure of religious and racial alterity who, in medieval chansons de geste and romances, is depicted as being diametrically opposed to the Christian knight.

"The Pagans are Wrong": The Conventional Portrait of the Saracen

For further information regarding the origins of the term "Saracen" and its relationship to other terms such as "Agarene" and "Ismaelite," see Beckett 90-104. See also Daniel, Arabs and Medieval Europe 53-54; and Tolan 10-11. This study examines Saracens in selected Middle English romances as (mis)representations of Middle Eastern Muslims. While Norman Daniel and Dorothee Metlitzki draw no distinction between "Saracen" and "Muslim" in their respective studies, often using the terms interchangeably, this study will follow the more recent practice of using "Saracen" to refer solely to representations of Muslims in medieval writings. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, for example, uses "Saracen" instead of "Muslim" in order "to mark the category from the start as produced through the passionate investment of occidental fantasies and desires, rather than as a historical marker of a simply misrecognized identity." See "On Saracen Enjoyment," 136, n. 3. Likewise, I will refer to the "Saracen religion" when discussing the beliefs and practices of the Saracens in medieval vernacular literature. "Islam" and "Muslim" will be used to refer to the religious sect and its adherents which we recognize today as characteristically Islamic. Finally, the name "Muhammad" will be used for the historic or religious person, while the Middle English "Mahoun" will be used when referring to the Saracen god. "Muslim" and "Islam" will be used, in the course of this study, for convenience, although I recognize there is no single Muslim religion. Other generalizations such as "Europe," "Christendom," "Christian," "the West" and "the East" will also be used for the sake of convenience. Roland's rallying cry, "the pagans are wrong and the Christians are right" {Chanson de Roland 1015), epitomizes the image of the Saracen as an intractable other, whose distinguishing feature is his religious beliefs. The Saracen is "wrong" because of his misdirected worship: whereas the Christian knight prays directly to his God and his saints without recourse to the veneration of images, the Saracen is a polytheist who engages in the idolatrous worship of a trinity of gods (usually Mahoun, Apolin, and Tervagant), believing in their divine protection and infallibility. In La Chanson de Roland, for example, the Saracens pray for divine aid prior to battle. Their prayers, however, go unanswered and when the

Saracens suffer a devastating military loss, they resort to abusing their religious idols for their inefficacy: "O, wretched god, why do you cause us such shame? / Why did you permit our king to be destroyed? / Anyone who serves you well receives a poor reward" (2582-84).

The Saracens imagine their gods as feudal overlords who break their feudal contract: despite serving their gods faithfully, the Saracens receive "poor reward" because their gods are, the poem implies, incapable of facilitating Saracen victory in battle and bestowing military honour. Saracen worship is always futile: the Saracen's beliefs and practices, cast as inferior to those of the Christian knight, predestine his downfall. In medieval chansons and romances, the inevitable Christian victory over the Saracens speaks to the "lightness" of

Christian belief and, more importantly, validates the Christian cause of crusade and mission.

Those swearing allegiance to Mahoun originate primarily from two of the continents

- "Affryke" and "Assye" - that make up the tripartite medieval world. The non-Christian world is imagined as being expansive and consequently threatening. The Middle English

Kyng Alisaunder suggests the East stretches from the edge of Europe to the "werldes ende"

(1912). Pagandom, in the Sege ofMelayne, is "lange and wyde" (143-44). Romances not 4 only emphasize the geographical expanse of the pagan world but also the unfathomable size of its population (Cordery 92). Saracen reinforcements seem limitless in Richard Coer de

Lyon. In Sir Ferumbras, the Saracen camp measures six miles around, and the Saracen army is described as being as dense or thick as grass (2378; 3220). The Saracen sultan Laban has at his disposal 100,000 reinforcements in the Sowdone ofBabylone (110); later, another

300,000 gather in preparation for battle against the Christian army (1004). The "numerical advantage of the Saracens is a constant feature" of medieval chansons and romances

(Comfort 631), which serves to dehumanize the Saracen other as well as to heighten the martial and spiritual superiority of the Christian knight.

The Saracens that populate the "painim londe[s]" are often described as black and/or physically monstrous. Vassals of Marsile's uncle in La Chanson de Roland, for example, are a "black race" from "Ethiopia, an accursed land" (1917; 1916). The troops are also described as being differently formed: "They have large noses and broad ears" (1918). Later, Roland encounters these "accursed men, / who are blacker than ink" on the battlefield (1932-33).

The emir Baligant commands a race reminiscent of the fabulous peoples described in the

Marvels of the East tradition: the Milceni who have bristles along their spines (3221-3223).

The Saracens that comprise Laban's army in the Sowdone ofBabylone "[embody] an alien, racialized physicality" insofar as they are described only in terms of their skin colour

(Cohen, "On Saracen Enjoyment" 126): "Some bloo, some yolowe, some blake as more, / some horible and stronge as devel of helle" (1005-06). The giant Estragote, a footsoldier in the Sultan's army, is a monstrous hybrid who is barely human with his dark skin, boar's head, and tremendous strength: "And Estragot with him he mette / With bores hede, blake and donne. / For as a bore an hede hadde / And a grete mace stronge as stele" {Sowdone 346-49). 5

The Sultan of Damascus is also identified as Saracen through his physical difference in The

King of Tars: his skin is described as "blac and lopely" and contrasts with the "unmarked," white body of the Christian princess (926).

Imagined as racially different and as polytheistic idolaters, the purportedly Muslim figures found in Middle English romances are inaccurate as representations of medieval reality. As Jeffrey Cohen observes, medieval Christians were "aware of the wide differences in dermal pigmentation among Muslims" but continued to imagine the Saracen as black, as a

"racialized figure of ultimate difference" ("On Saracen Enjoyment" 117; 115). Depictions of

Saracens as pagan idolaters do not reflect the reality that images or likenesses were prohibited but rather perpetuate popular misconceptions about Islam.3 As the scholarship of

William Comfort, C. Meredith Jones, Norman Daniel and Dorothee Metlitzki has established, the Saracens found in medieval vernacular literature are wholly fictional figures who do not, in the words of Norman Daniel, reflect an "Islamic reality" {Heroes 263).

Edward Said notes in Orientalism the distance between representation and empirical reality:

"we need not look for correspondence between the language used to depict the Orient and the Orient itself, not so much because the language is inaccurate but because it is not even trying to be accurate" (71). Medieval vernacular literature demonstrates no interest in depicting real Muslims as they actually were, or in offering an authentic representation of

Islam.

Interpreting Saracens in Romance:

The stereotypical Saracen found in Middle English romances has up to now most

3 Guibert of Nogent, unlike other chroniclers of the First Crusade, describes Saracens are monotheists and Muhammad as their prophet, not their God. See Tolan, 110. The image of the Saracen as pagan idolater was often perpetuated in spite of the available information regarding Islam and its followers. 6 frequently been interpreted in the context of crusading propaganda, incipient English nationalism, and England's proto-colonial enterprise. Dorothee Metlitzki describes Middle

English romances featuring stock Saracen figures in their narratives as "essentially vehicles of fanatical propaganda in which the moral ideal of chivalry is subservient to the requirements of religion, politics, and ideology" (160). Depictions of the military confrontation between Christians and Saracens function to uphold the ideal of Christian triumphalism (Metlitzki 160).

In addition, critics have identified a nation-building impulse in Middle English romance. Kofi Campbell argues that Beues ofHamtoun "works to create an imagined community of English readers for the text" ("Nation-Building" 206). Such nationalism is informed by its colonialist desire for the territorial expansion of the English Christian realm, and for the religious conversion of Saracens to Christianity. Saracens, according Siobhain

Bly Calkin, participate in the definition and affirmation of Englishness. Medieval romance requires the presence of Saracen adversaries against which the protagonist and the audience can be defined. Geraldine Heng similarly implicates romances in the project of nation- building and empire. Romance is the "genre of the nation," a literary medium that "solicits or invents the cultural means by which the medieval nation might be most productively conceptualized, and projected, for a diverse society of peoples otherwise ranged along numerous internal divides" (Heng, Empire 6).

Romances not only construct and articulate national identity, but also figure conquest and colonization. Indeed, romances perpetuate a cultural fantasy of unrivaled Christian superiority and dominance in which the Saracen plays a crucial role. In this cultural fantasy, the Saracen is the chosen enemy of Christendom. Perceived as a military and spiritual threat, 7

the Saracen bears the brunt of the Christian knight's crusading and missionary efforts. This

vision of the Saracen is one which medieval Christian audiences would have found palatable

(Calkin, Saracens 1): it is a vision in which Christian knights assert their moral and military

superiority over their Saracen rivals; in which Christianity triumphs over the Saracen

religion by converting Saracens and/or by demonstrating the moral bankruptcy of paganism;

in which the East and its people are available for conquest, militarily and culturally; and in

which the West dominates the East, controlling its territory, plundering its riches and ruling

its people.

The romances discussed in this study ostensibly participate in this cultural fantasy.

The Otuel and Ferumbras romances depict Charlemagne as an idealized military leader

entrusted with the defense of Christendom against encroaching armies. He and his Twelve

Peers campaign against the Saracen and conquer Spain, reclaiming it for Christendom. He is

a crusader who not only defends Christendom but also expands its borders through his

martial power and consolidates its superiority through Saracen submission. Beues of

Hamtoun and Richard Coer de Lyon similarly figure English Christian territorial expansion.

As a result of Bevis' military exploits, he gains possession of Saracen territories; through his

marriage to the Saracen princess Josiane, Bevis facilitates the conversion of Saracen

Armenia to Christianity. Richard the Lionheart, on the other hand, campaigns in the Holy

Land in order to regain lost Christian territories. Saracen lands reverting to Christian hands

and Saracen conversion to Christianity are also prominent themes in The King of Tars. Such

nationalist and colonialist projects, however, are attended with identity uncertainty. The

moment of contact, as narrated in the Otuel and Ferumbras romances, Beues of Hamtoun,

The King of Tars, and Richard Coer de Lyon, occasions the fusion of difference. 8

Imaginative Geography and Middle Spaces:

In Orientalism, Said asserts the centrality of the imaginative existence of "the

Orient" to the emergence of Orientalist discourse. Imaginative geographies are discursive formations, "tense constellations of power, knowledge and spatiality" (Gregory 29). Said, drawing on Bachelard's analysis of the "poetics of space," asserts that geographical spaces are imbued with figurative value:

The objective space of a house - its corners, corridors, cellar, rooms - is far

less important than what poetically it is endowed with, which is usually a

quality with an imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel: thus a

house may be haunted, or homelike, or prisonlike, or magical. So space

acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process,

whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into

meaning for us here. {Orientalism 55)

Spaces acquire, rather than innately possess, the range of meanings attributed to them. Just as places are imbued with figurative value through the "poetics of space," imaginative geographies "legitimize a vocabulary, a representative discourse peculiar to the understanding of the Orient that becomes the way in which the Orient is known" (Ashcroft,

Said6\). Orientalism thus becomes a form of "radical realism" by which an aspect of the

Orient is fixed with a word or phrase "which then is considered to have acquired, or more simply be, reality" {Orientalism 72).

As figurations of "place, space and landscape," imaginative geographies "dramatize distance and difference in such a way that 'our' space is divided and demarcated from 'their' 9 space" (Gregory 29). Spatialization is integral to the production of alterity as well as to identity formation. To illustrate this, Said uses the imagined example of a group of people living on a few acres of land who set up boundaries between their land and the territory beyond, the "land of the barbarians" {Orientalism 55). The distinction between the familiar space ("ours") and the unfamiliar space beyond ("theirs") is, as Said notes, an arbitrary geographical distinction having only "fictional reality" (Orientalism 54). He explains, the

"imaginative geography of the 'our land-barbarian land' variety does not require the barbarians [to] acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for 'us' to set up these boundaries in our minds; 'they' become 'they' accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from 'ours'" (Orientalism 54). Because such demarcations are

"less a fact of nature than [... ] a fact of human production" (qtd. in Ashcroft, Said 2), imaginative geography is necessary to the maintenance of the rigid boundaries that differentiate the Occident from the Orient in Orientalist thinking.

Romances' cultural fantasy of Christian dominance comes into being through such an imaginative geography. In other words, this cultural fantasy is predicated on a polarized geography that divides the world. Medieval romances demarcate the familiar (Christian) space from the "unfamiliar" space inhabited by Saracens, imbuing those spaces with relative value. By imagining geographical and cultural boundaries, Middle English romances envision a world of ostensibly "rigid lines and divisions" (Lambert 3) that separates

Christian from Saracen, self from other, 'us' from 'them.' Yet, even as romances assert the separateness of Christians and Saracens, they express anxiety over such delineations.

Imagining otherness, according to Michael Uebel, "necessarily involves constructing the borderlands, the boundary spaces, that contain - in the double sense, to enclose and to 10 include - what is antithetical to the self ("Unthinking" 265). The boundary line simultaneously acts as a "marker of separation" and a "line of commonality" (Uebel,

"Unthinking" 265). Between the imagined (or desired) absolutes of Christian and Saracen, lies an in-between or middle space characterized by impurity. In other words, beneath the cultural fantasy of well-bounded communities, we witness glimpses of the interpenetration of peoples and cultures - what Jeffrey Cohen calls "tempestuous intermediacies" {Hybridity

2) - that undermine clean separations.

"Christian" and "Saracen" are not discrete cultural identities but are always in contact with one another. Mary Louise Pratt argues that interactions between colonizing and colonized peoples challenge the neat division between races and cultures. Inter-cultural negotiation is a constant feature of the contact zone, the social spaces where "disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination" (4). Cross-cultural contact is figured in medieval romances primarily as a military conflict between Christians and Saracens but manifest in depictions of intermarriage, conversion and acculturation.

The contact zone, as Michael Uebel suggests, is "charged with ambivalence - oscillation or hesitation between extremes of attraction and repulsion, of mastery and anxiety" (Uebel, Ecstatic 41). Cross-cultural contact in Middle English romances is equally charged with ambivalence: the Saracen world is alluring but the desire to possess and incorporate it is accompanied by the anxiety that colonial encounters and the cultural interactions they occasion will undermine strict separations. Indeed, the contact zone suggests "the intrinsic hybridity of the frontier" and foregrounds "the interactive dimensions of encountering otherness" {Ecstatic 41). This study focuses attention on the boundary 11 between Christian and Saracen as a zone wherein the "dialectic relations of self and other"

{Ecstatic 41) must be grasped in terms of copresence.

The Usefulness of Postcolonial Theory:

The status of theory in medieval studies, specifically the historical and theoretical appropriateness of incorporating contemporary theory to the study of medieval society and culture, continues to be a matter of critical debate among medievalists. Opinions regarding the relevance of contemporary postcolonial studies to medieval studies have been divisive.

Some remain hesitant to incorporate postcolonial theory into their analysis of premodern texts. Gabrielle Spiegel suggests that postcolonial studies is incompatible with medieval studies; postcolonial theory arises from specific historical struggles, and to superimpose postcolonial theory on periods and peoples for which these theories were never designed, "to which they simply do not apply," only serves to undermine, even devalue, postcolonial studies (Spiegel 250).

But although postcolonial theory does not easily translate to the medieval world and focuses instead on modern manifestations of colonialism, it can be successfully adapted and applied to the premodern as evidenced by growing body of scholarly work in the area of postcolonial medievalism. Jeffrey Cohen, in his introduction to The Postcolonial Middle

Ages, asserts there can be a productive, dialectic relationship between postcolonial studies and medieval studies. He asks, "[h]ow might postcolonial theory encourage an opening up of what the medieval signifies, and how might that unbounded 'middle space' then suggest possible futures for postcolonial theory? How can medieval studies with its turn to the

'distant' past bring about the new?" (6). Postcolonial medievalism, in its study of premodern forms of colonialism, borrows heavily from postcolonial theory in order to illuminate the 12 historical and cultural forces that shaped the colonial contests of the Middle Ages (Holsinger

1204). However, as Cohen and others suggest, this exchange between postcolonial and medieval studies need not be one sided; postcolonial medievalism challenges the presentism of postcolonial theory, offering medievalists the opportunity to make "a significant impact on the methods, historical purview, and theoretical lexicon of postcolonialism" (Holsinger

1197).

This study, like much of the recent scholarship in the field of postcolonial medievalism, is animated by the theoretical problematics derived from contemporary postcolonial theory: the representation of the other and the dynamics of cross-cultural contact. My consideration of Saracen alterity is influenced in particular by the writings of

Homi K. Bhabha on hybridity, stereotypes and mimicry. Bhabha's work shows how rigid distinctions between the colonizer and the colonized are impossible to maintain. Moreover,

Bhabha demonstrates that the West is always troubled by its "doubles." These doubles, as

David Hubbart explains, "force the West to explain its own identity and to justify its rational self-image" (2). In other words, the West cannot confidently assert its superiority when other civilizations are so similar. Bhabha's concept of hybridity works to undermine the simple polarization of the world into self and other, and the assertion of authentic, or pure, cultural identity; rather, he emphasizes the "impurity" of cultures. Hybridity suggests that "cultures are not discrete phenomena; instead, they are always in contact with one another, and this contact leads to cultural mixed-ness" (Hubbart 7). Bhabha's theories offer a useful framework through which to view the impurity of collective identity in Middle English romances.

This study also responds to prevailing interpretations of the Saracen in Middle 13

English romances and, as chapter one makes clear, demonstrates the need to focus on the countermodel of the desirable Saracen (the noble Saracen warrior and the white Saracen princess) and the Saracenized Christian, and to examine the indeterminacies such characterizations expose. Chapter two examines medieval efforts to categorize difference, positing the existence of a premodern racializing discourse, and arguing for the usefulness of the term "race" to describe medieval efforts to describe and differentiate among peoples.

Race, in its medieval context, is imagined as simultaneously cultural and corporeal, and is best described as a "phenomenon of multiple category overlap" (Cohen, "On Saracen

Enjoyment" 116) which imbricates various categories of difference, such as geography, bodily morphology, and religion. This chapter will help to explain how the figureo f the

Saracen was cast as different through various modes of alterity, including religious orientation and bodily diversity, and will provide the conceptual basis for our discussion of hybridity in Middle English romances.

Chapter three explores the intersection of race and religion in scenes of conversion in

The King of Tars and Beues ofHamtoun. The Christian princess' feigned conversion in The

King of Tars serves as a proxy for cultural anxieties surrounding Saracen converts. The

Princess' conversion not only raises questions regarding the sincerity and completeness of religious conversion, but also occasions the miscegenation of communities. The Princess'

"failed" conversion contrasts that of her Saracen husband, who undergoes a racial and spiritual transformation at the moment of baptism. Such a fantasy of easy conversion - in which religious conversion overcomes ontological difference - is elusive in Beues of

Hamtoun, in which the veracity of the convert's spiritual transformation cannot be verified visually on, and through, the body of the white Saracen princess. Described as light-skinned, 14 the Saracen princess (Josiane) conforms to the European paradigm of female beauty and, consequently, fails to connote alterity, unlike the racialized body of the Saracen Sultan in

The King of Tars. Her conversion and assimilation into the Christian community does not solidify the already porous boundary separating Christian from Saracen. At one level, the

Saracen princess represents colonial achievement - her betrayal of her Saracen allies and her religious conversion complete the Christian victory over the Saracens. On another, she stands for impurity and the possibility of cultural mixing. In both romances, the body of the female convert acts as a site where sexual, religious, and racial boundaries are transgressed.

Whereas the Saracen princess' conversion is facilitated through the agency of sex, that is her love for, and marriage to, the Christian knight, the conversion and acculturation of the noble Saracen knight, which is the focus of chapter four, is only permissible because of his conformity to the Western paradigm of knighthood. This chapter examines the representation of two male Saracen converts, Otuel and Ferumbras, who resemble their

Christian counterparts in all but religion. This parallelism structuring the depiction of

Saracens and Christians negates cultural difference and occasions what Sharon Kinoshita calls a crisis of differentiation (Medieval Boundaries 16). Anxieties regarding the separateness of Christian and Saracen persist following the conversion of the Saracen knight, whose spiritual transformation and cultural assimilation becomes suspect.

The final chapter examines the vulnerability of the Christian knight to cultural contamination while abroad in Beues ofHamtoun and Richard Coer de Lyon. Bevis lives amongst Saracens and becomes immersed in Saracen culture. Richard the Lionheart engages in acts of cannibalism traditionally associated with the Saracen other in imaginative literatures. Physically and discursively proximate to the Saracen, both Bevis and Richard 15 manifest a hybrid English-eastern identity that threatens to dissolve the boundary between

Christian and Saracen, and that renders them unsettling exemplars of Englishness. If Beues ofHamtoun and Richard Coer de Lyon can be said to articulate an English national identity, that identity is characterized not by its cultural purity but by its heterogeneity.

This study focuses on characters in romance that frustrate neat categorizations of identity: the Christian princess in The King of Tars; the enamoured Saracen princess and the exiled Christian knight in Beues ofHamtoun; the male Saracen convert in the Otuel and

Ferumbras romances; and the crusader-king turned cannibal in Richard Coer de Lyon. These characters expose the fragility of classificatory boundaries because they threaten to dissolve the border between self and other. In the romances in which these characters appear, difference is best understood not as an either/or, Christian/Saracen dichotomy but rather as a continuum with differing degrees of alterity, along which the desirable Saracen and

Saracenized Christian are located. These figures of hybridity, who cannot be comfortably categorized as Christian or Saracen, demonstrate a preoccupation with the definitiveness of identity that underlies the nationalist and colonial narratives of romance identified by previous medieval scholarship. 16

The Genesis of an Idea: The Saracen as Other

Forced to flee his own castle following his daughter's betrayal, the Sultan of

Babylon threatens to forsake his gods and admonishes them for sleeping too long. When the besieged Peers obtain provisions, thwarting his attempt to regain his castle, he becomes enraged:

He defied Mahounde and Apolyne,

Jubiter, Ascarat and Alcaron also.

He commaundede a fire to be dight

With picche and brymston to bren.

He made a vowe with all his might:

"Thai shal be caste therinne." (Sowdone 2759-66)

This burning of religious idols reveals a peculiar understanding of Muslim worship. As an undergraduate student reading Middle English romances for the first time, such depictions of Saracens provoked in me a series of questions: Why did medieval authors represent Muslims as polytheists and Islam as form of idol worship? Were all literary

Saracens depicted in similar, disparaging way? Was this misrepresentation perpetuated out of ignorance of Islam, or was it a willful distortion by Christian authors who knew it was inaccurate? Why were Saracens often depicted as being physically as well as spiritually different from Christians? What can the representation of Saracens in Middle

English romances reveal about medieval conceptions of alterity? 17

These questions., which would ultimately inspire and the lay the groundwork for this study, are not unlike the concerns that animate a growing body of scholarly articles and monographs dealing with medieval representations of others, the crusades as a proto- colonial enterprise, the emergence of Orientalist and nationalist discourses in the Middle

Ages, and the dynamics of cross-cultural contact. The critical focus of the scholarship devoted to medieval perceptions of Muslims and Islam has noticeably changed and developed since the pioneering articles of William Comfort and C Meredith Jones.

Academic discussion has moved beyond identifying the historical inaccuracies inherent in medieval portraits of the Saracen to offering a more nuanced understanding of

Christian-Muslim relations and, more recently, considering the resonances between medieval and postcolonial studies. The present study is inspired by, responds to, and builds upon the recent scholarship authored by critics working in the emerging field of

"postcolonial medievalism," such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Sharon KinosMta, and

Geraldine Heng. It also rectifies some omissions left by previous scholarship, specifically, the consideration of liminal Saracen figures in light of medieval conceptions of identity and difference, and postcolonial notions of hybridity.

Scholarly work published prior to Said's Orientalism (1978) focused on highlighting the historical inaccuracy of medieval Christian depictions of Muslims and

Islam. In the early 1940s, William Comfort and C Meredith Jones both observed the conventions and stereotypes employed in depictions of Saracens in Old French literature.

While subsequent studies, such as Richard Southern's Western Views of Islam and the 18

West (1962) and Norman Daniel's Islam and the West (1962X dealt solely with, medieval polemical images of Islam, Dorothee Metlitzki's 1977 study was the first to explore the treatment of Saracens in Middle English romances. In The Matter ofAraby, Metlitzki identified stock Saracen figures (the enamored Saracen princess, the converted Saracen,, the defeated emir or sultan, and the Saracen giant), and located Middle English authors' use of literary stereotypes during a period of considerable knowledge of Islam, and of intellectual and cultural transmission.

The next extensive study of literary representations of Saracens was Norman

Daniel's Heroes and Saracens, which was published after but not influenced by Said's study of Orientalism. In his analysis of the stock Saracen figure found in the chansons de geste, he concludes that the epic portrait of the Saracen does not reflect an "Islamic reality" (Heroes 263). Critical discussions of literary Saracens agree that the purportedly

Muslim figures found in vernacular literature are historically inaccurate representations.

Daniel, however, differs in his analysis with regards to the function of these

(misrepresentations. Distinguishing the "unofficial" attitudes of the chansons de geste and later romances from the "official" Christian theological and polemic attitudes towards Arabs and Muslims, Daniel concludes that the chansons are not war propaganda and that their appeal extends deeper than religious prejudice: "[t]he songs are not Crusade propaganda, as I once believed, but they are good propaganda for a life of daring and adventure" (Heroes 266-67). Indeed, he concludes his study by asserting "[w]e should not entertain the idea that they are meant to be anything but creatures of fiction" (279). 19

But while literary Saracens are fantastical, insofar as they hear little resemblance to historical Muslims, their appearance in medieval vernacular literature cannot be dismissed as mere literary trope intended to heighten the sense of "daring" and

"adventure." To suggest that the Saracens found in the French chansons de geste and in

Middle English romances are innocuous ignores not only the circumstances in which these texts were produced and circulated but also the ideological interests these portrayals might serve. In other words, Daniel's study addresses how medieval Christian authors portrayed Muslims and Islam but not why Saracens were depicted in particular ways.

The assertion that Saracens are innocuous "creatures of fiction"i s a notable departure fromth e views of Comfort, Jones and Metlitzki, who had linked the currency of the stereotypical Saracen with intense religious fervor and propaganda. Comfort highlights the appeal of the Saracen character for western audiences, suggesting such portraits were intended for "home consumption" l>y those "subservient to the intolerant attitude of the Church in matters of faith" (659). Similarly, Jones asserts that literary

Saracens are misrepresentations borne out of hatred and propaganda; the portrait of the epic Saracen is "utterly useless as a guide to students of mediaeval maimers and customs.

It is based on hate, on a deliberately false propaganda. Its object was to disfigure, and the few instances in which there is a more or less faithful representation of reality are accidental" (225). Similarly, Metlitzki defines the Middle English poems she studies as

"essentially vehicles of fanatical propaganda in which the moral ideal of chivalry is subservient to the requirements of religion, politics, and ideology" (160). The fanciful 20

portrayal of the Saracen found in the chansons de geste is deployed for the purposes of patriotism and propaganda (119); in this, Metlitzki asserts, "there is no difference

between medieval epic and romance" (119).

Comfort and Jones locate the genesis of the stereotypical Saracen in the context of

the crusades. While such readings are attentive to the historical circumstances in which

the image of the stereotypical Saracen circulates, they privilege the crusades as the model

for medieval Christian interaction with Islam, a limitation recently addressed by Sharon

Kinoshita in her study of French epic poetry Medieval Boundaries. More broadly, while

these four foundational studies examine the figure of the Saracen in the medieval

Imagination, they interpret the presence of the Saracen as well as the fictional encounters

between Christians and Muslims solely as vehicles for patriotism and propaganda. I

would argue that Saracens in Middle English romance, in particular Saracen converts

who abandon their political, religious and familial affiliations, whatever their value as

propaganda, also function as a pretext for questioning categories of medieval identity.

Of the stock Saracen figures identified in this early scholarship, only the enamoured Saracen princess and her portrayal in medieval French epic has received

recent, extended critical attention, by Jacqueline de Weever in her book, Sheba's

Daughters (1998).1 Through her analysis of Saracen women in the chansons de geste, de

Weever attempts to make a "case for an early Orientalism not considered in Edward

Said's great work of that name" (xxiv). Drawing onpostcolonial theory, de Weever

1 Both Siobhain Bly Calkin and Sharon Kinoshita include chapters dealing with Saracen princesses in their respective monographs. See Calkin, Saracens 61-95; Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries 46-73. 21

explores the intersections of race and gender, and elucidates the racist and imperialist

biases underlying the depictions of both black- and white-skinned Saracen princesses.

Ultimately, Saracen women are an extension of the "binary oppositions of the culture of the time, Latin Christian/Oriental pagan* white/black, orthodoxy/heterodoxy,, truth/error"

(xvii) and function as a tool for "propaganda and ideologies of conquest and religion"

(xxiii). My own consideration of the white Saracen princess - and Saracen converts

generally - in Middle English romance has been influenced by de Weever's discussion.

But whereas de Weever highlights the proto-Orientalist tendencies of epic portraits, I will

examine the figure of the Saracen princess, as well as the male Saracen convert, in order to elucidate medieval efforts to understand and conceptualize difference, and to

demonstrate the fluidity characterizing medieval notions of difference.

The foundational criticism of Comfort, Jones, Metlitzki, and Daniel concentrates on identifying stereotypes and signaling the historical misrepresentation of medieval

Muslims* both of which are concerns that also animate Edward Said's groundbreaking study Orientalism. Orientalism, published in 1978, revolutionized the way we think about cultural and political relations, and influenced diverse disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Said's intellectual work helped to inaugurate colonial discourse analysis, and to shape postcolonial theory. In the last decade, medievalists have begun to be influenced by, and made extensive use of, Orientalism and the work of other postcolonial theorists. The emerging field of postcolonial medievalism calls for a broader historical understanding of colonial and/or postcolonial phenomena, challenging the 22

presentism of postcolonial studies and attempting to effect a more robust theorization of postcolonialism.

Orientalism examines the processes by which the (Islamic) Orient was, and

continues to be, constructed in European thinking. The Occident manages the Orient by

"making statements about it, authorizing views about it, describing it, by teaching it,

settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism [is] a Western style for dominating,

restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (Orientalism 3). According to Said,

Orientalism encompasses at least three different, yet interdependent, pursuits: an

academic discipline, a style of thought, and a "corporate institution for dealing with the

Orient" (Orientalism 2-3). As an academic field which emerged in the late eighteenth

century, Orientalism is "the discipline by which the Orient was (and is) approached

systemically, as a topic of learning, discovery and practice" (Orientalism 73). Said also

locates Orientalism as a corporate institution, a system used to dominate and authorize

the Orient, in the colonial era of European conquest. Yet as a system of thought, one

which is "based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction" between the Orient

and the Occident" (Said, Orientalism 2), Orientalism is a "discursive mode defined in

such elastic terms as to he discernible in almost any place or time" (Akbari, Idols 6).

Said Imefly highlights the medieval foundations as well as the consistent character of Orientalism, noting the similarities between medieval and modern

stereotypes of Islam and Arabs (287). Medieval Orientalist representations are informed not by lived experience, but rather by a textual tradition (58); Orientalism sketches a 23 medieval understanding of Islam as heretical that came to symbolize "terror, devastation, the demonic, hordes of hated barbarians" (59; 61-2). Said's brief discussion of the Middle

Ages and these vitriolic stereotypes is indebted to Norman Daniel's Islam and the West, which focuses on polemical images of Islam, and Richard Southern's Western Views of

Islam in the Middle Ages, which examines medieval attitudes towards Islam in light of early medieval ignorance and later medieval knowledge (60). Said's own discussion places greater emphasis on demonic depictions of Muslims and Islam; ignores medieval

Christians' increasing knowledge of Islam; and obscures, as Sharon Kinoshita observes in

Medieval Boundaries, medieval Christians' lived reactions and interactions with Muslims and the Islamic world (6). In short, what Said says about the Middle Ages lacks proper context, prompting John V. Tolan to offer a corrective to Said's discussion of medieval representations of Islam.

John V. Tolan's Saracens (2002) demonstrates an active engagement with Said's discussion of the Middle Ages and the circulation of vitriolic depictions of Muslims now taking place within medieval studies, demonstrating the productive possibilities of a dialogue between postcolonial and medieval studies. Saracens is as much inspired by

Said's Orientalism as a reaction to it. Both studies are motivated by a similar desire to examine how and why Islam is depicted in distorted and disparaging ways. However,

Tolan moves beyond Said's brief discussion of the Middle Ages and seeks to contextualize the vitriolic "orientalist" images cited by the latter. Indeed, Tolan abandons the static, timeless views of both the Orient and Occident which he believes underlie 24

Said's account of Orientalism. According to Tolan* Said casts medieval orientalism as

"timeless and immature; an 'adolescent' orientalism, waiting for the political and social

context of modern European Empires" {Saracens 280). Said's Occident "is bereft of its

historical and cultural variety" and "shorn of the individual motivations of its writers"

(280); as a result, it "risks becoming every bit as much a caricature as the inscrutable

Orient of the nineteenth-century romantics" (280-81). In contrast, Tolan examines

medieval depictions of Islam on their own terms and attempts to place them in their own

particular contexts, offering a more nuanced treatment than that found in Orientalism. For

example, Tolan argues that the negative "orientalist" portrayals Said denounces as the

ideological underpinnings of French and British colonialism have their origins in the

defensive reactions of Christian "oriental" subjects under Muslim rule. Borrowing Said's

notion of anticolonial "resistance culture," Tolan argues that Spanish Christian writers

challenged the Muslim triumphalist view of history with an apocalyptic vision promising

Christian vengeance; polemical writings produced in ninth-century Cordoba can be seen

as attempts to "demonize the 'occupying' power and discredit those who collaborate with it, using violence to dramatize the opposition between the 'us' and 'them1" (88). It is not until the thirteenth century, argues Tolan, that we witness the emergence of a discourse

akin to that employed by nineteenth-century apologists of empire described in

Orientalism, and the purposeful deployment of derogatory portrayals of Islam in order to

legitimize military action against, and political domination of, Muslims (175). 25

Tolan's attempt to historicize the discourse of Orientalism speaks to the ways in

which medievalists have engaged, and continue to engage and respond to, theoretical

trends in postcolonial studies. The past decade has witnessed a series of publications

which incorporate a postcolonial approach in the consideration of the Middle Ages.

While the use of postcolonialism as a theoretical frame in the study of the European

Middle Ages has garnered criticism, raising concerns about applicability and

anachronism* the scholarship in the area of postcolonial medieval studies has argued persuasively that medieval societies have resonances with postcolonial issues, such as

cross-cultural contact and colonization. For example, Kofi Campbell elucidates these

similarities in Literature and Culture in the Black Atlantic: From Pre- to Postcolonial, pointing out that England was colonized, pursued colonial interests in the British Isles,

and sought to establish its independence from French cultural domination by establishing

its own "national language" (12). Bruce Holsinger, in his 2002 Speculum article, also

asserts that medieval and postcolonial studies are not disparate disciplines. Holsinger

argues that medieval studies, because of its influence on the genealogy of Indian

Subaltern Studies, is in a valid position to utilize as well as critique and contribute to postcolonial studies, thereby disrupting the false sense of utter difference or theoretical belatedness among medievalists.

For an overview of the debate regarding the historical and theoretical appropriateness of incorporating contemporary postcolonial theory in the study of medieval society and culture, see Nadia R. Altschul; and Bruce Holsinger, "Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the Genealogies of Critique." See also, Gabrietle Spiegel's review of Biddkk's The Shock of Medievalism: G. M. Spiegel, "Epater les M6di<

Whereas early discussions in the sub-field of postcolonial medievalism focused on postcolonial criticism and its disavowal of the medieval period, more recent contributions analyze the emergence of nationalism and outline the medieval forms of nation. Discussions of medieval nationhood hinge on Benedict Anderson's definition of a nation as an "imagined political community," ironically demonstrating the applicability of his concept to understanding medieval communities despite his assertion that the emergence of nations coincides with the early modern era. Critics such as Geraldine

Heng, Lesley Johnson, Thorlac Turville-Petre, Felicity Riddy, and Diane Speed have all affirmed the existence of a nationalist discourse and emerging national identity in

England in the later Middle Ages.4

Both Geraldine Heng and Siohhain Bly Calkin give extended consideration to the ways in which romance is implicated in the project of nation-building. In Empire of

Magic (2003), Heng identifies romance as a genre oriented toward English nationhood:

"Even as the genre conveys the changing impulses of empire, the romances considered by

Empire of Magic also offer romance, simultaneously and in tandem, as a genre of the nation ... Cumulatively, the Latin, French and Middle English romances examined offer

Carolyn Dinshaw argues the medieval is positioned as an alterity against which modernity and postmoderaity emerge See Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern, 15- 19. See also Kathleen Davis, "National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postcolonial thinking about the Nation," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 28,3 (1998): 611-37. 4 See Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic, especially 63-113; Lesley Johnson, "Imagining Communities: Medieval and Mordern," in Concepts of National Identity, ed. Forde, Johnson, and Murray, 1-20; Thorlac Turvflle-Petre, "The ^Natlotf in English Writing of the Early Fourteenth Century," in England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1991 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Nicholas Rogers, 128- 39 and England the Nation; Felicity Riddy, "Reading for England," Bibliogrpahical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society-43 (1991):3i4-32G); Diane Speed, "The Construction of the Nation in Middle English Romance," in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol Meale, 135-57; and the collection of essays in Imagining a Medieval English Nation, ed. Kathy Lavezzo. 27 the resources of romance, in sum, as a genre of the English nation in the Middle Ages"

(6-7). In her analysis of Richard Coer de Lyon, Heng asserts that crusader cannibalism - which she sees as the cultural trauma that is constitutive of romance - metamorphosizes into "a triumphant system of symbolism in the romance of England" (68). In other words, cannibalism becomes a means of forming communal identity, and a way of figuring conquest and colonization. The rise of the medieval nation coincides with the epistemic shift of the thirteenth century; in this episteme, Heng locates the emergence of a racializing discourse of biological and spiritual difference, posited on religion, color, and physiognomy. Racial categories of difference, according to Heng, are thus instrumental in the formation of the medieval nation.

Calkin's Saracens and the Making of English Identity (2005), in contrast, focuses narrowly on the figure of the Saracen and examines the cultural function of Saracens in the Auchinleck manuscript, exploring how and why assertions of English identity take place in and around portraits of religious others. Drawing on postcolonial theory, medieval manuscript studies, and new historicism, Calkin argues that the Saracens found in the Auchinleck manuscript not only reveal much about western ideas of the East and cross-cultural contact, but also reflect preoccupations with rivals closer to home, notably the French and Scottish. Representations of Saracens, then, not only participate in the definition and affirmation of Englishness, but also are a vehicle through which the challenges of constructing English identity are expressed in the early fourteenth century. 28

My own analysis complicates the above-mentioned considerations of nationalism

in medieval romances. Focusing on the intermediacies that render categories of

communal identity indistinct, I contend that the nationalist and colonialist projects

identified hy Heng and Calkin are attended by identity uncertainty. The lack of

established boundaries (the separation between Christian and Saracen is notably porous)

and the fusion of difference (Saracen converts joining Christian communities; Christians

"going Saracen") threaten to destabilize the cultural fantasy of well-bounded communities necessary to the maintenance of nationalist and colonialist discourse. In this way, my research corresponds with current research trends in the area of postcolonial medievalism, specifically work that explores issues of hybridity.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's Hybridity* Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain

(2006) examines the dynamics of community formation in the wake of conquest. Bede,

Geoffrey of Monmouth and William of Malmesbury authored narratives in which the peoples of medieval Britain seemed to form well bounded communities, attempting to circumscribe the impurity and heterogeneity that results from the intermingling of peoples and cultures. Cohen's study reveals the hybridity concealed by neat categories of identity; similarly, Sharon Kinoshita demonstrates permeability of cultural boundaries and the fluiditycharacterizin g medieval notions of difference in Medieval Boundaries:

Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (2006). Kinoshita re-considers

"inaugural" texts of the medieval French literary tradition in light of their historical context of cross-cultural contact and reveals "alternate histories of peaceful contact and 29 accommodation" (236).This study will build on the work of Cohen and Kinoshita by exploring the concept of hybridity in Middle English romance, paying particular attention to representations of Saracen alterity and the ways in which these depictions frustrate neat categorizations of identity.

In addition to monographs which incorporate postcolonial approaches and explore themes of nationalism and cultural hybridity, a series of collections have also been published recently exploring concepts and questions in the Middle Ages which are of significance to postcolonial criticism: The Postcolonial Middle Ages (2000), Postcolonial

Moves: Medieval Through Modern (2003), Postcolonial Approaches to the European

Middle Ages (2005), as well as special issues of the Journal of Medieval and Early

Modern Studies (JMEMS).5 The special issue devoted to the topic of "Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages" contains several articles debating the usefulness of the term "race" to the study of the Middle Ages. More recently, Suzanne Conklin Abkari has examined medieval manifestations of Orientalism in relation to modern modes, and elucidates how a theory based on the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and British colonialism is expressed in premodern literature. Her Idols in the East (2009) sketches the contours of medieval Orientalist discourse within which Muslims are described, identifymg two distinct but complexly intertwined vectors: alterity defined in terms of religious difference, and alterity defined in terms of geographical diversity.

s J. Dagenais and M. R. Greer, "Decolonizing the Middle Ages," Special Issue of JMEMS, 30.3 (2000); Thomas Hahn, "Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages," Special Issue of JMEMS, 31.1 (2001); Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, "Signifying Gender and Empire," Special Issue of JMEMS, 34J (2004). 30

This present study likewise strives to understand medieval efforts to categorize

difference and proceeds with a consideration of medieval encyclopedias and travelogues,

and the ways in which these texts manifest a premodern discourse of race. The following chapter will identity the constitutive elements of the premodern racial discourse and

demonstrate how medieval others, such as the Saracen, were defined as different using a

system of classification that integrates religious, geographical, and bodily difference.

Race, in its medieval reality, was imagined in both cultural and corporeal terms, and is best understood as a "phenomenon of multiple category overlap" (Cohen, "On Saracen

Enjoyment" 116). 31

Medieval Categories of Difference and the Discourse of Race

In the Middle Ages, notions of identity were hardly straightforward or unproblematic (Lavezzo, "Complex Identities" 434). Male Christian identity, according to Lavezzo, was imagined during the period in uneasy relation to a variety of others

("Complex Identities" 434). Patriarchal Christian identity was "as fragile as any other identity formation, and depends for its production on the creation of imagined identities from which it differs" (Lavezzo, "Complex Identities" 434). The differentiation of self from other is predicated on a system of classification, on what we today might describe as a racial discourse. Bodily difference, a constitutive element of the medieval discourse of race, must be understood, as Suzanne Akbari points out, "in tandem with other categories of difference" ("Diversity" 157), such as geographical positioning andreligious belief. In other words, distinct modes of categorizing difference often overlap and intertwine to create an elaborate taxonomical system.

The Problem of Terminology

"Race" is a controversial term among medievalists. While it is etymologically related to Latin and romance terms describing descent, the word has no exact medieval equivalent (Cohen "Race"). Terms of medieval Latin usage, such as gen* and natio,

"imply, etymologically, a concept of race as descent groups" (Bartlett, "Concepts" 42).

Similarly, Middle English words such as "blod," "stok," and "linage" emphasize shared ancestry, consanguinity, and kinship (MEZ)). The contentious nature of the term "race," which carries modern associations of biological racism, in addition to the lack of 32

medieval equivalent, has prompted debate among medievalists regarding proper terminology, that is, whether "race "or "ethnicity" best reflectsmedieva l understandings of difference, the ways in which medieval thinkers described and differentiated among peoples.

Robert Bartlett's article, "Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,"

outlines the problem of definition, that is, the difficulties in describing medieval efforts to categorize difference using the modern terms "race" and "ethnicity":

Historians working in the present day, just like their medieval and early

modern predecessors, are confronted with difficult choices when they

write of human population groups. When, if at all, is it reasonable to

employ the word rao^ the word nation, the word tribe? What collective

term best describes, say, the Goths, the English, the Jews? What

meaning does the concept "ethnic identity" have? It is hard to do

without some collective terms, but neither the medieval nor the modern

terminology of race and ethnicity is simple or uncomplicated. Even the

distinction between those two central terms, race and ethnicity, is drawn

in different ways by different people. (39)

Bartlett signals that both "race" and "ethnicity" are social constructs referring "to the identifications made by individuals about the groups they belong to. If one word has a use, then the other does. One is not the dark side of the force in a Manichean dualism"

("Concepts" 41-2). Bartlett concludes that "race" and "ethnicity" should be treated as 33

synonyms because race, in its medieval conception, is not solely a biological category,

and because both terms are used to describe and differentiate between peoples

("Concepts" 41-2).

William Chester Jordan, however, rejects the equivalence of "race" and

"ethnicity" in Bartlett's formulation:

Bartlett suggests mat we cannot leave the word race to racists.. .However,

Bartlett's pleas notwithstanding, on the matter of race, the racists have

won. Let them keep the word.. .1 actually prefer "ethnic identity"; it has a

softer, less threatening ring in my ears, since identity can be (not always

is, but can be) understood as a process. (168)

For Jordan, "race" is contaminated by the histories that lie behind its use. Employing it in

medieval contexts, Jordan argues, will inevitably attract the modern associations of

biological racism, leading to misapprehension that renders it repugnant (Jordan 168).

While Jordan notes the disjunctive between medieval and post-Enlightenment

constructions of racial difference, he implies mat "ethnicity" does not carry the taint of

history; moreover, he asserts that "ethnicity" better conveys the fact that identity

formation is an on-going, open ended process.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen observes mat "ethnicity" remains the preferred term among medievalists precisely because it is disembodied: "Ethnicity, it seems, is identity as expressed in culture. Race, on the other hand, is identity lodged in the body, no matter how speciously. Ethnicity is adoptable, malleable, and ethically neutral. Race is 34

enfleshed, immutable, and haunted by history" ("On Medieval Race"). To differentiate

"race" and "ethnieity " along these lines, he suggests, is problematic. Even though

"ethnicity "is less threatening to the ear and does not carry the connotation of colour

prejudice, the concept is not innocuous or neutral and is linked to a history of ethnically-

motivated violence and discrimination. Moreover, the preference for the term "ethnicity,"

because it is disembodied - that is, it is not perceived to anchor difference to the flesh -

ignores the ways in which difference was imagined in corporeal as well as cultural terms

during the medieval period.

Although "ethnieity" remains the preferred term for some scholars, this study opts

to use the term "race" rather than "ethnicity" in its discussion of medieval conceptions of

difference, following the lead of other prominent scholars such as Jeffrey Cohen. "Race,"

rather than "ethnieity," foregrounds the inextricability of bodily difference and group

identity (Cohen "On Medieval Race"). In the medieval conception of race, there is a link

between physical and non-physical characteristics; race acts a sorting mechanism used to

differentiate and hierarchize insofar as these characteristics are imbued, implicitly or

explicitly, with value, with superiority or inferiority (Cohen "On Medieval Race"). As

Cohen observes, "[the term race] best conveys the uneven structures of power within

which identities are formed, represented, made solid" ("On Medieval Race").

Constituents of Difference: Responding to Bartlett's Formulation of Medieval Race

Race, according to Robert Bartlett, is a compound of language, law, power and blood. Since descent is the only constituent rooted in the body, Bartlett insists race is 35 malleable because its components can be "transformed not only from one generation to the next, but even within an individual lifetime. New languages can be mastered, new legal regimes adopted, new customs learned. To a point, therefore, medieval ethnicity was a social construct rather than a biological datum" (Europe 197). While medieval races thought themselves to be distinct in customs, language and law, these categories are not as keen as they first appear; they are neither innate nor inalterable insofar as they "are subject to rapid change and might be shared across cultural boundaries or not uniformly distributed with them" (Cohen, Hybridityll). So if constituents such as language, law and custom served to distinguish between peoples, and were subject to change, then the race of an individual or group could change over time, signaling a potential change in identity. Jeffrey Cohen similarly characterizes race as "elastic," suggesting mat racial designators can be adopted and adapted by a dominating group for specific purposes:

This performability of race can allow a previously divided or

heterogeneous group to cohere. It can also enable the foisting of such

union upon peoples who do not necessarily desire such delineation.

Should this people then find themselves subordinated politically, the

construction of race that has been bestowed upon them tends to harden

into an imprisoning category, locking them in alien terms and subaltern

status. ("On Medieval Race")

Communities are constituted through inclusion and exclusion based on racial categories such as the constituents outlined by Bartlett. Both Bartlett and Cohen intimate that race is a conceptual category that is culturally and politically constructed. As Bartlett observes, 36

"biological differences do not themselves constitute race or ethnicity but are part of the raw materials from which race or ethnicity can be constructed" ("Concepts" 41). Race and racial difference are constituted through "the identifications made by individuals about the groups they belong to" ("Concepts" 41) and, I would add, the groups to which they do not.

While Bartlett's formulation foregrounds the mutability of racial constituents and the constructedness of race as a conceptual category, he downplays the biological component of race, and emphasizes the cultural and social component of racial identity.

However, such a formulation ignores the ways in which differences among medieval peoples were inevitably imagined in corporeal terms and the ways in which differences in customs, laws, and language were attached to the body. While we should not dispense with Bartlett's formulation of race entirely, we must recognize that medieval authors did not speak of race solely in cultural terms. Indeed, we shall see that the differences that were thought to set medieval people apart were simultaneously cultural and corporeal.

Indeed, in his summary of recent anthropological work on ethnicity, Florin Curta asserts that group identity may be culturally constructed, but it is not insubstantial: "ethnicity is not innate, but individuals are born with it... it is not biologically reproduced, but individuals are linked to it through cultural constructions of biology" (qtd. in Cohen, "On

Medieval Race"). When speaking of medieval conceptions of race, we cannot separate culture and biology.

To Bartlett's formulation of race as a compound of language, law, power and blood, we can add a series of other racial constituents. Race, in its medieval context, is 37

inextricable from geographic location, religion, physiology, physical appearance and comportment, political affiliation, sexual practice^ language, law, class, and customs

(including clothing, diet, hairstyle). As Cohen suggests, race has no independent ontology

but rather is a "phenomenon of multiple category overlap" ("Saracen" 116). In other words, race is an imbrication of categories that constructs and demarcates collective identity. Focusing on determinants most relevant to our consideration of Saracen alterity

- geography, genealogy, religion, and physical appearance - this chapter will elucidate the intersection and mutability of racial determinants, beginning with an exploration of the ways in which contingent differences in geography are expressed as "real" biological differences, and an examination of the medieval ethnographer's reliance on climatic theory to explain the physical and temperamental differences among peoples.

Mapping Difference: Geographical Location and Human Diversity in Medieval

Ethnographies

Classical and medieval encyclopedias represent foreign peoples whose chief distinction is one of geography. Pliny's Natural History, which was widely disseminated throughout the Latin Middle Ages, catalogues the monstrous races of men, highlighting the variety and geographical range of the world's peoples (Friedman 5). In his description of human diversity, Pliny emphasizes differences in physical appearance and social practices. Some races are physically unusual but not anomalous, such as pygmies

(Friedman 1). Others take their name fromthei r manner of living such as the Astromi

("Apple-Smellers") or the cave-dwelling Troglodytes ("hole-creepers") (Friedman 1).

There also exist fabulous races such as the Blemmaye, who are depicted as being 3& differently formed and having their faces on their chests. Despite the diversity among the monstrous races, Pliny emphasizes their remote geographical placement. Friedman notes the monstrous races are depicted as populating the outermost edges of the world, such as

Ethiopia and India.1 Since monstrous races were thought to inhabit remote environments

- mountains, swamps, deserts- considered inhospitable and hostile to civilized mea, their traditional placement on the world's edges was "closely related to their monstrousness, both in character and in appearance" (Friedman 37).

Physical appearance as well as moral disposition was firmly rooted in the medieval concept of place insofar as medieval encyclopedists and cartographers 2often invoked environmental determinism to explain racial diversity. The belief in cltmatological determinism has its basis in the astronomical and medical traditions

(Akbari, "Diversity" 158). In the De sphaera, the astronomer Sacrobosco locates Ethiopia at the equator, in a region characterized by excessive heat: "for [the inhabitants] would not be so black if they were born in the temperate habitable zone" (1-07)* An early thirteenth-century commentator elaborates Sacrobosco's description of Ethiopian physiology: "An example of the blackening of Ethiopians is the cooking of golden honey.

First it is golden, then reddish, and finally by long cooking it becomes black and bitter, and that which was at first sweet is now salty. And it is just this way all over Ethiopia"

(137). The Ethiopian's blood, affected by the extreme heat, is drawn to the surface of the skin where it becomes "black and bitter." Here, the climate governs the -distribution of the

1 Pliny and others often conflated Ethiopia with India. Consequently, "'Ethiopia'must be understood...as a vague literary term rather than one denoting a specific place." See Friedman 8. 2 For a discussion of Macrobian zone maps in relation to climatological determinism and racial diversity, see Friedman 50-1. 39

humours, the bodily fluids responsible for disposition and character (Cohen, Hybridity

33). Indeed, according to medieval medical tradition, the ideal body is "the temperate

body, in which the qualities of heat and cold, moisture and dryness, are in perfect

balance" (Akbari, "Diversity" 159). In Pantegni, by Constantinus Africanus, southern

inhabitants are black and tend to be phlegmatic. Because their natural bodily heat is

dissipated through their pores, they are soft-bodied, easily drunk, and prone to dysentery.

Conversely, northern inhabitants, because they reside in a cold and dry region near the pole, are healthy and of a pleasing colour. Whereas the Ethiopian's body is soft, the

northern man's is strong (Akbari, "Diversity" 159).

The geographical surveys of Isidore of Seville and Bartholomaeus Anglicus assert

a correspondence between climate and bodily diversity. Characteristics of a nation - the physical attributes and temperaments of its people — are altered by the climate its

members inhabit in Isidore of Seville's Etymologies:

People's faces and colouring, the size of their bodies, and their various

temperaments correspond to various climates. Hence we find that the

Romans are serious, the Greeks easy-going, the Africans changeable, and

the Gauls fierce in nature and rather sharp in wit, because the character of

the climate makes them so. (9.2.105) 40

Ethiopia3, according to Isidore, is so-called because of "the colour of its inhabitants"

(14.5.14). The skin of the Ethiopian4 has been scorched because of the nation's geographical proximity tathe sun:

Indeed, the colouring of the people demonstrates the force of the sun, for it

is always hot there, because all of its territory is under the South Pole.

Around the western part is mountainous, sandy in the middle, and desert to

the east. It stretches from Mount Atlas in the west to the borders of Egypt

in the east, bounded in the south by the Ocean and in the north by the river

Nile. It has very many tribes, fearsome with their different faces and

strange appearance. (14.5.14)

Ethiopia occupies a geographical extreme beyond which is "unknown to us due to the burning heat of the sun" (14.5.17). The sun functions as "an ordering principle that allows the encyclopedist to differentiate between peoples and between disparate territories" (Akbari, "From Due East" 26).

In De proprietatibus rerum, Bartholomaeus asserts the corporeal difference of the

African people, who are adversely affected by the sun, the heat of which discolours their bodies:

In Isidore's Etymologies, Ethiopia is said to have two parts: one located in the west in Mauritania and the other located in the east (14.5.16). The latter is "doubly marked by the effects of the sun, by its southern exposure as well as its eastern orientation." See Akbar^ "From Due East to True North; Orientalism and Orientation" 26. Any black or dark-skinned person was referred to as an Ethiopian, regardless of where in African the individual originated. Thus, the Ethiopian was "a conflation of all Blacks living in sub-Egyptian Africa." See Strickland 79s See also Snowden, Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks. 41

[T]he sonne abideth longe over the Affers, men of Affrica, and brennen

and wasten humours and maken ham short of body, blaeke of face, with

crispe here. And for there spirites passe oute atte pores that ben open, so

they be more cowardes of herte.

An the cuntrarye is of men of the northe londe: for coldenes that is

withoute stoppeth the pores and breedeth humours of the bodye maketh

men more ful and huge; and coolde that is modir of whitnesse maketh hen

the more white in face and in skynne, and vapoures and spirites ben

ysmyten inwarde and maken hatter withinne and so the more bolde and

hardy. An the men of Asia ben meneliche disposed in that, and here firste

londe is by eeste. (15.50)

Here, as in Isidore, the climate imprints the body: the heat of the sun makes men "blaeke of face" while coldness is the "modir of whitenesse." Bodily difference coincides with temperamental difference: whereas the heat of southern men is expressed outwardly, leaving them "cowardes of herte," the heat of northern men is expressed inwardly, making them "bolde and hardy." Characteristics of a nation, such as cowardice and boldness, are signaled visually through the body and through skin pigmentation (Akbari,

"From Due East" 24). In other words, bodily difference becomes a manifestation of the climatological influence on the body and the distribution of its humours. What is striking about Bartholomaeus' account is the way in which corporeal difference is linked to foundational differences in character insofar as the black body of the African is perceived to be comparably deficient. 42

The association between corporeal difference, influenced by climate, and differences in character is also apparent in William of Malmesbury's account of Pope

Urban II's exhortation to crusade at the Council of Clermont (1095). The Saracen, according to Malmesbury, is adversely affected by torrid climate in which he lives:

the least valiant of men and, having no confidence in hand-to-hand

combat, love fighting on the run. No Turk ever dares do battle at close

quarters, and when driven from his ground he "draws his bowstring

from afar" and "trusts his missile to the wandering winds"; his bolts

having drunk their fill of liquid poison, it is venom and not valour that

brings death to the man they strike. If he achieves anything, therefore, I

would ascribe it to fortune and not fortitude, seeing that his weapons of

war are flight and poison. It is in fact well known that every nation born

in Eastern clime is dried up by the great heat of the sun; they may have

more good sense, but they have less blood in their veins, and that is why

they flee from battle at close quarters: they know that they have no

blood to spare. (600-03)

As a result of their exposure to the sun and heat, Saracens lack martial fortitude. The valuation of character is apparent in Malmesbury's implicit contrast between the Muslims' duplicity and cowardice, and the Christians' courage in battle. As Bartlett notes,

"[environmental thinking was rarely value-free" ("Concepts" 46). 43

The climate also precipitates bodily adaptation in The Book of Mandeville's

Travels. The southern inhabitants of Ethiopia are described as being blacker than their eastern counterparts. As a result of the climate in Ethiopia,

all the ryueres and5 all the watres ben trouble and bei ben somdell salte for

the gret hete bat is here. And the folk of bat contree ben lightly drunken

and han but litill appetyt to mete And bei han comounly the flux of the

wombe and bei lyuen not longe. In Ethiope ben many dyuerse folk And

Ethiope is clept Gusis. In pat countree ben folk bat han but o foot and bei

gon so blyue bat it is meruaylle And the foot is so large bat it schadeweth

all the body a3en the sonne. Whanne bei wole lye and reste them. In

Ethiope whan the children ben jonge and lytill bei ben all 3alowe And

whan bat waxen of age bat 3alowness turneth to ben all blak. (104)

As depicted by Mandeville, Ethiopia is a place of bodily deformity. The Ethiopian is not only black but differently formed as a result of his geographical proximity to the sun.

Here, as in the accounts of Isidore and Bartholomaeus, racial difference is a product of the environment.

Such bodily differences, however, are not essential but rather subject to variation

(Akbari, "Diversity" 164). Albertus Magnus suggests in his De natura loci that if

Ethiopians were re-located to a more temperate climate, within a few generations they would be physiological altered: their offspring would have white skin and all the other attributes associated with northern climates (Akbari, "Diversity" 165). Mandeville, in his

5 All diacritical marks have been written out. 44

account of the land of the Pygmies, similarly notes the mutable effects of the climate. The

height of the Pygmy is appropriate to the climate in which he lives. The climate not only

affects the physiology of the native inhabitants but also that of immigrants. According to

Mandeville, when men of normal stature live in the land of the Pygmies, their offspring

will also be of diminutive stature. The accounts of Albertus Magnus and John

Mandeville, which detail the effect of the climate on the world's peoples, suggest that

differences in physiology and character were not innate but rather contingent on

geographical positioning. This theory of human diversity, however, was often yoked

uneasily together with another, one which accounted for bodily difference through

genealogical descent (Abkari, "Diversity" 165).

Biblical Genealogies and the History of Human Diversity

In Book nine of the Etymologies, Isidore of Seville turns to the Bible in order to

explain the origins and nature of the world's peoples. He uses biblical genealogies "to

identify and classify people in an apparently rational and comprehensible framework"

(Tolan, Saracens 10). The world is comprised of seventy-two or seventy-three peoples, each of which can be traced back to one of Noah's three sons: "Now, of the nations into which the earth is divided, fifteen are fromJapheth , thirty-one from Ham, and twenty-

seven from Shem.. .And there are an equal number of languages, which arose across the

lands and, as they increased, filledth e provinces and islands" (9.1.2). For Isidore, the diversity of humanity "was rationally explicable and could (at least in theory), be traced 45 to a unified origin, to a human ancestor, Noah" (Tolan, Saracens 10).6 All human beings were thought to share common descent, and to be biological descendants of Noah and his wife, and Adam and Eve (Bartlett, "Concepts" 45). Drawing on the biblically-based belief in humanity's common descent and shared language, Isidore attributes the diversity of languages to the construction of the Tower of Babel and the subsequent differentiation of speech among the world's peoples (9.1.1). For Isidore, the variation in language leads to the migration of peoples and the formation of nations, asserting "nations arose from languages, not languages from nations" (9.1.14). As Tolan observes, Isidore tries to impose order not only on "the chronology of history but also on ethnology: history is the key to understanding the origins (and hence, to a larger degree, the natures) of the world's peoples (gentes)" (Saracens 11-12). Human diversity, for Isidore, developed over the course of time (Bartlett, "Concepts" 45), with the unfolding of biblical history.

Medieval authors turned to the Bible in order to elucidate the origins of Saracens, to establish their "general relationship to the peoples and religions of the world," and later to understand the phenomenon of Islam and its role in the unfolding of Christian providential history (Southern 15). Isidore, in his Etymologies, identifies the Saracens as descendents of Ishmael, one of the founders of the world's peoples: "A son of Abraham was Ishmael, from whom arose the Ishmaelites, who are now called, with the corruption

Isidore gives a fuller account of the Saracens later in Book 9 of the Etymologies'. "The Saracens are so called either because they claim to be descendants of Sarah or, as the pagans say, because they are of Syrian origin, as if the word were Syriginae. They live in a very large deserted region. They are also Ishmaelists, as the Book of Genesis teaches us, because they sprang from Ishmael They are afeo named Kedar, fromth e son of Ishmael, and Agarines, fromth e name Agar (i.e., Hagar). As we have said, they are called Saracens from an alteration in their name, because they are proud to be descendants of Sarah" (9.2.57) 46

of the name, Saracens, as if they descended from Sarah, and the Agarenes, from Agar

(i.e., Hagar") (9.2.6).

In Genesis, Ishmael is Abraham's first-born son, born of Hagar, Sarah's

handmaid. An angel tells Hagar that her child will "be a wild man; his hand will be

against every man, and every man's against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all

his brethren" (Gen. 16.12). Later, Abraham's wife, Sarah, bears a son, Isaac. When

Ishmael mocks his younger brother (Gen. 21.9), Sarah tells Abraham to "[c]ast out this

bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son"

(Gen. 21.10). God tells Abraham to heed Sarah and announces that "of the son of the

bondwoman I will make a nation" (Gen. 21.13). According to the book of Genesis,

Ishmael fathers twelve sons, "twelve princes according to their nations" who "dwelt from

Havilah unto Shur, that is before Egypt, as thou goest toward Assyria" (Gen. 25.16-18).

Drawing on the genealogies presented in the book of Genesis, Isidore identifies the twelve sons of Ishmael with northern (pre-Islamic) Arabs (Beckett 95; Tolan, Saracens

11).

In the Christian exegetical tradition, Isaac "the son of the freewoman,prefigure d

Christ, and his descendants the Church. Similarly Ishmael and his descendent represented the Jews. That was the allegorical meaning of the events described in Genesis. But literally the actual descendents of Ishmael were held to be the Saracens" (Southern 17).

The Venerable Bede (c. 673-735) interprets the Angel's prophecy regarding Ishmael: 47

It means that [Ishmael's] seed is to live in the wilderness - that is to say,

the wandering Saracens of uncertain abode, who invade all those living

beside the desert, and are resisted by all. But this is how things used to

be. Now, however, to such an extent is '[Ishmael's] hand against

everyone and everyone's hand against him' that they oppress the whole

length of Africa under their sway and, moreover, inimical and full of

hate towards everybody, they hold most of Asia and a considerable part

of Europe, (qtd. in Beckett 18)

Bede identifies the Saracens with encroaching Muslim forces, who were making great advances into previously Christian regions (Beckett 18; Southern 16).7 The excerpt from

Bede's biblical commentary exemplifies the process through which Old Testament

Ismaelites, pre-Islamic Arabs and Muslims "congregated and eventually mingled within the singular embrace of the name SaracenF (Beckett 19). As Beckett notes, this process is significant in the formulation of western perceptions of Islam because "[fjor centuries afterwards, western authors defined and characterised Muslims using negative imagery from biblical exegesis and apocalyptic literature" (19).8

Bede and "other erudite ecclesiastics had learned from pre-Islamic patristic writers that the name 'Saracen' had been adopted by the Ismaelites or Hagarenes of the Old Testament." The terms Saraceni, Ismaelitae, and Agareni had been used, according to Beckett, by Jerome (d. 420) "to refer to Arab people living in the Sinai peninsula and Syrian desert. By the time the Muslims of the seventh century inherited the label Saraceni, it had been in use for several hundred years, and in a learned Christian context it rendered the conquerors immediately familiar and explicable." See Beckett 18, 19. The identification of Saracens with the descendants of Ishmaelproved to be problematic. If, according to biblical genealogies, Saracens descended fromHaga r and not Sarah, why were these people called Saracens? Biblical commentaries postulated that the name "Saracen" was adopted by the Ismaelites or Hagarenes of the Old Testament in order to claim descent from Abraham's wife, Sarah, rather than from their less reputable ancestor, the slave-woman Hagar. Thus, the Ismaelites and Saracens were Because Old Testament Ismaelites, pre-Islamic Arabs, and Muslims were thought to be actual descendants of Ishmael, differentiated from the Chosen People on the basis of their founder, the Saracens ostensibly fit into this vision of humanity sharing a single progenitor. Concomitant to the biblically-inspired belief in humanity's common descent was the assertion that only descendents of Noah and those possessing the faculty of reason could qualify as human. The chief problem for Christian thinkers "who took the geographic lore of Pliny seriously was how to fit the monstrous races into the narrative of events recorded in these two ages" of man, spanning from Creation to Noah and from

Noah to Abraham respectively (Friedman 88). Friedman outlines the difficulty posed by the existence of fabulous races:

Any Christian who had read Pliny's chapter on the races, or who had seen

them depicted in the travelers' guides of the pilgrimage roads, was bound

to wonder, since these races were not mentioned in Scriptures, if they had

descended from Adam, and, if so, how they survived the Flood and what

should be the attitude of the Christian toward them. These questions in the

Middle Ages were equivalent to asking whether the Plinian races were, in

fact, men, for only a descendant of Noah could qualify as human. (88)

Medieval writers, wrestling with the question of the origins of the monstrous races, offered two kinds of responses: "[b]roadly speaking, the first of these was the proselytizing missionary view" which asserted, that monstrous races "were neither an

"clearly defined as the same people, and as a people who proved themselves to be untrustworthy and inferior by attempting to deceive the world concerning their genealogy." See Beckett 95. 49 accident in the Creation or indicative of a failure in God's plan"; the second viewed the monstrous races "as cursed and degenerate, a warning to other men against pride and disobedience" (88-89)

Augustine addresses the question of monstrous races' origins, their humanity and their place in God's creation in a chapter in the City of God entitled "Whether certain monstrous races of men are derived from the stock of Adam or Noah's sons" (16.8). The eighth chapter, when read in the context of the rest of the work, "forms part of

Augustine's argument that all men throughout the world who worship the same God are encompassed in His universal city, which includes rather than excludes. The heavenly city on earth whose existence he wishes to demonstrate draws its inhabitants from all nations no matter their languages, laws, and customs" (Friedman 90). Augustine asserts that the monstrous races, despite being differently formed, are not necessarily contra naturam but rather "a part of divine creation immune from human judgment since only

God has absolute knowledge of and authority over creation" (Uebei, Ecstatic 15). In chapter eight, Augustine specifically considers the case of the Cynocephali, or Dog-

Men9:

Barbaric traits - uncivilized habitat, incomprehensible speech, odd diet, exotic or immodest dress, and abhorrent customs - were assigned to the monstrous races, which provided "the ideological infrastructure for later medieval Christian portraits of living outcast groups," such as Jews and Muslims. See Strickland 42. There was, in the Middle Ages, a "fairly widespread connection of Saracens and Cynocephali in the Middle Ages...as the Moslems were often described by Christians as a race of dogs." See Friedman 67. Medieval polemics, world maps, and vernacular literature associate Saracens, either literally or figuratively,wit h the Cynocephali, drawing a parallel between the Saracen's perceived spiritual backwardness and the Cynocephali's physical deformity and lack of civilization. Physical deformity and godlessness converge in the image of the Cynocephali, who came to represent unconverted pagans during the later Middle Ages. See Friedman 61; Strickland 48. Exegetical interpretations of Psalm 21.17 identified non-Christians with the dogs mentioned in David's desperate cry: "dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me: they pierced What am I to say of the Cynocephali, whose dog's head and actual barking

prove them to be animals rather than men? Now we are not bound to

believe in the existence of all the types of men which are described. But

no faithful Christian should doubt that anyone who is born anywhere a

man - that is, a rational and mortal being - derives from that one first-

created human being. And this is true, however extraordinary such a

creature may appear to our sense in bodily shape, in color, or motion, or

utterance, or in any natural endowment, or part, or quality. However it is

clear what constitutes the persistent norm of nature in the majority and

what, by its very rarity, constitutes a marvel (16.8)

There are, for Augustine, two aspects of humanity: the possession of reason and the descent from Adam (Friedman 91). The appearance of the Cynocephali does not preclude them from humanity (Uebel, Ecstatic 16).10 The passage is nevertheless ambivalent

my hands and my feet." The passage evokes Christ's Passion and the dogs were understood allegorically as the Jews, "who were called dogs because just as a dog barks at what is strange to him, so the Jews rejected the new doctrines of Jesus and barked against them. Dogs also stood for heretics who knowingly rejected the truth." See Friedman 61. The Cynocephali - whose physical deformity and lack of comprehensible language - marked them as monstrous and barbarous in the catalogues of fabulous races - are here understood in theological terms. Non-Christians who reject salvation are denied humanity: "[t]o refuse the Word is to deny logic and so to lose humanity." See Friedman 68. The unconverted pagan is depicted as a monstrous race with the full implications of that identification. See Strickland 160.

For medieval thinkers, theon&of the key determinants of difference was language and the capacity to communicate. Christians attributed the multiplicity of languages to the dispersion of humankind following the destruction of the Tower of Babel which spelled the end of a "culturally homogenous mankind" See Muldbon 83. The post-Babel differentiation of language reads to the formation nations; in other words, language is integral to the construction of collective identity. In the catalogues of the fabulous races, some of the races identified as monstrous are so, in part, because they lack human speech, an important component in the classical definition of barbarian. For example, mouthless races, like the Astromi and the Straw-Drinkers, are incapable of speech as are the Troglodytes and the Speechless Men, the latter of which communicate through gestures. See Friedman 29. The Cynocephali ("Dog-Heads") lack human speech, communicating solely by barking. The lack of 51 insofar as Augustine admits the possibility that members of the fabulous races are not humans, but rather animals lacking in reason and pedigree (Uebel, Ecstatic 15-6).

Augustine seems unwilling to commit himself to the humanity of the races: "to conclude this question cautiously and guardedly, either these things which have been told of some races have no existence at all; or if they do exist, they are not human races; or if they are human, they are descended from Adam" (16.8). As Friedman notes, "if Augustine grants tentatively their descent from Adam, he does not go into the details of that descent or discuss how the races might have come to be so different from other men" (92). By emphasizing the races' reason and their place in the heavenly city, albeit tentatively,

Augustine casts the monstrous races as potential Christians capable of salvation

(Friedman 90). As Uebel observes,

[t]he perceived differences between "us and them" are strictly products of

fundamental distinctions along the hierarchy of salvation. These

differences, which manifest the limits of the recognizable and

unrecognizable, are, in the theological view, subsumable to divine

dispensation. Others, as imperfect humanity, represent the potentially

salvageable since all races are open to grace. Monsters remain historically,

culturally divided from normative humanity, yet potentially unified with it

intelligible speech contributes to the dehumanized image of the Cynocephalus, who is physically deformed, a hybrid of human and animal. Like their Classical predecessors, "medieval authorities continued to equate lack of speech with lack of civilization." See Strickland 48. Possession of intelligible speech as a marker of civilization speaks to the problem posed by the monstrous races for medieval thinkers who debated the races' humanity. Isidore of Seville links speechlessness and inhumanity in chapter eleven (on "The human being and portents") of the Etymologies. 52

at the moment of the Last Judgment. As incarnations of the fallen ideal,

they possess a double status as insiders enjoying the promise of salvation

and as outsiders reminding humanity of the consequences of the Fall.

(Ecstatic 16)

Christianity and, by extension, the capacity for salvation serve as "the principal dividing

line between the damned and the saved, the wild and the civilized" (Uebel, Ecstatic 17).

In the Christian tradition, the monstrous races were sometimes thought to be

descendants of Cain. After Cain's malediction, he "built a city" (Gen. 4.17), the nature of which is dramatized through the contrast between the two brothers. Augustine writes,

I classify the human race into two branches: the one consists of those who

live by human standards, the other of those who live according to God's

will. I will also call these two classes the two cities, speaking allegorieally.

By two cities I mean two societies of human beings, one of which is

predestined to reign with God for all eternity, the other doomed to undergo

eternal punishment with the Devil,. .Cain.. .the first-born... Scripture tells

us Cain founded a city, whereas Abel, as a pilgrim, did not found one. For

the city of the saints is up above. (15.1)

Monstrous races were traditionally associated with Cain* the biblical outcast, as their first parent, partaking "of Cain's curse and promise of eternal torment in hell" (Friedman 31).

Cain as progenitor transmits his evil nature to the monstrous races of the East, outwardly transforming the perfect form of the human body through sin (Friedman 92; Strickland 53

49). The association between Cain and monstrosity can be found in other medieval

contexts. In Beowulf, Grendel and bis mother are described as "kinsmen of Cain,"

concretizing their abject nature (107). The Hereford Map includes the inscription "sons of

the cursed Cain" in reference to monsters who consume human flesh and drink blood

(Strickland 49, 203-32; Friedman 95). According to Strickland, the idea of Cain

"provided a convenient forum for expression of hostility towards Monstrous Races" as

well as denigrating Jews and other non^Christian enemies, including Saracens, who were thought to share a kinship with Cain (211-12). Similarly, Friedman notes "ft}he

descendants of Cain and Ham seem, indeed, to have become ubiquitous by the thirteenth century, and almost any person or people viewed with distaste or hostility by a Christian writer was likely to receive honorary membership in their family, as genealogy was used to justify an unfriendly or suspicious attitude toward the peoples who dwelt on the fringes of the medieval Latin world" (103)

It is important to realize that "medieval notions of difference operated within the context of kinship-based societies, societies that stressed common descent and blood relationships" (Muldoon 91). Although Bartlett asserts that race "in its medieval reality was almost entirely c\Atata^\Europe 197)* medieval formulations have a biological component insofar as Christian thinkers turned to biblical genealogies in order to understand the origins and natures of foreign peoples . Augustine emphasizes in the City of God that the so-called monstrous races were part of God's creation, a willed part of

His plan. While Augustine uses genealogy to emphasize humanity's shared descent and the place of the monstrous races in creation, other Christian thinkers use it to differentiate 54 among the world's peoples; ancestry is simultaneously what connects and separates the world's peoples. The monstrous races, in the Christian tradition, exemplified "the decline from the perfection of prelapsarian man" and were evidence of "the corruption of the human species through some crime and sin" (Friedman 89). As Friedman notes, tribal and racial differences become evidence of "species corruption" (89). Implicit in biblical treatment of the differences among men after the Flood was the idea of "better" and

"worse" races; if human beings are all descendants of Adam, God's idea of the perfect man, deviation fromthi s model of humanity was often "seen as the consequence not only of the Fall, but also of alien strains entering a tribal line of descent, so that the resulting people were less than fully human. Divine punishment, of course, could also change or

'corrupt' a species" (Friedman 89-90). Those who were physically anomalous - the monstrous races - or those who did not adhere to the tenets of Christianity - non-

Christians - became associated with the tainted lineage of Cain. Evident in the treatment of biblical genealogies are the ways in which biblical history - the Fall, the Flood, the

Tower of Babel, Cain's curse - influence human history, in particular the ethnographic diversity of the world's peoples. Medieval thinkers deploy descent strategically in order to minimize difference by emphasizing a shared progenitor and an inclusive conception of salvation, or to entrench difference by introducing the notion of species corruption, demonstrating the elasticity of medieval conceptions of race. 55

"Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots?": Religious Identity and the Moralization of Somatic Difference

Underlying the anthropological accounts of foreign peoples, in which races are

"geographically identified by location, physically described and then ascribed moral attributes according to their somatic features and geographical habitats," is a system of value and meaning which privileges whiteness and disparages blackness (Heng, "Jews"

261). An individual's physical form mirrored, according to medieval physiognomic theory, his/her inward character. Strickland outlines the two basic assumptions of physiognomic analyses:

[t]he first is that mental disposition follows bodily characteristics, and the

second asserts that the body suffers with affectations of the soul. This

means that a person's character may be determined by correctly

interpreting specific physical signs, such as movements and gestures,

colour of skin, hair, and eyes; facial expressions; growth of hair; skin

texture; voice; condition of the flesh; bodily proportions and overall build.

In other words, the physiognomical system is a semiotic one, in that parts

of the body are read as signs of moral disposition, such as courage,

cowardice, good disposition... (38)

Bodily difference is imbued with moral value so that, in Bartholomaeus' account of cold and hot climates, whiteness and blackness become signs of a group's moral superiority

(whiteness/inner courage) or failing (blackness/ cowardice). Anthropological accounts are marked by their ethnocentrism, implicitly locating the "ideal human types in Western

Europe, not in Africa, India, the Near East, or the Far North" (Strickland 38). Indeed, the

"unmarked" white body, free of physical deformity, is the ideal body - the norm by which all other peoples are evaluated. Strickland cites an image from a fifteenth-century

French copy of Bartholomaeus's encyclopedia which accompanies a chapter concerned with the ideal human body. The image tellingly depicts a tall, well-proportioned, white- skinned, blond figure; the exemplar of Northern European physiognomy stands in a forest landscape (Strickland 39). Medieval writers and artists "routinely used physiognomical descriptions and pictorial representation not only to signify the moral failing of enemy groups and individuals, but also to communicate the virtue of Christ, the Virgin, angels, saints, and ordinary Christians" (Strickland 39). To be white, as Heng notes, is to be

"European, Christian, of elite status, and imbued with courage, strength and moral virtue"

("Jews" 261-2).11

Race must be read and understood in relation to geography, bodily morphology, and theology because "curious customs and appearance suggested to the medieval mind an equally curious spiritual condition" (Friedman 2). Colour dualism, in which white is valued positively and black negatively, is evident in a range of medieval cultural artifacts

Racial difference is intimately connected wife social status' "Rural dwellers and fee poor might be imagined as having descended exclusively from a subordinated group, and might even be represented with darkened skin and other features that visually set them apart fromelites. " See Cohen, "Entry for Race." Economic distinctions were often demarcated along racial lines* as in the Middle English romance Gerenides. Clarionas, Gerenides' love interest, attempts to disguise herself as a laundress. She initially fails to disguise her identity by misrepresenting her class: "The lauender perceiued wel therbigh / Hir white legges, and said, "ma dame, / Your shin boones might doo vs blam; / Abide," she seid, "so mot I thee, / More slotered their most be." (7062-66). Clarionas' white skin is indicative of her noble class and consequently, her legs must be blackened with ash in order for her to pass as a member of the lower classes. 57

(Heng, "Jews" 261). Despite the "natural" explanations for blackness offered by

medieval theories of climate, physiognomy and environment, black skin is nevertheless

aligned with sin and the demonic in Christian allegoresis and imagery (Cohen, "Saracen"

118; Friedman, 64-6; Strickland 84).

As Friedman notes, "[c]olor polarities were easily interchanged with moral

polarities, and the blackness of immorality contrasted with the whiteness of salvation"

(64-5). Gregory the Great (c. 540-604), in his Moralia in lob, interprets Ethiopia as a

symbol for the fallen world, whose blackness is a sign of sinfulness (cited in Cohen,

"Saracen" 118; Strickland 84). St. Jerome writes in Tractates in Librum Psalmorum,

"People of the Ethiopians means those who are black, being covered with the stain of

sin.. .m the past we were Ethiopians, being made so by our sins and vices. How? Because

sin had made us black" (qtd. in Strickland 84). Paulinus of Nola too aligns blackness with

sinfulness: "The dragon devours the people of Ethiopia, who are not burned by the sun

but are black with vice, sin giving them the colour of night These are the Ethiopians the

serpent devours, being condemned to make them his food" (qtd. in Strickland 84).

Theodulus, in his tenth-century Ecloga, also interprets "Ethyopum" allegorically:

"Ethiopians, that is sinners. Indeed, sinners can rightly be compared to Ethiopians, who

are black men presenting a terrifying appearance to those beholding them" (qtd. in

Friedman 65). Fulgentius of Ruspe characterizes the Ethiopian as "one not yet whitened by the grace of Christ shining on him" (qtd. in Friedman 65), thereby concretizing

Strickland's observation that "[t]he central idea in [patristic writings] is the symbolic equation of black with spiritual darkness, implying the concomitant equivalence of white

with spiritual enlightenment" (84).

But implicit in Fulgentius of Ruspe' s account of the Ethiopian as one who has yet

to attain divine grace is the possibility of spiritual transformation. Medieval texts depict

the literal bleaching of skin through baptism and conversion, outwardly signaling a

change in spiritual state. In The King of Tars, the Saracen Sultan of Damascus willingly converts to Christianity; at the moment of his baptism, the Sultan transforms, as a result

of divine grace, from being "Mac & lobely" to being "[a]l white" (928-9). The Sultan's

blackness, prior to his baptism, is clearly associated with his beliefs, contrasting with the description of the Christian princess of Tars, who is "as white as feber of swan" (12). The princess dreams she is being attacked by black hounds; while she initially fears for her

safety, she is reassured by the appearance of Christ, who is "in white elopes, als a kni3t"

(451). When the princess wakes from her dream, she immediately prays: "On her bed sche sat al naked, / To Ihesu hir preier sche maked" (460-61), Lisa Lampert explains the

significance of the princess's nakedness: "Her naked body may be read as erotic, but it is also vulnerable and, as she is still a virgin, innocent. Given the poem's opening description of her, she is also a vision ofwhiteness, likened to Jesus in his white robes and sharply contrasted to the hounds of her dream (and to her Saracen husband)" ("Race"

408, emphasis mine). The King of Tars demonstrates the ways in which physical and religious difference are entangled, elucidating the "connection between Christian belief and a morally inflected whiteness" (Lampert, "Race" 409), and providing a "twilight, interzonal space in which culture and biology overlap" (Heng, Empire 229). 59

Interestingly, race is constructed, in part, in moral terms, as a choice. A change in religion could signal a potential change in racial identity, as dramatized in The King of Tars.

Religious difference is colour-coded in The King of Tar & insofar as whiteness becomes the normative marker of Christian identity: "The King of Tars, as a medieval artifact, supposes the normativity of whiteness, and of the white racial body, as the guarantor of normalcy, aesthetic and moral virtue, European Christian identity, and full membership in the human community, in complicity with the possession of a human essence conferred by religious discourse acting as biological determination" (Heng,

Empire 231-2). But the representation of colour difference in The King of Tars also points to the possibility of change - to the lack of an unalterable racial essence - although we should note Lampert's caveat that "this change requires conversion and is based on a fixed belief in Christianity as the only true religion" ("Race" 409),

Because religion is the dominant discourse of the medieval period, "the assigning of a hierarchical difference of colour (white over black) to human beings is often decided upon by ahierarchy of religious difference (Christianity over Islam)" (Heng, "Jews"

261). Colour difference is inextricably linked with religious difference in cultural depictions of Saracens, who were often represented in Western European fantasy as dark as the Ethiopian because of their "infernal" religion, even though Christians were well

There is a long cultural history of associating blackness with the devil. Devils in the form of the black Ethiopian torment saints in Jacobus de Voragine's The Golden Legend. The association between the devil and the Ethiopian is found in later medieval imagery, in which the corporeal demons assume the form of the black man. Strickland cites the late twelfth-century Canterbury Psalter, which depicts Christ healing the Gadarene demoniacs (Matt. 8.28-32), as an example of the interchangeability of demons and Ethiopians. See Strickland 81. In this image, the possessed are rendered black Ethiopians and clad only in loincloths. The demons driven out by Christ are also depicted as small, winged aware of the wide diversity in skin pigmentation among the various groups who practiced

Mam (Cohen, Identity Machines 199-}. The pejorative characterizationof theblack

Ethiopian offered the model for the racialized representation of the Muslim, a depiction

commonly found in medieval Christian works, such as the Chanson de Roland

(Strickland 83).

In the poem, the Saracen army is comprised of various ethnic groups (peoples

from the Middle East, fromth e fringes of Latin Europe, and from Africa), some of whom

are differentiated by their skin colour and physiognomy. Abisme is described as a "man

of evil traits and mighty treachery, / He does not believe in God, the son of the Virgin

Mary; / And is as black as molten pitch" (1472-74).The poet ascribes to Abisme the same

dark skin attributed to the Ethiopian. Interestingly, the Saracen's skin colour and

character are inseparable - he enjoys perfidy, murder and heresy. Here, Abisme is not

solely differentiated on the basis of his religious beliefs; rather, biological as well as

cultural markers of Otherness (skin pigmentation, religious difference) coalesce in his portrait. Another Saracen leader, Marganiee, rules over Carthage, Alfrere, Garmalie, and

Ethiopia. He commands "the black race" described as having "large noses and broad ears" (1917-18). Throughout the Chanson de Roland, the Otherness of the Saracen, like that of the Ethiopian, is racially marked through physical difference: the Mileeni who possess large heads and pig-like bristles on their spines (3221-23); the Canaanites who are described as ugly (3238); the fiery desert dwellers of Occian possessing skin so hard

Ethiopians, "creating a strong visual identification between Ethiopians, demons, and evil." See Strickland 81. Middle English romances sometimes portray the Saracen as a descendant of Satan himself. See C. Mereditli lones, "The Conventional Saracen of the Songs of Geste." 61

they do not wear armor (3246-51); and the giants of Malprose (3253). Again, religious

difference is signaled visually through physiological difference, to which the medieval

poet ascribe moral value. The anatomized descriptions of Saracens, which highlight

differences in skin pigmentation and morphology, emphasize not only the Saracens'

deviation from normative whiteness but also from Christianity and spiritual salvation.

Not surprisingly, the Saracen soul, in the Chanson de Roland, is carried off to hell by

Satan himself whereas the Christian knight dies a martyr's death and ascends to heaven

accompanied by angels (1269; 2389-96).

Such moralizations also influence the visual representation of racial difference on

medieval maps. Medieval cartography renders visible distinctive peoples and regions

identified through their relative distance from Christianity "in human and cultural, as

well as spatial, terms" (Heng, "Jews" 262), Maps such as the Ebstorf map locate the

monstrous races at the extremities of the world, projecting the interconnection of

religious and physical difference. Friedman emphasizes the theological significance of

medieval world maps, "monstrous men are symbolically the farthest from Christ of

anything in the creation, and are represented in a narrow band at the edge of the world, as

far as possible from Jerusalem, the centre of Christianity" (37). In his discussion of the

Ebstorf map* Friedman notes the relative placement of the monstrous races and Christian nations:

"[The Ebstorf map] features a row of monstrous races confined in a

narrow strip at the southern edge of the world.. .the races are literally at

the left hand of Christ. Viewed as a cosmological statement, the Ebstorf 62

map would seem to be saying that Christ holds in his arms and spans with

his body the microcosm and the macrocosm and includes the monstrous

races within the world, yet keeps them at the greatest distance possible

from the centre. That centre - Jersualem and the Christian nations -

constitutes the oikumene. Beyond it are foundth e Jews and Moslems, and

beyond them in regions like Scythia and the land of Gog and Magog are

barbaric tribes. At the very edges of the world, at Christ's left hand, are

the monstrous races. (46)

Monstrous races are geographically and theologically exiled in order to explain their physical difference and to emphasize their perceived moral inferiority, their relative distance from Christ and Christianity. Thus, religious affiliation and the perceived

spiritual state of collective groups is expressed concretely through the body, through physiognomy and morphology.

The discourse of religious difference, as Akbari observes, is "predicated on binarism - that is right belief and wrong belief' - whereas the discourse of bodily difference is not {Idols 161). Rather, "there is a norm, and there is greater or less deviation from that norm" (Akbari, Idols 161). In other words, corporeal difference is "a

continuum, with the monstrous races found on the fringeso f the eeumene located on one end, and the normative Euroepan body on the other" (Akbari, Idols 160). Located along this continuum, the medieval other is a product simultaneously of religious and bodily difference, "partakfing] in both the binarism of religious alterity and the spectrum of bodily diversity" (Akbari, Idols 161). 63

Discourses of religion and bodily difference converge in medieval representations of conversion. Conversion scenes construct religious differenc&as contingent insofar as it is possible to change one's religious affiliation. Interestingly, changing one's religion signals a change in racial identity as exemplified by the Middle English The King of Tars and by legendary accounts of St. Christopher whose conversion affects his physical transformation, causing him to lose the distinctive physical feature that previously characterized him as a Cyncephalus: his dog's head (Strickland 245-6). Such examples demonstrate the ways in which the discourse af religious alterity and the discourse of racial alterity are sometimes aligned in medieval texts.

Conclusion: The Fluidity of Racial Determinants

Geraldine Heng locates the emergence of a racializing discourse in the long thirteenth century of the medieval period {Empire 70-1). She writes,

Among the instrumental regimes that developed in the episteme of the

thirteenth century and after, I suggest, is a racializing discourse of

biological and spiritual difference, posited on religion, color, and

physiognomy, the intense and searching examination of which theorizes a

taxonomy of essential differences among peoples, that sets the later

Middle Ages apart fromth e earlier Middle Ages. {Empire 70)

The examination of medieval encyclopedias, travelogues and exegetieal texts reveals the existence of a system of classification that differentiates and hierarchizes. Biological and spiritual difference, however, are not the only vectors along which identity and difference 64

were circumscribed. Race, in its medieval reality, is an imbrication of categories that

constructs and differentiates self from other. Race as a conceptual category is layered; as

Cohen suggests, it is best understood as a "phenomenon of multiple category overlap"

("Saracen" 116). As we have seen, the constituents of difference - geographical

positioning, genealogy, religious belief, and physical appearance — used to demarcate^

communal belonging, are intertwined and are difficult to tease out. To the modes of

categorization discussed in this chapter, we could add other means of differentiating

among the world's peoples: language, law, political affiliation, sexual practice, and

customs such as clothing and hairstyle.

The modes of categorization that function together as a taxonomical system are notably fluid. Geographical surveys not only assert a correspondence between climate

and bodily diversity, but also suggest that such bodily differences are subject to variation.

This theory of human diversity contrasts, and was often yoked together with, another

account, one which relied on biblical genealogies to explain the differences among the world's peoples. While the latter depicts racial difference as inborn, genealogy as a mode of differentiation is surprisingly elastic. Descent could either be used to minimize

difference or to entrench it. Bodily difference, regardless of its underlying cause, was thought to mirror an individual's inward character or spiritual state. Such moralizations, however, construct racial identity, in part, as a choice and suggest the possibility of changing one's racial identity through a spiritual reorientation.

For further discussion of other constituents of difference, see Bartlett, The Making of Europe; and Cohen, Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain. 65

Medieval categories of difference thus are characterized by their lack of fixity; unlike post-eighteenth century theories of race, race as constructed in the medieval period may not have been an immutable destiny. Suzanne Conklin Akbari elucidates the differences between medieval and Enlightenment theories of race: prior to the eighteenth century, "we find heredity and environment variously and inconsistently identified as causes of bodily diversity; by the eighteenth, however, we find a conception of bodily diversity that sees physical and behavioural differences as essential, fixed and immutable

- rooted in the very existence of the individual" ("Diversity" 166). While medieval theories of race differ from modern ones, Akbari admits "medieval systems of categorization laid the foundations for modern distinctions between those who are

'naturally' slaves and those who are 'naturally' their masters" ("Diversity" 157).

The texts we have examined in this chapter are preoccupied with naming and categorizing the differences thought to separate the world's peoples. Middle English romances display a similar desire to impose classificatory boundaries and to maintain a strict separation between Christian and Saracens. However, romances such as The King of

Tars and Beues ofHamtoun express border anxiety. Indeed, their depictions of religious conversion suggest that Christians and Saracens are not altogether different from one another. Moreover, The King of Tars and Beues ofHamtoun demonstrate the insufficiency of a binary model to describe the convert's ambivalent position between two opposing cultures. 66

Transgressive Unions: Female Conversion and Interfaith Marriage in

The King of Tars and Beues ofHamtoun

In The King of Tars, the Saracen Sultan of Damascus accepts conversion at the request of his Christian wife after they both witness the miraculous transformation of their child from a formless "rond of flesche" (579) to a fully-formed little boy. The romance dramatizes the transformative power of baptism twice: the substantial change of the lump-child which is quickly followed by the Sultan's own spiritual and racial transformation. Convinced of the power of Christianity, the Sultan forsakes his heathen gods and receives the Christian faith. At the moment of baptism, the Sultan's Saracen identity, defined in terms of religious allegiance and racial difference, is transmuted: "His hide, bat blac & lobely was, / Al white bicom, burth Godes gras, / & clere wibouten blame. / & when be soudan seye bat si3t / I>an leued he wele on God almi3t; / His care went to game" (928-33). Here, the "Saracen body is the site of transformation" (Akbari,

Idols 157). The blanching of the Sultan's black Saracen body signals a substantial and essential change that is concomitant with spiritual reorientation. Indeed, the Sultan's inclusion into the Christian community necessitates a bodily change because he cannot change cultural position and retain the signifier of otherness, his black skin.

The Sultan's transformation - both spiritual and physical - perpetuates a fantasy of easy conversion. He ostensibly converts to Christianity and integrates into the

Christian community with relative ease, free of the cultural suspicions that surrounded actual apostates. This fantasy of easy conversion, however, contrasts with instances of 67

apostasy in The King of Tars and in Beues ofHamtoun. Both romances feature female

converts - one Christian, the other Saracen - and both romances depict the process of

female conversion as fraught The King of Tars and Beues ofHamtoun thus evoke the

cultural suspicion surrounding converts: in The King of Tars, the feigned conversion of a

Christian princess serves as a proxy for cultural anxieties surrounding non-Christian

converts entering the Christian community, whereas Beues ofHamtoun questions the

extent to which baptism and conversion can completely eradicate the vestiges of Saracen

identity. The conversion of the Christian Princess in The King of Tars and of Josiane in

Beues ofHamtoun both occasion the transgression of religious and sexual boundaries through interfaith unions, undermining the strict segregation of Christian and Saracen.

Policing Racial and Religious Minorities: Medieval Prohibitions against

Intermarriage and Interfaith Intercourse.

The strict segregation of religious and ethnic communities in the Middle Ages provided the impetus for Christian injunctions against intermarriage and interfaith sex

(Lambert 4-5). Canon lawyers produced, between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, extensive "literature on the impermissibility, not just of marriage, but of any sexual contact between Christians and non-Christians" (Nirenberg 131). The lawyers reasoned that "[i]f Christians and non-Christians were explicitly banned from bathing or dining together, and from other forms of social intimacy, then surely the church fathers had also intended to ban the most intimate of social relations: sexual intercourse" (Nirenberg 131). 68

Legislation enacted by the Council of Nablus (1120) in the crusader Kingdom of

Jerusalem regulated the dress of non-Christians and forbade sexual relation between

Christians and Muslims. Muslims were prohibited from dressing like "Franks" and were enjoined to wear distinctive dress, thereby facilitating the identification of non-Christians

(Tolan, Saracens 196-97). The Council of Nablus also sought to regulate sexual activity within the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, enacting severe penalties against Latin men who engaged in extramarital sexual relations with Muslim women: "If anyone shall be proved to have slept with a Muslim woman with her consent, let him be castrated and let her nose be cut off' (qtd. in Brundage 60). Latin women were also penalized for forming sexual attachments with Muslim men: "If a Christian woman shall freely have intercourse with a Saracen man, let both of them be condemned to the penalty for adulterers. If, however, he took her by force, she shall not be held guilty; but the Saracen shall be made an enunch" (qtd. in Brundage 60). The Nablus enactments, as Brundage explains,

"specifically sought to discourage sexual encounters between Latin Christians and those local peoples who remained loyal to Islam" (61). In other words, the "prohibitions were aimed at sexual liaisons across religious lines rather than interracial sexual relations," including those involving Christian converts (Brundage 61).

The same preoccupation with the integrity of the Christian community and the same fear of inter-faith sexual unions justified "the most extensive attempts at segregation undertaken by the medieval Church" in the thirteenth century (Nirenberg 69

133). One of the seventy canons generated by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215),1 canon

68 notably specifies the conditions of appearance of racial and religious minorities living throughout Christendom:

In some provinces a difference in dress distinguishes the Jews or Saracens from

the Christians, but in others confusion has developed to such a degree that no

difference is discernible. Whence it happens sometimes through error that

Christians mingle with the women of Jews and Saracens, and, on the other hand,

Jews and Saracens mingle with those of the Christians. Therefore, that such

ruinous commingling through error of this kind may not serve as a refuge for

further excuse for excesses, we decree that such people of both sexes (that is,

Jews and Saracens) in every Christian province and at all times be distinguished

in public from other people by a difference in dress since this was also enjoined

on them by Moses. ("Fourth" 290)

Clothing, in particular singular clothing imposed by canon law on racial and religious minorities, served to set bodies apart by "displaying their distinctiveness" (Cohen,

Hybridity 17). Three years following the enactment of the canon requiring that Jews and

Saracens be identified on the basis of dress, England required Jews to wear distinguishing badges (Heng, "Jews" 251). The tabula became "a visible marker of Jewish apartness and non-belonging," which testified "to the historical project of publicly identifying and

1 The canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, which call for a new Crusade and place restrictions on non- Christians, illustrate the pope's "three-pronged attack" on Islam: "crusade against Muslim principalities, legal restrictions on Muslims living in Christian territories, and mission to Muslims everywhere." See Tolan, Saracens 196. 70 naming a minority population that was not to be perceived as part of the national community of the Christian English" (Heng, "Jews" 251). Such restrictions reflect a desire to impose classificatory boundaries, and to circumscribe the limits of collective identity.

The rationale behind the insistence that Jews and Saracens wear distinctive clothing is a sexual one (Kruger 137). The legal restrictions were not only designed to prevent category "confusion," rendering non-Christians visible and identifiable, but also protect Christians "from the polluting contact of the infidel subject: sexual contact was above all to be avoided" (Tolan, Saracens 196). Inter-faith unions, both marital and sexual, were perceived to transgress the lines of religious distinction, undermining the strict segregation of Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities (Kruger 167). Distinctive clothing became "emblems of difference" that outwardly signified the "sexual boundary not to be transgressed" (Nirenberg 133).

Injunctions against Jews and Saracens demonstrate a preoccupation with the physical and spiritual purity of Christians (Tolan, Saracens 196). Canon 68 implicitly links sexual transgression with spiritual corruption. Jews and Saracens were not only enjoined to wear distinctive clothing but also refrain from public places during Holy

Week, keeping the rituals free from contamination and safeguarding the sanctity of

Christian worship (Tolan, Saracens 197).2 The legislation reflects "a certain visceral

2 Canon 68 seeks to protect Christians from spiritual corrupt by prohibiting blasphemous words or acts:

On the days of the Lamentations and on Passion Sunday they may not appear in public, because some of them, as we understand, on those days are not ashamed to show themselves more ornately attired and do not fear to amuse themselves at the expense of the Christians, who in memory of the 71 repugnance at the bodies that they sought to rope off from Christendom," suggesting that

Jewish and Saracen bodies were considered to be racially different from Christian ones

(Kruger 166-67). Such measures did not (ostensibly) apply directly to those who have converted to Christianity (Kruger 167). Scholarly work on medieval conversions reveals that it was permissible for the convert to marry and to "[enter] into the social life of

Christian communities" (Kruger 167).

Christian communities, however, did not always welcome the religious convert with open arms. While conversion to Christianity was encouraged, converts evoked some measure of distrust within the established Christian community, making their religious assimilation difficult. Integration into the Christian sexual and familial structures was especially fraught: "the anxious establishment of boundaries between religious communities that partly expressed itself in the condemnation of interfaith sexual contacts translated into uncertainly about the licitness of sexual and familial relations with new converts to Christianity" (Kruger 167). The marginalization of the convert stems not only from suspicions regarding the sincerity and completeness of the conversion, but also the

sacred passion go about attired in robes of mourning. That we most strictly forbid, lest they should presume in some measure to burst forth suddenly in contempt of the Redeemer. And, since we ought not to be ashamed of Him who blotted out our offenses, we command that the secular princes restrain presumptuous persons of this kind by condign punishment, lest they presume to blaspheme in some degree the One crucified for us. ("Fourth" 290-91)

It is important to keep in mind that Jewish and Muslim communities were as concerned about miscegenation and contamination fromth e "other" religious communities as were the Christian majority. See Nirenberg.

3 Latins (specifically Latin men) were "free to marry Syrian and Armenian Christians and even to marry Christian converts from Islam; but marriage to a practicing Muslim was subject to severe penalties. Religion, not race or ethnic heritage, was the issue that the Nablus decrees addressed. See Brundage 61. 72 fears that there is some hereditary aspect of Jewish or Saracen identity (Kruger 167).

Robert Stacey, in his study of Jewish conversion to Christianity in thirteenth-century

England, concludes that such integration fails because "there was clearly an irreducible element to Jewish identity in the eyes of many Christians, which no amount of baptismal water could entirely eradicate" (278). Although the act of conversion itself suggests an impulse towards amalgamation, there was a "consistent Christian anxiety that [the convert] would 'relapse' to their original religion - the fear that converts had not 'truly' become Christian, that they were always on the verge of reverting to a prior state -

[which] suggests how fully problematic was their integration into Christendom" (Kruger

171). The convert occupies an ambivalent position between two hostile religious communities precisely because he rejects one community in favour of another but remains "somehow different, still of an other people, gens, race than the Christian society to which he is assimilated" (Kruger 170).

This fear of apostasy - that is, the difficulty of determining the genuineness of belief, and the belief that the convert remains essentially different - is dramatized in The

King of Tars. The Princess' conversion (albeit feigned) must have been unnerving for a medieval audience in several respects: it features the religious conversion of a Christian to the Saracen religion, evoking the cultural anxiety that "the boundary of conversion might be transgressed in the wrong direction" (Nirenberg 128); it raises the possibility of

"passing" and places religion in a performative context; and it occasions the miscegenation of Christian and Saracen communities which results in the birth of a monstrous hybrid, the lump-child. The Princess' conversion is, thus, more troubling than 73 that of her Saracen husband because it raises the specter of doubt and it more readily blurs the established boundary between religious communities.

"Passing" as Saracen and the Fear of Miscegenation in The King of Tars:

The King of Tars begins with the martial conflict between the Christian King of

Tars and the Saracen Sultan of Damascus. The war is precipitated by the Christian

Princess' rejection of the Sultan's marriage proposal. The Princess refuses to abandon her

Christian beliefs in favour of marriage and wealth: "Ihesu, mi Lord in trinite, / Lat me neuer bat day yse / A tirant forto take. / O God & persones pre, / For Marie loue pi moder fre, / 3if him arst tene & wrake" (61-66). The Sultan, enraged by the Princess' refusal, gathers his army and engages the Christian forces in battle. The loss of 30,000 Christian

lives and the desire to prevent further bloodshed prompts the Princess to reconsider the

Sultan's proposal. But the Princess' marriage to the Sultan necessitates her religious

conversion.

The Saracen Sultan agrees to marry the Christian princess on the condition that she converts to the Saracen religion:

I>ou most bileue opon mi lay

& knele now here adoun;

& forsake pi fals lay

tat pou hast leued on mani a day,

& anour seyn Mahoun. 74

& certes, bot bou wilt anon,

I>i fader y schal wib wer slon. (470-76)

Shared religious belief is a necessary condition of marriage not only for Saracens but also for Christians:

Noiber for fo no fre[n]de

For nobing wold he ney3e bat may

Til bat sche leued opon his lay,

I>at was of Cristen kende.

Wei lobe war a Cristen man

To wedde an heben woman

I>at leued on fals lawe. (405-15)

The poet explicitly condemns interfaith marriage, insisting that marriage should only take place between members of the same religious group.

Religious difference is inextricably linked with colour difference in The King of

Tars* The Saracen Sultan is described as "blac & lobely" (928). His racialized body signifies his religious difference and contrasts the "unmarked," white body of the

Christian Princess, who is not only described in terms of her incomparable beauty but also the colour of her skin: "A douhter bai hadde hem bitven, / Non feirer woman mi3t ben, /As white as feber of swan" (10-12). Given that religious and racial identities are deeply intertwined in The King of Tars, the poet's injunction against interfaith unions encompasses the transgression of racial boundaries through marriage. The poet

4 See also Chapter two, 33-35. 75 announces the impending marriage between the Saracen Sultan and the Christian

Princess, drawing attention to the disparate religious and racial identities of the couple:

"Als lob was bat soudan /To wed a Cristen woman, / As y finde in mi sawe" (413-15).

The rest of the romance dramatizes the miscegenation of communities and the resulting birth of the lump-child, a monstrous hybrid with no discernible identity. The transgression of religious and racial boundaries is occasioned by the Princess' outward performance of Saracenness, which evokes the cultural and ideological distrust of converts and the associated anxiety regarding the separateness of Christians and Muslims.

The Princess, in accordance with the Sultan's wishes, ostensibly agrees to abandon Christianity and adopt the Saracen religion: "To Mahoun ichil me take, / &

Ihesu Crist, mi Lord, forsake, / I>at made Adam & Eue" (487-89). The Sultan, convinced of the Princess's desire to convert, proceeds to instruct her in the Saracen way of worship. The scene culminates in the Princess's performance of Saracen ritual:

Sche kist Mahoun & Apolin,

Astirot, & sir Iouin,

For drede of wordes awe.

& while sche was in be temple [per]

Of Teruagant & Iubiter

Sche lerd be heben lawe. (499-504)

The Princess not only performs the religious acts of a Saracen but is also richly "cladde /

As heb(b)en wiman were" (383-84). She outwardly performs Saracenness: she professes 76 the Saracen religion in word and deed, learning prayers and kissing the idols; and assumes the appearance of a Saracen woman.

Despite the Princess' adherence to Saracen law, its customs and practices, her entrance into the religious community of the Saracens does not confer upon her a racial transformation. The Princess' whiteness apparently vindicates her secret fidelity to

Christianity:

& pei sche al be lawes coupe,

& seyd hem openliche wip hir moupe,

Ihesu for3at sche nou3t

Wher bat sche was, bi norpe or soupe,

No minstral wip harp no croupe

No mi3t chaunge hir pou3t. (505-10).

Although she ceremonially kisses Saracen idols and recites Saracen prayers openly, the

Princess continues to engage in private Christian worship: "For when sche was bi hirselue on / To Ihesu sche made hir mon, / J>at alle bis world hap wrou3t. (513-16).

Here, the poem distinguishes between the Princess's essential or internal character and her outward appearance, attempting to contain the implications of her ritualized performance.

The Princess' "conversion" is preceded by her dream of Christ as a white knight.

In her dream, the Princess is surrounded by a "hundred houndes blake" (425) which bark at her and threaten to bite to her. Drawing upon the racial signifiers typically associated 77 with Saracens, the poem highlights the Princess's isolation as a Christian amidst the

Sultan and his people. Although the Princess initially fears for her safety, she prays for, and receives, Christ's protection. She is also is reassured by Christ's promise to help her in her time of need: "mi swete wi^t, / No parf pe noping drede, / Of Teruagaunt no of

Mahoun. / I>i lord pat suffred passioun / Schal help pe at pi nede" (452-56). Following her

"conversion," the romance continues to identify the Princess as a "Cristen maiden" (529) and to emphasize her religious fidelity, already shown in the dream sequence. In doing so, The King of Tars forecloses the possibility of (true) Christian conversion to the

Saracen religion and Christian acculturation into the Saracen community.

Geraldine Heng interprets the constancy of the Princess' skin colour as evidence of the "absolute stability of the princess of Tars's own skin color and race" {Empire 254) and, by extension, her religious (Christian) identity. The princess' entrance into the religious community of the Saracens, according to Heng, "fails to coincide with a successful conferral, upon her, of blackness, corresponding to a new religious essence"

{Empire 235). Heng's assertion regarding the stability of the Princess' religious and racial identity, however, ignores category confusion occasioned by the Princess' conversion and the anxieties that attend the conversion experience.

The Princess conveys "the appearance of one identity (Saracenness), and yet supposedly retains another diametrically opposed identity (Christianity)" (Calkin,

Saracens 112). Even though the narrator asserts the Princess's essential character as

Christian, her appropriation and performance of Saracen identity is successful. Indeed, the Sultan is convinced of the authenticity of the Princess' conversion: "E»e soudan wende 78 ni3t & day / J>at sche hadde leued opon his lay, / Bot al he was bicou3t [deceived]" (SH­

IS). Her conversion not only troubles the boundary between Christian and Saracen, but also places religious identity in a performative context.

The Princess's feigned conversion (albeit from Christianity to Islam) functions as a proxy for the cultural distrust of Saracen converts, who, it was feared, could not be completely assimilated due to their essential otherness or their outward concealment of their true "nature." While the poem presents the feigned conversion of the Princess as a triumph - the "inferior" Saracen religion cannot enact an essential transformation of the

Christian princess - the process of conversion itself evokes the cultural distrust of converts and introduces the possibility of "passing" - of concealing one's true (racial) self- into the narrative. The fear that converts would "relapse" is attended by concerns regarding the efficacy of conversion and whether it could guarantee a complete transformation, that is, affect a spiritual and biological change within the convert. Failed conversion raises the specter of miscegenation and occasions the monstrous birth of an indeterminate being of mixed parentage.

Convinced that the Princess has willfully converted, the Sultan weds her and they conceive a child (65-67). Theologically speaking, marriage made man and woman a single entity: "Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh" (Gen. 2.24).5 Moreover, medieval Christians understood that "sexual relations, whether licit or illicit, meant that the partners became

5 Douay-Rheims translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible. 79

one flesh" (Brundage 382). The marital and sexual union of the Princess and the Sultan

represents, in the medieval imagination, a unity of flesh. Moreover, in light of medieval

injunctions against interfaith unions, the act of consummation transgresses religious and

racial lines of distinction.

If the consummation of the marriage between the Princess and the Sultan raises

the possibility of Saracen-Christian integration, then the child - the product of an inter­

racial and -faith marriage - presents the problematization of such boundaries as

monstrous. The child, a product of miscegenation, is grotesque:

& when be child was ybore,

Wei sori wimen were berfore,

For lim no hadde it non.

Bot as a rond of flesche yschore

In chaumber it lay hem bifore

Wibouten blod & bon.

For sorwe be leuedi wald dye

For it hadde noiber nose no eye,

Bot lay ded as be ston. (577-85)

The child is a formless lump of flesh lacking "bobe lim & lip" (594). The child is not only physically indeterminate but also religiously and racially indeterminate. The lump- child is monstrous hybrid that violates boundary order - insofar as the child is not recognizably human nor can it be categorized as Saracen or Christian - and that renders visible the consequences of intermingling disparate identities. 80

In analogues of The King of Tars, the nature of the child born of an inter-faith marriage varies. Horastein groups analogues by the type of monstrous birth: (A) the hairy child; (B) the half-and-half child (half-hairy, half-human and half animal, half- black and half-white); (C) the formless lump ("New Analogues" 434). Each variation of the monstrous birth suggests the incompatibility of disparate identities, although not all medieval portraits of inter-faith unions depict the offspring as formless lumps. For example, in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, Feirefiz - a boy who is spotted black and white - is the child of a black Saracen Queen (Belacane) and a white Angevin knight

(Gahmuret). Both Parzival and The King of Tars anxiously entertain what a child of mixed parentage might look like however. While the mottled Feirefiz suggests the separateness of his maternal (black spots) and paternal (white spots) inheritances, the formless lump in The King of Tars is unintelligible and more readily "insists that cross- cultural intercourse means the end to any ability to differentiate cultural groups and inheritances" (Calkin, Saracens 115). Indeed, the formless lump evades categorization and differentiation, and refuses to inscribe a division between Christian and Saracen.

Both parents in The King of Tars understand the appearance of the monstrous child in religious terms. The Sultan blames his wife and says,

I>e childe bat is here of be born

Bobe lim & lib it is forlorn

Alle burth bi fals bileue.

I>ou leuest nou3t wele afine

On Iubiter no on Apoline 81

Amorwe na an eue;

No in Mahoun no in Teruagant,

terfore is lorn bis litel faunt,

No wonder t>ei me greue. (592-600)

The Sultan's accusation offals belieue," of impiety towards the Saracen gods, suggests that the Princess' feigned conversion is the direct cause of the child's deformity. The

Princess retorts, "Leue sir, lat be bat bou3t. / I>e child was 3eten bitven ous to; / For bi bileue it farb so / Bi him bat ous hab wrou3t" (603-06). Like the Sultan, the Princess blames religious difference for the formless lump, linking Saracenness with failed conception. According to the Aristotelian theory of conception, the mother contributed only basic matter, that is, the material, fleshly substance from which the child is made

(Calkin, Saracens 117)6. The father, on the other hand, supplies the "life or spirit or form," the vital principle which transforms matter (Bynum Fragmentation 100). The association between the paternal shaping of matter and religion is made by the Princess:

"3if it were cristned ari3t / It schuld haxxe fourme to se bi si3t / Wib lim & liif to wake"

(760-62, emphasis mine). Uere,fourme retains its technical connotation. The Christian sacrament, according to the Princess, will shape the formless Aristotelian matter, rectifying the failure of the Saracen father to imprint Christian matter.

Atinkson describes the male and female roles in Aristotelian conception theory in Oldest Vocation (46-51). Joan Cadden also describes the theory in its classical and medieval forms, as well as its transmission to the medieval West in Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture (Cambridge, 1993). 82

While it remains unclear which parent is to blame for the deformed child, the text makes it clear that the violation of the prohibition against Christian-Saracen intercourse and the intermingling of disparate identities has resulted in a monstrous progeny whose indeterminacy renders visible the loss of defining cultural boundaries. Thus, the possibility of Christian-Saracen integration is presented as horrific and undesirable. The women who assist in the birth are described as being "wel son" at the sight of the formless flesh (578). The mother "For sorwe... wald dye" (583) and lies "in care & wo"

(602) while the Sultan too is distraught over the child's appearance: "In hert he was agreued sore / To sen bat selcoube si^t" (686-87).

The child's indeterminacy troubles both the Saracen and Christian communities, and necessitates the appeal for divine intervention from Saracen and Christian deities.

After the Sultan's failed attempt to heal his child by appeal to the Saracen gods (622-72), his wife seeks out an imprisoned priest and asks that the child be baptized:

[Her is a child selcoube discriif.

It hap noiber lim, no liif,

No ey3en forto se.]

Hali water bou most make,

& bis ich flesche bou take

& cristen it, wiboutten blame,

In be worbschipe of pe Faders name 83

3if it were cristened ari3t

It schuld haue forme to se bi si3t

Wib lim & liif to wake. (748-62)

The poem here offers a more elaborate description of the lump child: the child is not only physically indeterminate, lacking limbs and eyes, but also inanimate. The Princess laments that the child has no "liif (749). In addition, the poet's repeated use of the word

"flesche" in the passage above and the subsequent baptism scene reinforces the lump- child's lack of "liif," both in the sense of an animate existence and an animating principle

(a presumably Christian soul).

The sacrament of baptism bestows upon the child both a recognizably human form and a spiritual essence:

I>e prest toke be flesche anon,

& cleped it be name of Ion

In worbschip of be day;

& when bat it cristned was

Ithaddeliif&lim&fas,

& crid wib gret deray.

& hadde hide & flesche & fel,

& alle bat euer berto bifel,

In gest as y 30U say.

Feirer child mi3t non be bore; 84

It no hadde neuer a lime forlore;

Wele schapen it was wipalle. (767-83)

The sacrament affects a substantial change. The "rond of flesche" is transformed into a

recognizably human, well-formed little boy, demonstrating the interdependence of

physical appearance and religion, and suggesting that "without religious categorization

and differentiation, there is no biological formation of the body" (Calkin, "Marking"

228). Baptism ends the offspring's indeterminacy and signals the child's membership in

the Christian community. He is even given the Christian name of John - names too are transformative and this one ends the indeterminacy occasioned by the interracial and

interfaith union of the Christian Princess and Saracen Sultan, and bestows a religious and

racial identity.

The bodily and spiritual transformation of the child is quickly followed by the

spectacle of the Sultan's conversion, in which the Saracen's black body becomes white.

"At the moment of immersion," Akbari observes, the deviant body - the black Saracen

body, the formless lump of flesh - is "assimilated to the physical and spiritual norm,

where it has a white body and a Christian soul" {Idols 192). The spiritual renewal of

father and son and the concomitant bodily metamorphorsis demonstrates the perceived

supremacy of Christianity and, in the case of the lump-child's conversion, reinscribes the

troubled boundaries of identity. In these instances of conversion, the romance opts for a

fantasy of easy conversion in which the religious and racial identities are

unproblematically aligned. 85

The romance ends with a portrait of a Christian family. Its patriarch - the

"Cristene soudan" (1105) - adopts the role of crusading king and forcibly converts

Saracens "bio & blak" (1226). The triumphant ending of the King of Tars, in which the

Princess successfully promulgates Christianity, and in which Saracen converts are easily

integrated into the Christian community, attempts to allay the anxieties that attend the

process of conversion. The Princess' failed conversion to the Saracen religious ostensibly

reinforces the sense of Christian triumphalism, in which Christianity, not the Saracen

religion, is granted superior power. However, her conversion, although incomplete,

remains unnerving insofar as it evokes, and functions as a proxy for, cultural anxieties

surrounding the religious conversion of non-Christians and the integration of apostates

into the Christian community. But such fears are contained, in The King of Tars, by the unproblematic transformation, both spiritual and physical, of the lump-child and the

Saracen Sultan.

The Saracen Princess and the Problem of her Conversion in Beues ofHamtoun:

Saracen conversion, whether forced or willed, is always welcomed in Middle

English romances. It signals the martial and spiritual defeat of the Saracen while bolstering the sense of Christian superiority. The conversion of the white Saracen princess is especially desirable because she enables the Christian possession of Saracen wealth and lands. She converts for love not of the Christian religion, like the Saracen queen Braminmonde in the Chanson de Roland, but rather of the Christian knight. 86

The fantasy of the converted Saracen princess appears frequently in chansons de geste and romances. Of the twenty-one Saracen princesses who appear in medieval

French verse written between 1150 and 1300, seventeen fall into the category of the white Saracen princess, the most famous being Orable/Guibourg of the Guillaume cycle

(de Weever 5). This literary convention also finds expression in Middle English romances such as the Sowdone ofBabylone and Beues ofHamtoun. Orable in the Prise d'Orange, Floripas in Fierabras and its redactions, and Josian in Beues typify the Saracen woman who falls in love with the Christian knight; who betrays her Saracen culture by helping the Christian knight; and who undergoes religious conversion. These foreign women are characterized by their sensual beauty: depicted as being white- or light- skinned, they are reminiscent of Christian heroines of chansons and romances in terms of physical appearance and attractiveness. Saracen princesses, however, are aggressive in nature, displaying a degree of agency often denied to Christian women. They quickly shift allegiances, eagerly embracing Christianity and denigrating their own culture through betrayal and conversion. Their active participation in the Christian conquest of

Saracen lands and people separates them from Christian as well as other Saracen women.

The white Saracen princess, as Jacqueline de Weever demonstrates in Sheba's

Daughters, is an inverse portrait of the black female Saracen warrior (54). Whereas the black Saracen warrior is reviled for her monstrous appearance and her opposition of

Christian forces, the white Saracen princess is admired for her material wealth, her sensual beauty, and (paradoxically) her treachery. Amiete, the scythe-wielding giantess in 87

Fierabras, is representative of the black female Saracen warrior found in chansons and

romances:

When Amiete, who lay with her children

under the fireplace, heard the cry and the melee

(She was a giant blacker than pepper;

With great hips and a wide mouth,

With the height of an upright lance,

Her eyes were redder than a lighted torch;

She is utterly ugly and disfigured).

Her children cry, for whom she is afraid;

From her bed she had newly arisen.

A Saracen has told her the news,

That her lord is dead, whom she had married,

And that proud Charlemagne has [taken] the populated town.

When Amiete hears that, she is very angry,

She jumps up from her bed totally disheveled

Her hair covered her altogether like a horse's mane.

Before her she sees and finds a scythe.

Never, as long as she lives, will this place be taken; 88

She killed many soldier and piled up their corpses. (5216-25)7

Amiete's exaggerated features - her physical stature, her bodily hair, her black body and her flaming red eyes - highlight her grotesque and horrifying nature. She is "a monster, an abjected and fantasmatic body produced through category violation" (Cohen, "On

Saracen Enjoyment" 121): she is recognizably human but is differently formed; she is a mother and wife, but deviates from such traditional female roles by virtue of her militancy.

Amiete's counterpart in the Middle English redaction of the poem, The Sowdone ofBabylone, is Barok:

Than came forth Dam Barrok the bolde

With a sithe large and kene

And mewe adown as thikke as shepe in folde

That came byforne hir bydene.

This Barrok was a geaunesse,

And wife she was to Astragote.

She did the Cristen grete distresse;

There durst no man hire sithe abyde;

She grenned like a develle of helle. (2939-48)

Barok, like Amiete, is an example of grotesque femininity: she is an exaggerated, militant, and demonic being. Devoid of eroticism, the female Saracen warrior inspires

7 The passages describing Amiete and Floripas were translated by Jacqueline de Weever and appear in the Appendix of her book Sheba 's Daughters. horror and condemnation because she is barbaric, uncivilized and uncourtly (de Weever

55). As de Weever observes, "female giants [are] truly outside civilization because as women they are militarily effective, as Saracen pagans they are the infidel that all good

Christians abhor (in the poems at least), and as giants they carry negative moralizations"

(75).

The otherness of the female Saracen warrior is not only marked physically

(through stature, race) and culturally (through exclusion, religion), but is also strongly gendered as well (Cohen, "On Saracen Enjoyment" 120). Identified as mothers and wives, both Amiete and Barok deviate from Christian norms surrounding femininity insofar as they are viragos, masculinized women capable of decimating Frankish soldiers with their weapons. The black female Saracen warrior is "danger personified" (Ramey,

Christian 47). Imagined as a monstrous racial and female other, Saracen warriors such as

Amiete and Barok are "more threatening to the French soliders than any army of Saracen men. Like the mother of Beowulf, their maternal and wifely instincts are intimately connected with perversions of the body and excesses of violence. Their monstrous . . . bodies are designed to protect their brood. They, unlike white Saracen women, are meant to stay with their families and eventually perish at the hands of French crusaders"

(Ramey, Christian 47). Diametrically opposed to the Christian Franks, the black Saracen warrior functions to block (albeit temporarily) their expansionist ambitions (de Weever

97), unlike the white Saracen princess who enables Christian victory through her treachery. 90

In the chanson Fierabras, for example, Floripas is the opposite of Amiete in

terms of narrative. Whereas Amiete fights against the Frankish host, Floripas collaborates

with them; she willfully opposes her father (who is also her sovereign) and abandons her

religion in favour of a Christian marriage and religious conversion. Floripas, then, not

only differs from Amiete in narrative function but also in appearance:

Soon Floripas, the Emir's daughter, enters. One never spoke of a lovelier

maiden. I will tell you the truth about her graceful body. Her skin was

tender and white like the summer flower, her face like the meadow rose,

her mouth very small, her teeth, close together, were whiter than polished

ivory. Her lips were a little full and very red, her nose well placed, her

forehead fair and smooth, her eyes laugh, and sparkle more than a

moulting falcon's. Narrow her hips, delicate her sides. She wore a cloak

from Galazia, richly embroidered; the fairy who made it decorated it with

fine gold stars, which gave a sharp brilliance... The maiden was very wise

and of great beauty: little breasts hard like young apples, body well made

and formed, white as the meadow flowers. Her hair was blond with little

curls, braided loosely with a little gold thread. (2105-44)8

Floripas's proportional and delicate features contrast sharply with Amiete's exaggerated, giant stature. Whereas the portrait of Floripas is highly eroticized, vividly describing her

% There is no description of Floripas in the Middle English romance The Sowdane ofBabylone. sensual, white body, Amiete's focuses on her abject body - her ugliness, her excess, her black skin. Floripas's conformity to the European paradigm of feminine beauty, which outwardly signals her potential for conversion, further differentiates her from the uncivilized female Saracen warrior, Amiete. As Ramey notes, the black Saracen warrior can never integrate into Christian society: "[t]he inconceivable conversion of the black women, impossible because of their fidelity to their people, is reflected in the blackness of their skin" {Christian 47). These monstrous women are not "salvageable" and, as a result, "the female equivalent of the converted Saracen giants does not exist" (Ramey,

Christian 47, 48).

Critics such as Gerladine Heng, Jacqueline de Weever, and Lynn Tarte Ramey locate the genesis of the motif of the enamoured Saracen princess in the context of the proto-colonial enterprise of the Crusades, citing Orderic Vitalis's account of Bohemond and Melaz as the earliest example of the trope {Empire 186; Sheba 's Daughters 36;

Christian 40). Book X of the Historia Ecclesiastica recounts events of the First Crusades and describes the capture of Bohemond I of Antioch by the Turkish Emir, Danishmend, and his subsequent imprisonment, along with other nobles, in the Emir's fortress. While imprisoned, Bohemond meets the Emir's daughter, Melaz, who is admired for being

"beautiful" and "very wise"; for having "much authority in her father's house"; and for possessing "great riches" (5.359). Melaz, much like her counterparts found in chansons and romances, "love[s] the Franks passionately" after hearing of "their great feats"

(5.359-60); this love compels Melaz to help the Christian captives by procuring food and clothing, and later securing their release. Eager to enjoy the prisoners' company, Melaz 92 bribes the guards and enters the dungeon where she "engage [s] in subtle discourse with the captives about the Christian faith and true religion, learning about it by constant discussion interspersed with deep sighs" (5.360). Melaz will later opt for religious conversion and a Christian marriage. She announces to her father, the Emir: "I am a

Christian; I wish to be reborn through the sacrament of the Christian faith and will no longer remain here with you. For the religion of the Christians is holy and honourable, and your religion is full of vanities and polluted with all filth" (5.369). She also agrees to marry Bohemond's cousin who, according to Bohemond, will make a more suitable husband than him: "See now, Roger, the son of prince Richard, is my kinsman and younger than I, more handsome than I am, equal to me in birth, wealth, and power"

(5.379). By accepting conversion as well as marriage, Melaz effectively abandons her religion and her people.

The motif of the Saracen princess who aids the crusader-knight, who desires religious conversion, and accepts a Christian marriage, continues to proliferate in medieval chansons and romances. These portraits of Saracen women featuring Melaz and her sisters are, argues de Weever, Orientalist constructs. Saracen women are an extension of the "binary oppositions of the culture of the time, Latin Christian/Oriental pagan, white/black, orthodoxy/heterodoxy, truth/error" (xvii) and function as a tool for

"propaganda and ideologies of conquest and religion" (xxiii). Possession of the white

Saracen princess facilitates military conquest, territorial expansion and cultural assimilation. In short, she is a "tool of colonialism" because she denigrates her own 93 culture through betrayal and conversion, and ensures the Christian appropriation of

Saracen lands and wealth (de Weever 45).

Geraldine Heng similarly implicates the converted Saracen princess in the fantasy of empire {Empire 187). Her conversion to the religion of the Christian conquerors

"attests [to] a colonizing impetus at work in representation" {Empire 186). White Saracen women, Lynn Tarte Ramey asserts, represent the belief in the possibility of "overcoming and enfolding the Saracen" {Christian 50). Her desire for the Christian knight and her cultural assimilation serves as a means of appropriating and conquering another culture

{Christian 50). One "modality of colonization," to borrow a phrase from Geraldine Heng, is the whitening of the Saracen princess.

Only Saracen women who epitomize medieval European ideals of beauty are capable of conversion:

the portrait [of the white Saracen woman] makes the hero's love for the

Saracen woman legitimate and emphasizes an assimilationist agenda: To

make the foreign Other as much like oneself as possible, to identify the

Other with the same...Identification with the Other implies making the

Other over in one's own image, identifying the Other with oneself, denying

the values of the Other's society and culture and imposing on that Other

one's own. (de Weever 37-8)

The reproduction of conventional European beauty through the white Saracen princess necessitates an act of erasure. The erasure of difference legitimates the love between the 94

Saracen woman and the Christian knight, and signals the white Saracen princess's potential for religious conversion and cultural integration (de Weever 38).

This phenomenon appears in Beues ofHamtoun. Josiane, a Saracen princess, is described as "faire" and "bri3t of mod, / Ase snow vpon be rede blod" (521-22) while

Bevis' mother, a Scot, is likewise "faire and bri3t" (27). Josiane's physical beauty simultaneously eradicates the opposition between her and her European counterparts, and effaces her alterity as a Saracen woman. Indeed, she is indistinguishable from other

Christian beauties in everything but degree (Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries 53). Josiane not only epitomizes medieval European ideals of beauty but exceeds them: the poet asks rhetorically, "Wharto scholde that may discrive? / Men wiste no fairer thing alive" (523-

4). No fairer woman can be found in Christendom or pagandom; Josiane, like other

Saracen princesses, is "the site of excess that effaces the oppositions between"

(Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries 53) her and other (Christian) women.

Her sexual desirability is heightened by the material wealth that adorns her body.

Described as wearing gilded shoes (520), Josiane is reminiscent of other heavily ornamented Saracen women found in other chansons. In the chanson Fierabras, for example, Floripas wears a finely worked belt with a buckle of refined gold; stockings of

Alexandrian silk and fretted gold; shoes painted in silver and fine gold; and a fur-lined mantle of ciclatoun (2120-30). Orable, in La Prise d'Orange, wears "un paile escarinant,

/ Estroit lacie par le cors qu'ele ot gent / De riche soie consue par les pans" [... a gown of marvelous stuff, / tightly laced on her noble body, / and sewn along the sides with rich silks] (660-62). Dressed in rich fabrics and often adorned with gold and gems, the 95

Saracen princess "represents all she brings with her: her father's kingdom, his treasure of money and jewels, and his country's revenues. Such a woman is to be welcomed" (de

Weever 30). The female Saracen princess is thus linked symbolically to land and material wealth. Thus, the Saracen princess, such as Josiane, functions as "phantasmic representations of Western designs on the Orient" (Harlowe xiv). As Barbara Harlow observes in her introduction to The Colonial Harem, "[possession of Arab women came to serve as a surrogate for and means to the political and military conquest of the Arab world" (xiv-xv). To seduce the Saracen woman and to convert her to Christianity is to assimilate Saracen territories to Christendom.

Two forms of desire - for the woman, for the wealth she represents - converge in the portrait of the Saracen princess. This desire is legitimized by the whitening of the

Saracen princess. To be an acceptable lover of the Christian knight, the Saracen princess must appear foreign because of prohibitions against inter-faith and inter-racial unions. To be a welcomed convert to the Christian community, she must resemble a Christian and, through her actions, identity with Christian ambitions. But while the erasure of difference is part of the colonial fantasy of romance, as critics such as Heng, de Weever, and Ramey suggest, we must not overlook the ways in which the portrait of the Saracen princess, in particular that of Josiane, masks anxieties regarding boundary transgression.

According to Jeffrey Cohen, the body of the medieval Other is typically a racialized (that is, black) body of "ultimate difference who condense [s] everything inimical to the fragile Christian selfsame" ("Saracen" 115). The black body of the

Saracen becomes a signifier of otherness; it is a body that serves to construct cultural 96 identity and difference, rendering the divisions between Christian/Saracen, self/Other visually apparent. If, as Cohen suggests, racial alterity is "always written on and produced through the body," and the racialized body connotes one's cultural membership

("On Saracen Enjoyment" 115), Josiane's body - her fair complexion and physical beauty - fails to connote racial alterity and consequently, defies racial categorization because her body fails to identify her as Saracen, as Other. In Beues, the poet, even as he details Josiane's physical attractiveness, laments the princess' paganism, "Boute of

Cristene la we she koube nau3t" (526). The blazon signals to the reader what her body does not: Josiane is, in fact, Saracen.

By emphasizing Josiane's ignorance of Christianity, the poet re-asserts a sexual boundary that is not to be crossed. Sexual contact with the Saracen princess, prior to her conversion, is forbidden. The cultural anxiety surrounding interfaith intercourse is evident in the bedchamber scene. Following Bevis' victory over Brademond, Josiane declares her love for the Christian knight: "Beues, lemman, bin ore! / Ichaue loued be ful

3ore, / Sikerli can I no rede, / Boute bow me loue, icham dede, / And boute bow wib me do be wille" (1093-97). Taken aback by her aggressiveness, Bevis rejects Josiane's sexual advances:

'For gode,' queb Beues 'bat ich nelle.'

'Her is' a seide 'min vnliche,

Brademond king bat is so riche,

In al bis world nis ber man,

Prinse ne king ne soudan, 97

I>at be to wiue haue nolde,

And he be hadde ones beholde!'

'Merci,' 3he seide '3et wib ban

Ichauede be leuer to me lemman,

I>e bodi in be scherte naked,

I>an al be gold bat Crist hab maked,

And bow wost wib me do be wille!'

'For gode,' queb he 'bat I do nelle!' (1093-1110)

Bevis refuses to reciprocate Josiane's love until she agrees, in a subsequent scene, to convert to Christianity. His rejection of Josiane stems from the fear of sexual contact between races, suggesting that her body - a Saracen body - remains essentially or ontologically different, despite its outward resemblance to the normalized Christian (read white) body, and conformity to the European paradigm of beauty. Sexual contact with the

Saracen other not only violates boundary purity by transgressing the lines of racial and religious distinction, but also introduces the possibility of contamination. The sexual threat Josiane poses to boundary order explains the romance's nervous preoccupation with her virginal status, with the physical integrity of her body.

Her virginal status, on the one hand, demonstrates her conformity to the Christian paradigm of female virtue as well as her potential to receive the Christian faith through spiritual conversion. Josiane unwillingly marries King Yvor; when Beues returns to the

Armenian court and learns of Josiane's marriage, he rescinds his commitment to her, claiming that her marriage to Yvor has been consummated. Josiane insists that she has 98 remained a virgin despite her marriage stating, "Merci... lemman fre, / Led me horn to be contre / And boute be finde me maide wimman, / Be pat eni man saie can, / Send me a

3en to me fon / Al naked in me smok alon" (2201-06). Josiane's assertion of her virginity is proven in the following episode in which Beues is injured during his confrontation with the lions, while Josiane remains unhurt because she is protected by her virginity (2388-

94). Josiane's proven virginity testifies to her fidelity and becomes a necessary condition for her conversion. Indeed, the episode with the lion is quickly followed by Josiane's baptism by Bevis' uncle Saber, a Florentine bishop.

On the other hand, the sexualized body of the Saracen princess must remain virginal in order to foreclose the possibility of sexual transgression, and to contain the threat of contamination. Josiane's body, a potential source of pollution to the Christian knight and therefore untouchable prior to her conversion, is supposedly purified and rendered licit through the sacrament of baptism. Indeed, baptism is a necessary precondition of marriage to the Christian knight: without these rites, sexual contact with the Saracen woman remains forbidden. But while Beues ofHamtoun does not explicitly express uncertainty about the licitness of sexual and familial relations with new converts to Christianity, it does interrogate the legitimacy and efficacy of Saracen conversion to

Christianity.

Conversion not only entails a change in one's religious affiliations but also necessitates a movement between two opposing cultural positions. As Sarah Lambert notes, "the easiest way to slip in and out of one's racial group is through the agency of sex - sexual attraction, sexual violence, marriage - and it is almost always the women 99 who are found to be permanently changing their racial identity" (9). Josiane's movement across cultural and religious boundaries is thus facilitated through the agency of sex, specifically, her sexual attraction to Bevis and their subsequent marriage. While she assumes a Christian identity, and gains admittance into the Christian community through marriage, it is unclear whether or not her baptism affects a full transformation and completely eradicates the vestiges of her Saracenness. As previously discussed, there existed a cultural distrust of converts because, it was feared, conversion could not overcome ontological differences that separated Christians and Saracens. As Kruger observes, religious conversion cannot guarantee a full transformation:

[r]eligious conversion may provide a route toward

assimilation into a dominant culture; but insofar as race

remains intractable to conversion, and insofar as a "stable"

racial identity is made to override religious "choice" in

definition of "true" identity - with race understood as a

biological category more determinate of the "essential" self

than is a culturally determined religious identity - religious

conversion does not finally guarantee a full transformation.

(163)

Indeed, Josiane's behaviour following her conversion suggests an innate, inconvertible

Saracen nature that religious choice cannot override.

While giving birth to her twin sons, Josiane calls upon the Virgin Mary to ensure the safe delivery of her children. Her invocation of the Virgin Mary, and her labour appears to signal not only a genuine conversion but also, as Calkin observes, her

"incorporation into English, Christian society as [a] valued mother" (Saracens 84).

Moreover, Josiane gives evidence of her fidelity when soon after she is beaten, bound, and taken by Ascopard to King Yvor. To make herself unattractive to Yvor and to avoid being defiled by him, Josiane uses herbs to turn her skin leprous:

While 3he was in Ermonie,

Bobe fysik and sirgirie

3he hadde lerned of meisters grete,

Of Boloyne be gras and of Tulete,

I>at 3he knew erbes mani & fale

To make bobe boute & bale.

On 3he tok vp of be grounde,

I>at was an erbe of meche mounde,

To make a man in semlaunt bere,

A foule mesel alse 3if a were.

Whan 3he hadde ete bat erbe, anon

To be Sarasines 3he gan gon,

And wente hem forb wiboute targing

To-ward Yuore, be riche king.

I>ai nadde ride in here way

Boute fif mile of bat contray, 101

3he was in semlaunt & in ble

A foule mesel on to se. (3495-3512)

Upon seeing Josiane's leprous form, Yvor is repulsed and sends her away; as a result of her actions, the now-Christianized Josiane protects Bevis' dynastic interests. Dynastic continuity depends on Josiane fulfilling her reproductive role and producing legitimate heirs in order to guarantee succession and secure baronial rights (Crane 58-9). By promoting Bevis' dynastic interests, Josiane ostensibly safeguards the integrity of the

Christian familial structure.

However, this episode paradoxically both asserts Josiane's Christian identity and calls the definitiveness of that converted identity into question. While Josiane actively protects familial lineage, she does so by using a knowledge of herbs acquired while living

in Saracen Armenia. The passage explicitly links Josiane's knowledge of medicinal arts herbs with her Saracen upbringing. In this episode, Josiane also displays female agency and resourcefulness, two qualities typically associated with the Saracen woman (Wiess

14-15).

Later, Josiane is forced into wedlock by Miles after her guardian, Ascopard, has been dispatched. On their wedding night, Josiane protects herself from Miles' sexual advances by appealing to maidenly modesty:

"Ich bidde, bow graunte me a bone, Ich bidde pe at pe ferste frome,

I>at man ne wimman her in come;

Be-lok hem par oute for loue o me,

I>at noman se our priuite!

Wimmen beb schamfast in dede

And namliche maidenes" (3194-202)

Josiane "casts her individual request as the manifestation of a maidenly modesty that is the norm for women" (Calkin, Saracens 73). Her performance of female modesty is convincing: Miles grants her boon and dismisses his attendants, remarking that he must now take off his own boots (something he has never done before). Josiane's performance of female modesty creates an opportunity to dispose of her husband:

Iosian be-bou3te on luring,

On a towaile 3he made knotte riding,

Aboute his nekke 3he hit brew

And on be raile tre 3he drew;

Be be nekke 3he hab him vp ti3t

& let him so ride al pe ni3t. (3219-25)

As Calkin observes, "[b]y deploying a rhetoric of maidenly modesty, Josiane engineers a situation in which she is able to defend her body from a would-be rapist. She shows how women can use a supposed aspect of their group identity as women to advance their individual interest," such as the desire to remain inviolate {Saracens 74). However, like

Floripas who kills a jailor and her governess for the benefit of the Twelve Peers in the

Sowdone, Josiane's actions do not conform to typical romance paradigm of femininity and to the gender norms of Christian society to which she now belongs.

Josiane's eruptions of Saracenness not only violate gender expectations but also suggest an innate, inconvertible Saracen nature that cannot be eradicated through religious conversion and cultural assimilation. While Josiane no longer identifies herself as Saracen, her agency and resourcefulness - qualities typically associated with Saracen rather than Christian woman - remain inconsistent with her new found membership in the

English Christian community. Such actions evoke the cultural concern regarding the veracity and permanence of a convert's new religious identity. Mary Douglas argues that

"[d]anger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is indefinable" (96). Beues ofHamtoun, like The King of Tars, raises the problem of indeterminacy: clean separations are anxiously undercut by the portrait of the Saracen princess, who occupies a transitional state and who is suspended between two collective identities, neither fully one nor the other.

If Josiane is poised between two disparate cultures, then her children are impure beings. Peggy McCracken notes that, while descent might be claimed from the father, the mother's contribution to her offspring's identity can never be completely effaced ("The

Body Politic" 38). If conversion cannot guarantee a full transformation, then Josiane cannot maintain the purity of English bloodline. The English community is defined by and rooted in lineage, in unambivalent identity. A woman's duty is "to produce heirs in order to guarantee succession and political and social stability" (McCracken, "The Body

Politic" 38). However, the Saracen woman, imbued with the same reproductive power to ensure dynastic succession, threatens this stability because her children, products of intermarriage, would be allowed to inherit. At the end of Beues ofHamtoun, Miles marries the daughter of the King of England and will become King of England himself.

Here, a singular or stable identity cannot be embraced: for a son of a Saracen to be King of England and thus the head of the body politic illustrates the extent to which what constitutes Englishness and what constitutes Saracenness have become virtually indistinguishable.

Saracen princesses such as Josiane initiate action in numerous chansons and romances (Daniels, Heroes 79; Warren 357; Kahf 36). As Sarah Lambert notes, however,

"[o]nce [women] have crossed the boundaries into Christendom, they have to move into the background" (9). Like Bramimonde, whose vocal opposition is silenced and who assumes a less prominent place in the narrative at the end of the Chanson de Roland,

Beues ofHamtoun moves Josiane into the background of the narrative and relegates her to the role of passive bystander, effectively containing her agency and her Saraceness.

Yet, because of Josaine role in dynastic succession, indeterminacy continues long after

Josiane has faded into the narrative background and died quietly.

Women in The King of Tars and Beues ofHamtoun traverse the gap separating

Saracen and Christian cultures, and function as conduits through whom Saracen-Christian interaction is realized. Transcending the boundaries of race and religion, the Christian princess of The King of Tars and the Saracen princess Josiane raise questions regarding the definitiveness of identity following religious conversion, questions that are not confined to female converts. Whereas the women in The King of Tars and Beues of

Hamtoun are ostensibly assimilated into their respective new communities through religious conversion and marriage, the male Saracen convert gains entrance into the

Christian community through baptism and the ethos of chivalry. The Otuel and

Ferumbras romances, which feature a Saracen knight who accepts Christianity, evince similar concerns regarding the process of conversion as The King of Tars and Beues of

Hamtoun: namely, the fear that conversion may not work and affect the full transformation of the convert. "Had he been a Christian, he would have been a worthy baron":

The Chivalrous Saracen Warrior in the Otuel and Ferumbras Romances

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, English redactors produced Middle English

adaptations of French chansons glorifying the deeds of Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers:

the Auchinleck Roland and Vernagu (c. 1330); the Auchinleck Otuel a Knijt (c. 1330); the

Fillingham Otuel and Roland (c. 1330); the fragmentary Fillingham Firumbras (c. 1375-

1400); the Ashmole Sir Ferumbras (c. 1380); The Sowdone of Babylon (c. 1400); The Sege

ofMelayne (c. 1400); Duke Rowlande and Sir Otuell ofSpayne (c. 1400); the fragmentary

Middle English version of the Chanson de Roland (c. 1400); and the parodic romance of The

Taill of Rauf Coliyear (c. 1475). Of the ten Middle English Charlemagne romances, six

demonstrate an interest in the motif of the converted Saracen (Ailes and Hardman 44, 55;

Metlitzki 183; Wapole 385; 391). "[AJmong all the exploits of Charlemagne and his twelve

peers," as Metlizki writes, "the conversion of the two Saracens [Otuel and Ferumbras] was

the topic that aroused popular interest most" (183). The Otuel and Ferumbras romances (see

Appendix A) each recount the conversion of a noble Saracen knight following his defeat in

single combat with one of the Twelve Peers. His conversion constitutes a change not only in

religious faith but also in political allegiance. By accepting Christianity, Otuel and

Ferumbras pledge fealty to Charlemagne, fighting on his behalf in various Christian-Saracen

conflicts, and participating in the destruction of their former Saracen allies. It is striking that,

in these particular narratives, the Saracen knight not only occupies the narrative focus but

also, at times, eclipses Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers as the romances' hero.

Insular interest in, and the production of, the Matter of France is mainly restricted to the Charlemagne cycle, in particular the Fierabras-Otinel material (Field 313). Extant chansons de geste traditionally have been grouped into three cycles: the geste du roi; the geste de Doon de Mayence (Rebellious Vassal cycle); and the geste de Garin de Monglane

(Guillaume cycle) (Holmes 73).' The geste du roi recounts the legendary history of

Charlemagne and his vassals, and their struggles against the Saracens (Holmes 73).

According to Holmes, "[fjhere are eighty or more extant chansons de geste of which some thirty belong to the geste du roi" (73). Yet, there is little sign of insular interest in the cycles of the Matter of France, other than the geste du roi, such as the Rebellious Vassal cycle or the wider Guillaume cycle (Field 313). Comparatively few of the chansons de geste from the

Old French tradition were selected for translation (Field 313; Ailes and Hardman 43).

The limited number and scope of Middle English Charlemagne romances has not escaped the notice of scholars. Sidney J. Heritage, for example, observes in his introduction to his edition of Sir Ferumbras, "It is not a little remarkable, considering the great popularity of the subject - a popularity clearly proved by the frequent allusions in other works - that so few English versions of the Charlemagne Romances should exist" (xii-xiii). Rosalind Field theorizes that Middle English "translators are perhaps not aware of the full range of over one hundred continental chansons de geste" (313). The range of Middle English translations of the Matter of France may have been dictated by "the pre-existent and limited selection of material available in AN [Anglo-Norman] from the twelfth century through to the mid

Sarah Kay describes the other narrative cycles: the geste de Guilaume d'Orange "takes shape around the figure of William with his innumerable heroic nephews, cousins, uncles, and miscellaneous forebears." (49). While the Charlemagne poems deal with Christian-Saracen conflicts abroad, chansons in the Guillaume cycle depict the defense of the Christian homeland from invaders. See Kay 49. The finalcycl e deals with the pursuit and overthrow of traitors or rebel barons. See Kay 50; and Holmes 90. Other critics suggest an approximate total of one hundred chansons available for translation. "Very few of the hundred-odd Old French chansons de gestes were translated into Middle English." See Ailes and Hardman 43. See also Kay 48. fourteenth-century" (Field 315). However, the limited production of the Matter of France in

Middle English may also be attributed to cultural preference.

The Middle English Charlemagne romances were translated and copied during the

Hundred Years War, a time of national conflict. It may seem strange that, during a period of increasing hostility between England and France, Middle English romancers would deliberately rework chanson material and borrow heroic figures from French national epic.

Robert Warm similarly wonders what appeal material derived from the continental French epics of the Charlemagne cycle could have had for English audiences during the Hundred

Years War: "Why was it that during a period of prolonged Anglo-French hostility, in a conflict which many commentators have identified as being instrumental in establishing a sense of English national identity, romances which dealt with French heroes, and French military successes, were being composed, copied, circulated and read throughout England?"

(87).

English affinity for narratives dealing with Charlemagne and his vassals stems partly from the allure of Charlemagne himself No figure, with the exception of King Arthur, looms larger in the medieval European imagination than the Emperor Charlemagne (Smyser 80).

One of the three Christian figures among the Nine Worthies,4 Charlemagne was the recipient of literary veneration through numerous chansons and romances. In the Alliterative Morte

Arthure, the sage philosopher, who interprets Arthur's vision of Lady Fortune and the Nine

3 There are extant insular (Anglo-Norman) versions of only nine chansons de geste, "ranging fromth e authoritative Oxford manuscript of the Chanson de Rolandof'the twelfth century to two fourteenth- century copies of Fierebras." See Field,"Romance" 313. 4 The famous Nine Worthies include figures from the classical (Hector, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar) Hebrew (Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabacus), and Christian traditions (Arthur, Charlemagne, and the Christian crusader Godfrey of Bouillon). These figures were celebrated as paragons of chivalry. In Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe, Richard Kaeuper observes "[t]his fusion of Judeo-Christian and classical history gave chivalry the most ancient and most venerable lineage possible" (200). Worthies, celebrates Charlemagne as a valiant champion for Christendom:

The tone climand king, I know it forsooth,

Shall Karolus be called, the kinge son of Fraunce;

He shall be cruel and keen and conquerour holden,

Cover by conquest contrees ynow;

He shall encroach the crown that Crist bore himselven,

And that lifelich launce that lepe to His herte

When He was crucified on cross, and all the keen nailes

Knightly he shall conquer to Cristen men hands. (3422-29)

The philosopher prophesies Charlemagne's territorial conquests and, most importantly, his role in the Christian reclamation of sacred relics associated with Christ's crucifixion. This glorification of Charlemagne as Christian hero can also be found in the French chansons and their insular adaptations, which frequently depict the emperor and his douzepers, the twelve peers of France, as "embattled against the forces of paganism for the defence of

Christendom" (Barron 89).

The cultural resonance of Charlemagne as Christian emperor and conqueror perhaps appealed to Middle English redactors. The process of translatio, of adapting the French chansons for an English audience, necessitates the "steady diminution in the Frenchness of the French heroes" (Field 315). While the French chansons conflate Christian and French heroism,5 the Middle English Charlemagne romances increasingly emphasize, over the

5 The French chansons, unlike their Middle English adaptations, conflate Christian and French heroism by emphazing the French heritage of Charlemagne and his peers, and identifying the king's realm with Christendom As Ailes and Hardman observe in the French epics "a strong and clear division between the Self, 'us' and the 'Other': between the side with which the reader/listener is expected to identify, and the [Saracen] enemy" (50). The heroes of French epic are consistently identified as being both 'Christian' and 'French.' See Ailes and Hardman 50. 110 course of their development during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the heroes'

Christian identity. In other words, the Middle English Charlemagne romances downplay the

French nationality of their heroes, choosing to "[celebrate] Christian heroes who happen to be French, rather than French heroes who happen to be Christian" (Warm 87).

Of the Ferumbras texts, only Sir Ferumbras retains a significant number of references to "frensche" or "frenschmen" (Ailes and Hardman 51). In the Sowdone, the narrator opts for the term "cristene men," referring to the French nationality of the peers only twice (2512; 2168). Firumbras, the latest of the Firumbras group, identifies the heroes as

"cristene men" or "cristen kny3tes," making no reference to their French origins (Ailes and

Hardman 52). The romances of the Otuel group similarly shift the focus away from French national identity. Otuel a Knijt occasionally uses "freinche" to designate the heroes, although "the poet prefers the word 'kny3te" (Ailes and Hardman 52). The poet of Otuel and

Roland refers to the peers' French origins relatively little "in comparison with an Old French where 'franceis' is the single most common designation for the side with which we are to identify" (Ailes and Hardman 52). The narrative content of Otuel and Roland can be divided into two sections; in the first section, the word "ffrenche" is only found three times whereas in the Roncevaux section it is used only once. As Ailes and Hardman note, the poet instead refers to the peers as "kni3tes," "dussypers," and "cristen" (52). The designation "French" does not appear at all in Duke Rowlande any more than in Firumbras (Ailes and Hardman

52). The shift in designation, from French to Christian, is a "process of

'supranationalization'" in which "[t]he French forces can become 'our' forces when what they represent is Christendom rather than a French national identity" (Ailes and Hardman

53). Ill

The chanson material selected for translation lends itself to the cultural appropriation of Charlemagne as a distinctly Christian crusader and conqueror.6 This, however, does not adequately explain Middle English redactors' particular preference for those narratives featuring the converted Saracen knight. The Otuel and Ferumbras romances are also "notable narratives of incorporation, focusing on the conversion and assimilation of the eponymous protagonists" (Ailes and Hardman 44). They invoke the medieval Christian ideal of conversion as an effective means of dealing with the problem of Islam.

The Dream of Muslim Conversion in Fourteenth-Century England:

During the Saracen attack on Rome in the Sowdone, Ferumbras makes his way to

"Seinte Petris," the basilica, "And alle the Relekes he seased anoon, / The Crosse, the

Crown, the Nailes bente; / He toke hem with him everychone" (664-66). The stolen relics remain central to the narrative of the Sowdone: the loss of the relics enrages Charlemagne, who immediately sets sail in pursuit of the Saracen Laban; later, when Charlemagne offers terms of peace to Laban, the French king demands the return of the lost relics (Sowdone

1820-22). Sir Ferumbras places greater emphasis on the return of the relics as a condition of peace. Seven different knights deliver Charlemagne's terms, with little variation: all demand the return of the stolen relics and the immediate release of the French prisoners (1806-1947).

Narratives dramatizing the loss of the holy relics associated with Christ's passion would have resonated with an English Christian audience. Indeed, according to Tyerman,

6 Both French and English monarchs invoked Charlemagne in order to legitimize their respective royal authority. As Marianne Ailes and Phillipa Hardman explain, "any claim made by the French Capetian dynasty to be the legitimate successors of Charlemagne was of course available to the English royal house too, given Edward Ill's claim to the French crown through his maternal grandfather, Philip IV. Therefore, translating the texts into English could be seen as a form of cultural appropriation, echoing the English kings' claim to France. Furthermore, Charlemagne provides an imperial model for fifteenth-century English kings who were keen to present themselves as Christian Emperors." The crown used in the coronation of medieval French kings was known as the Crown of Charlemagne. See Ailes and Hardman 44. See also, Hardman, "The Sege ofMelayne. A Fifteenth-Century Reading" 71-86. 112 some fourteenth-century English guilds continued to pray for the restoration of the True

Cross to Christendom. He writes, "[t]wo such guilds were founded in Norfold in 1384, the

Fraternities of St. Christopher in Norwich and of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Wiggenhall on the Ouse. Each began meetings with prayers for the recovery of the Holy

Land: at St. Christopher's at Norwich, 'for ye holy londe and ye holy crosse, yat Godd for his might and his mercy bring it oute of hethen power into reule of holy chirche'" (England

261).7

Like the lost Holy Relics and the Holy Land itself, it was believed that the Saracen could be reclaimed for Christendom through religious conversion. The idea of the Saracen as a reclaimable object would have appealed to fourteenth-century English audiences, for whom the renewal of Crusades and the prospect of Muslim conversion continued to be relevant. Pierre Dubois, in his treatise advocating the recovery of the Holy Land, entreats

Edward I of England to reclaim that land from "the Saracens who seized it" (Recovery 70).

Such an enterprise would increase European land holdings:

When these projects have, by the grace of God, been accomplished, Catholics

of the same mind will be in possession of the whole Mediterranean coast,

from the west all the way to the east on the north side, and the greater part

touching the Land of Promise on the south. The Arabs will then be unable to

prosper materially unless they share with the Catholics the commerce in their

7 Sacred relics such as the True Cross and the Holy Lance were objects of the utmost importance to medieval Christians, particularly to Christian Crusaders. During the First Crusade, a significant military success was attributed to the recovery of the relics. The discovery of the Holy Lance coincided with the breaking of the siege at Antioch in 1098. OrdericVitalis writes, "They dug from morning until evening and, in the presence of Peter [Bartholomew, a mystic from France], the man to whom the place had been revealed, discovered the lance. When it had been reverently lifted up a loud shout was raised; immediately men came crowding in to see it and kiss it with profound reverence. The discovery caused such rejoicing that all languor was laid aside, all sorrows were forgotten, and fromtha t moment the Christians found the courage to talk of battle" (109). 113

products. This will also be true in the case of oriental peoples and their

products. {Recovery 156-57).

Dubois advocates the religious as well as economic benefits one could accrue through military activity in the East (Calkin, "Anxieties of Encounter" 148). "Devotion to the Holy

Land remained part of the mentality of the period," according to Christopher Tyerman

{England 260). Numerous fourteenth-century guilds provided special funds for pilgrims, in particular those bound for Jerusalem, and prayed regularly for the patriarch of Jerusalem

(Tyerman, England'260-61). English knights continued to embark on crusading ventures throughout the fourteenth century, notably participating in the 1365 sack of Alexandria, a crusading endeavor noted by chroniclers and historians for its material profit (Tyerman,

England 260, 291-93).

The recovery of the Holy Land also remained a common theme for contemporary writers (Tyerman, England281). Readers, according to the prologue of the Travels of Sir

John Mandeville, long to hear of the Holy Land: "[I]t is longe tyme passed bat ber was no generall passage ne vyage ouer the see and many men desiren for to here speke of the holy lond and han bere gret solace and comforte" (3). Mandeville invites readers to remember the

Life and Passion of Christ, through which the Holy Land was "behighte us in heritage" (2).

Moreover, Mandeville calls for the reconquest of the Holy Land: "Wherfore euery gode cristene man bat is of powere and hath whereof shoulde peynen him with all his strengthe for to conquere our right heritage and chacen out all the mysbeleeuynge men" (2).

The idea of crusade was not, in the medieval imagination, incompatible with the movement to convert non-Christians and evangelize among them. Conquest, according to

Elizabeth Siberry, was regarded by some as necessary for conversion to occur (17). Others, 114 such as the English Franciscan scholar Roger Bacon, argued that "the crusades hindered the conversion of the Muslims" (Siberry 19). In his Opus Mains, written at the request of Pope

Clement IV between 1266 and 1268, Bacon advocated preaching and teaching as a means of affecting conversion:

Nor are unbelievers converted in this way, but they are slain and sent to hell.

The survivors of the wars and their sons are angered more and more, and are

infinitely removed from the faith of Christ, and are inflamed to do Christians

all possible evils. Hence the Saracens for this reason in many parts of the

world cannot be converted. (Ill)

Teaching and philosophical argument, not warfare, will win converts to Christianity (Tolan,

Saracens 225). Adherents of rival religions, according to Bacon, are "not blind or evil; they are simply at different stages in the progression toward God... Each religion reflects the soul's knowledge of God, even if that knowledge is at times imperfect, leading to religious error. Such error can be imputed to ignorance, and when infidels are properly instructed... they should be able to recognize the truth of Christianity" (Tolan, Saracens

227). Bacon perceives religions like Islam to be imperfect forms of Christianity (Tolan,

Saracens 227).

Mandeville similarly emphasizes the congruence of Saracen theology with

Christianity, noting more similarities than differences (Akbari, Idols 57). Saracens, according to Mandeville, "knoulechen wel bat the werkes of Ihesu crist ben gode and his wordes and his dedes and his doctryne be his gospelles weren trewe and his meracles also trewe and the blessede virgine Marie is good and holy may den... And bat all bo bat beleuen perfectly in god schul be saued" (86-7). The similarities between the Saracen religion and 115

Christianity serve to reinforce "the inevitability of the final victory of Christianity explicitly promised in the Sultan's chamber" (Akbari, Idols 57). The Sultan admits,"I>at cristene men schull wynnen a3en this lond out of oure hondes when bei seruen god more deuoutly" (89);

Saracens concede the "law of Machomete" will fail, unlike the "lawe of cristene people" which will "laste to the day of doom" (87). For Mandeville, Christian victory entails not only the reclamation of the Holy Land but also the active proselytization of Saracens: "And be cause bat bei gon so ny oure feyth bei been lyghtly conuerted to cristene lawe whan men preche hem And schewen hem distynctly the lawe of Ihesu crist and whan men tellen hem of the prophecyes" (87).8 The Travels encourages the belief that Saracens are on the verge of easy conversion; the proximity of the Saracen religion to Christianity suggests that, through religious instruction, Saracens will recognize the truth of Christianity. Mandeville's Travels thus exemplifies secular literary interest in the redemption of the pagan and the ideal of conversion.9

English interest in conversion is further evidenced by the presence and upkeep of the

Domus Conversorum. The Domus Conversorum, or House of Converts, was established in

London in 1232 by King Henry III (Kelly 130). A hospice for converted Jews, the House of

Converts did not fall into disuse following the Expulsion of 1290;10 although the Domus experienced a decline in membership after the Expulsion, it continued to receive within its

8 Mandeville reiterates the proximity of the two religions and the potential for conversion later in the chapter: "And bei sayn pat of theise iiij. Ihesu was the most worthi and the most excellent and the most gret so pat pei han many gode articles of our feyth, all be it bat pei haue no parfite lawe and fayth as cristene men han. and perfore ben bei lightly conuerted and namely bo bat vnderstonden the scriptures and the prophecyes, For pei han the gospelles and the prophecies and the byble writen in here langage. Wherfore bei conen meche of holy wrytt, but bei vnderstone it not but after the lettre gostly but bodyly and perfore ben bei repreued of pe wise pat gostly vnderstonden it" (88). 9 For an extended treatment of the virtuous pagan in Middle English literature, see Vitto. 10 For an account of the expulsion as well as the circumstances of the Jews prior to the expulsion, see Mundill. walls converts and the children of converts (Kelly 130-31). By Chaucer's time, the Domus was "still known as having been established for the maintenance of converts 'from Jewish depravity,' de Judaicapravitate" (Kelly 133), although Kelly cites Richard of Sicily and

William Piers as examples of converts living in England who may have, in fact, been

Muslims (145-153).

Documentary evidence suggests, then, that non-Christians and non-Christian converts were living in England, whether in or out of the Domus Conversorum. Their presence evinced fears that Saracens and Jews were living in England under false pretenses

(Kelly 145). In the "Good Parliament" of 1376, for example, the Commons charged that some of the alleged Lombards living in England were really Jews and Saracens (Kelly 145):

The Commons petition that all of the Lombards who have no other

occupation than that of broker be made to quit the land within a short time,

since evil usury and all sorts of subtle plotting connected with it are practiced

and maintained by them; understanding, most noble Lords, that there is in the

land a much greater multitude of Lombard brokers than merchants, who do

nothing but mischief, and many of those who are held to be Lombards are

Jews and Saracens and secret spies, and they have recently brought to the

land a very horrible vice that is not to be named, through which the Kingdom

cannot fail to be destroyed within a short time if strict corrective measure be

not quickly taken, (qtd. in Kelly 145)

11 We do have a sense of the number of converts admitted to the Domus Conversorum: "In 1292, there were ninety-seven members, and in 1308 the membership was down to fifty-two, according to Reddan, though Adler finds ninety-six in 1280 and fifty in 1380. But the Domus was given new life under Edward HI, who assigned to it some children of converts. We know of two in 1336, another two in 1337, and one in 1344, and we hear of another in 1347" See Kelly 130-31. 117

The Commons complain that the Jews and Saracens have introduced the vice of sodomy into

England (Kelly 145).12 Such suspicions were attended by "the hope of converting unbelievers to the true faith" (Kelly 156). Indeed, the conversion of non-Christians was actively sponsored by English monarchs, such as Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV

(Kelly 156). Richard II, for example, was "vigorous in sponsoring the conversion of unbelievers," bearing witness to the baptism of two apostates, Richard of Sicily and William

Piers, at his chapel in Langley (Kelley 156). Such sponsorship speaks to a particularly

English interest in "welcoming non-Christians into the Christian fold" (Kelly 168).

"Close to the way of Salvation": Imagining Islam as a Christian Heresy

Christian polemicists, such as Peter of Cluny and Petrus Alfonsi, did not view Islam as a separate religion; rather, it was merely a variety of heretical error (Tolan, Saracens

165).13 The Saracen had unwittingly been corrupted by the teachings of the charismatic heresiarch, Muhammad (Tolan, Saracens 136). Indeed, hostile polemical biographies of

Muhammad portray the prophet as a trickster and magician who dupes his followers by performing false miracles (Tolan, Saracens 140). Muhammad, according to Adelphus, in his

Vita Machometi, "was a supreme magician, student of diabolical doctrine, of the evil art, a very learned man in necromancy, from whom 'no herb nor root lurking in dark places escaped'" (qtd. in Tolan, Saracens 141-42). Using his expertise, Muhammad dupes naive

Saracens: "He performed so many wonders [mirabilis] among his people, that they liked to invoke him as a god. That is how good his magic [mathesis] was" (Adelphus qtd. in Tolan,

Saracens 142). Such (false) assertions regarding Islam's founder served to "explain to the

12 Saracens were often associated with the vice in canon law, both as perpetrators of the act and as agents of divine punishment. See, Kelly 145. 13 For further discussion of Muhammad as heresiarch in Christian polemical writings, see Tolan 135-69. 118

[medieval Christian] reader both the diabolic nature of Islam and its tremendous success in winning converts" (Tolan, Saracens 142). Guibert of Nogent similarly describes Islam as a schismatic Christian sect. In his brief biography of Muhammad, which appears at the beginning of his Gesta Dei per Francos [The Deeds of God through the Franks], Guibert reiterates "popular opinion" regarding Islam's founder: "there was a man, whose name, if I have it right, was Mathomus, who led them away from belief in the Son and in the Holy

Spirit. He taught them to acknowledge only the person of the Father as the single, creating

God, and he said that Jesus was entirely human" (32). Guibert describes Islam in relation to

Christianity, portraying the former religion as a derivation and a separation from the latter.

The belief that Muhammad was "an instigator of heretical strife" fueled "the clerical view that baptized Saracens were essentially prodigal sons returning to the fold" (Metlitzki

204-05). Because Christian authors classified Islam as a heresy,14 they "tried to refute it using the well-worn tools of antiheretical argument" (Tolan, Saracens 137). The initial

Christian response to heresy was religious correction or conversion. Indeed, the thirteenth century "saw for the first time significant effort to convert Muslims to Christianity through mission" (Tolan, Saracens 172). Conversion, then, became a viable solution to the "Islamic problem." Preaching the Word of God would not only correct the misunderstanding that

Norman Daniel identifies "two entirely separate conventions within which the mediaevals expressed themselves." See Islam 341-42. While popular texts, such as chansons and romances, depicted Muslims as pagan idolaters, more "learned" views of Islam as a heretical deviation of Christianity. Tolan, in his own treatment of Western representations of Islam, observes that the "situation is far from being so simple....When on examines the texts closely, the distinction between 'learned' and 'popular' blur." See Saracens 136-37. Suzanne Conklin Abkari similarly believes the "two conventions are mutually reinforcing and nourish one another." In other words, the "'fanciful' rhetoric of idolatry thoroughly permeates [the] 'realistic' mode" characterized by Christian polemics and biographies of the prophet Muhummad." See Akbari, Idols 202-3. Both the "fanciful" and "realistic" modes - the former representing Islam as idolatry, the latter as Christian heresy - "insist on the fundamentally retrogressive nature of the religion." Islam is, in the medieval Christian imagination, "collectively and universally anterior to the advent of Christianity." See Akbari, Idols 227. 119 forms the basis of Muslim faith but also facilitate the conversion of a misled people (Tolan,

Saracens 208). Because Muslims were, according to the anonymous author of the De Statu

Sarracenorum, "close to the way of salvation" (qtd. in Tolan, Saracens 208), they need only be confronted with the truth of Christianity in order to convert. This belief in the easy conversion of Muslims is echoed in the Otuel and Ferumbras romances, in which the noble

Saracen knight abandons his religion in favour of Christianity.

The Otuel and Ferumbras romances distort Islam into a form of paganism that is ostensibly antithetical to the Christian faith. The confrontation between Otuel and Roland foregrounds the theological differences that distinguish the Saracen religion from

Christianity: polytheism and idolatry. In chansons and romances, Christian knights appeal directly to their God and their saint, without recourse to the veneration of images, whereas

Saracens are depicted as engaging in the idolatrous worship of three graven images of

Mahoun, Apolin, and Tervagant (Akbari, Idols 206).15 Otuel, for example, alludes to a similar trinity of gods during his battle with Roland. When the Christian knight tries to convince Otuel to embrace Christianity, the Saracen knight adamantly refuses to abandon his

The religious idols are frequentlymentione d in chansons and in romances. The Sowdone describes the religious ritual which surrounds the veneration of the Saracen gods and their images: And to his goddes offrynge he made. He and his sone Sir Ferumbras Here goddis of golde dide fade; Thai brente frankensense That smoked up so stronge The fume in her presence, It lasted alle alonge. (677-82) The religious devotion soon gives way to anger when the sultan is defeated in battle. The sultan decries the efficacy of his gods and threatens to burn the idols (2431-40). The sultan never casts the idols into the fire, however; he is, instead, remorseful and renews his sacrificial offerings in the hopes of appeasing his gods and earning their favour. The sultan's renewed devotion, of course, does not change his military fortune; he loses another battle, he again becomes incensed and abuses his religious idols which he, then, repents only to endure yet another defeat. The scenes of idolatry in La Chanson de Roland and the Sowdone are intended to "[condemn] the Mulims for their idolatry" and "[point] out the futility of their wrongly directed worship." See Akbari, Idols 207. beliefs: "so mote y the, / that ne schalt-ou neuer se / to for-sake Mahoun, / ne turmegaunt, that ys so fre, / ne Iouyn, the goddys thre, / that beth goddys of grete renown" {Otuel and

Roland 521-26). The pagan pantheon is here comprised of three gods - "Mahoun"

(Muhammad), "Turmegaunt" (Termagaunt), and "Iouyn" (Jupiter).16 The grouping of the

"goddys thre" is significant. While romance redactors did not consciously write the Saracen religion as a schismatic heresy, the way in which medieval Christian polemicists wrote of

Islam, they nevertheless suggest its proximity to Christianity by imagining the Saracen pantheon as a trinity. Thus, while religious difference separates Otuel and Ferumbras from their Christian counterparts, it is a difference that is easily overcome through conversion.

Mirror Images: The Crisis of Non-Differentiation in the Otuel and Ferumbras

Romances

The noble Saracen warrior is presented, in medieval chansons and romances, as a

17 mirror image of the Christian knight. Cast as a potential Christian, the noble Saracen knight possesses, and is admired for, his chivalric virtues and martial prowess. Although the figure of the chivalrous Saracen may seem anomalous, crusade accounts describe western admiration for opponents and assert the belief in the possibility of Muslim conversion (Ailes,

"Chivalry" 1). The author of the Gesta francorumwrites , "They [the Turks] have a saying that no men, except the Franks and themselves, are naturally born to be knights. This is true and nobody can deny it, that if only they had stood firm in the faith of Christ and holy

Christendom... you could not find stronger or braver or more skilful soldiers; and yet by

The inclusion of Jupiter among the three main Saracen deities is slightly unusual; in other chansons and romances, the Saracens primarily pray to Mahoun, Termagaunt and Apollo. Critics, such as C. Meredith Jones, Norman Daniel and Siobhain Bly Calkin, have also noted the similarities between Christians and Saracens in romances and in chansons. See Jones 224; Daniel, Heroes and Saracens, 38-51; and Calkin, Saracens and the Making of English Identity, 22-31. 121

God's grace they were beaten by our men" (21). Ambroise, in his account of the Third

Crusades generally describes Saracens as "work[ing] evil against [God]" (3170) but alludes to the potential of the pagans: "Had they not been infidels no better people could ever have been seen" (5060-61). He attributes to Saphdin (Safa al-DIn) two qualities - prowess and largess - commonly associated with chivalrous (Christian) knights (Ailes, "Chivalry" 3):

"Then there came spurring up, apart from the other Turks, on a swift and speedy horse, a single Saracen. It was the noble Saphadin of Arcadia, a man of valiant deed, kindness and generosity" (11512-17).

Praiseworthy Saracens can also be found in the chansons de geste. In La Chanson de

Roland, for example, the emir of Balaguer is described as being "very handsome and his face fierce and fair. / When he is mounted on his horse, / He bears his arms with great ferocity. / He is well known for his courage" (895-98). The emir, despite his religious affiliation, is praiseworthy and, therefore, an ideal candidate for conversion: "Had he been a

Christian, he would have been a worthy baron" (Chanson de Roland 899). Chivalric

Saracens, such as the emir of Balaguer, are equal to their Frankish counterparts "in all but religion, they need only accept Christianity to become exemplary barons" (Kinoshita,

Medieval Boundaries 27). While the emir of Balaguer is described only as having the capacity to convert, however, the Saracen knights Otuel and Ferumbras fulfill their potential and assume an important presence as actual converts.

In her well-known discussion of La Chanson de Roland,xsSharon Kinoshita describes the similarities between the Christian and Saracens armies:

18 See Sharon Kinoshita, '"Pagans are wrong and Christians are right': Alterity, Gender and Nation in the Chanson de Roland." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 (2001): 80-111. An expanded discussion of the Chanson de Roland appears in her book, Medieval Boundaries. Both sides are orderly feudal hierarchies, each a mirror image of the other.

Like opposing kings on a chessboard, Charlemagne and Marsile/Baligant

convoke their barons to council, array their troops, and carry personal

standards in battle. Moreover, Christians and pagans speak the same

language: whether exchanging ambassadors or haranguing each other in

formulaic displays of bravado, they have no need of interpreters... Both sides

image their gods as feudal overlords, expected to dispense favors and

miracles commensurate with the devotion they are offered. {Medieval

Boundaries 25-26)

This narrative parallelism leads Kinoshita to conclude that, "[s]imilar in language and custom, the two sides arguably are different in religion and nothing more" {Medieval

Boundaries 26).

The eponymous knights of the Otuel and Ferumbras romances similarly resemble their Christian counterparts "in all but religion." The parallelism structuring the depiction of

Saracens and Christians negates cultural difference and casts the chivalrous Saracen as a potential candidate for conversion. Indeed, the Saracen knights' conformity to the chivalric ideals of the Christian community, exemplified by Charlemagne and his knights, facilitate his conversion and acculturation. However, this lack of difference also points to the permeable boundary separating Christian from Saracen. As Kinoshita observes in her discussion of La Chanson de Roland, "if the possibility of conversion is held open then any sense of identity which depends on the opposition between self and other is intrinsically unstable" ("Alterity" 86).The noble Saracen knight, precisely because he occupies a middle space between two opposing cultural positions, and is imbued with the capacity to convert, 123 troubles the limits of collective identity and occasions, what Sharon Kinoshita terms, "a crisis of differentiation" {Medieval Boundaries 16).

In the prologue to Duke Rowlande, the poet promises to tell of "doghety men" proven in battle (7-12), namely Charlemagne and his peers. The poet celebrates the king and his knights as paragons of chivalry in his blazon:

The sone of le Roy Pepyn,

J>at was sir Cherlles gud & fyne,

Als be cronykills vs gan say,

With his dusperes doghety and dym

I>at wele couthe feght with a Sara3ene,

For to felle bam fey.

Mynstrells in bat lande gan duelle,

Bot alle be sothe bay couthe noght tell

Of his noble cheualrye. (13-27)

For the battle fought against the Saracens and their false religion, the king and his knights are praised as the "flour of cheualrye" (23).19 Here, "cheualrye" refers to ideal knightly conduct, and "doghety" conduct "may be understood as the basic physical expression of

Diane Speed argues that Duke Rowlande is more preoccupied with knighthood than the other Otuel romances. But while Duke Rowlande may demonstrate a comparatively more coherent discourse of Christian chivalry, the other Otuel romances certainly characterize Charlemagne and his peers in similar chivalric terms as Duke Rowlande. Otuel a Knijt describes Charlemagne as a "dou3ty man" and a "treu kni3t" charged with the preservation of Christendom. See "Chivalric Perspectives 7-14. There is no reference to the peers in the opening of Otuel a Knijt. Otuel and Roland describes Charlemagne in terms of his knightly status ("syr Charlemayne") and his role as conqueror (1-4) and then proceeds to outline his military conquests, which he accomplishes "with ful grete honour" (6). Roland is described as a "grete warryour" and a "gode knyghf'in the prologue, highlighting the peer's chivalric conduct (11; 24). Interestingly, the prologue to Otuel and Roland emphasizes religious chivalry, suggesting all martial deeds are performed in the name of God and all military successes are achieved through divine Grace. 124 knighthood: prowess" (Speed, "Chivalric Perspectives" 214). Charlemagne and his peers receive similar acclaim in the Sowdone, in which they are described as "doughty in all stourys" and as "worthy men of dede" (729-30). Indeed, the poem idealizes the Peers as models of western knighthood:

Therfore ye knightes, yonge of age,

Of oolde ye may now lere,

Howe ye shalle both hurle and rage

In felde with sheelde and spere.

And take ensample of the Twelfe Peris,

Howe thai have proved her myght,

And howe thai were both wight and tiers

To wynnen honourys in righte. (926-34)

The Sowdone also describes the knightly collective of Charlemagne and his peers in terms of their conduct, that is, their martial prowess and ability to accrue honour. Charlemagne and his knights are, then, consistently described in chivalric terms using "an authoritative narratorial voice that is regularly identified with the Christian position" (Speed, "Chivalric

Perspectives" 214). In this way, the Otuel and Ferumbras romances construct "true chivalry" as a "Christian institution, a key concept of which was loyalty, whether to one's lord, one's God or one's lady" (Speed, "Chivalric Perspectives" 214).

20 Hardman observes in the Sege "frequent reference[s] to Charles's French forces as 'our men,' 'our Cristyns,' and so on. The same device appears in Sir Otuell in descriptions of encounters between the Saracens and 'our folkes' (1528), 'our batell[s]' (1124, 1454, and 1464). Indeed, throughout both Charlemagne romances in the Thorton MS 'our' men are normally identified as 'the Cristynde,' 'the Cristen oste,' 'the Cristen folke,' 'oure Cristen knyghtis,' not as the French, and the territory which they defend is not only France but the whole realm of'Cristyante' or 'Crystyndome.'" (74). This Christian position from which the narrator describes Christian confrontations with Saracens and with which the intended reader is expected to identify is implicit in all the Otuel and Ferumbras romances discussed here. While true chivalry is attributed almost exclusively to the Christian French, the poet uses similar language to describe Otuel and Ferumbras in order to signal their status as noble warriors, and their desirability as converts to the Christian community. Otuel, in Duke

Rowlande, is described as "doghety" by both the narrator (56) and by Christian knights (116,

320, 516), recalling the prologue's blazon of Charlemagne and his peers. Despite his religious and cultural affiliations, Ferumbras is similarly worthy of the poet's praise.

Characterized as a "doughty man...of ded" {Sowdone 207), the Saracen knight in the

Sowdone is likewise an accomplished warrior who, like Charlemagne and his knights, accrues honour through feats of arms.

Redactors of the Otuel and Ferumbras material, however, had "certain obstacles to overcome in depicting [the] noble and chivalrous pagan" (Ailes, "Chivalry" 8). Prior to their conversion, both Otuel and Ferumbras (mis)direct their violence against Christians. Otuel boasts about killing Christians in battle:

Nyne monethes es gone arighte

Sen I with Cursu was dobbide knyghte,

My golde brayden brande.

Athosande there to be ded I dighte

Of Cristen men mekill of myghte,

Righte with myn aween handed. {Duke Rowlande 139-44)

Similarly, in Otuel a Knijt, the Saracen knight admits to killing many Frenchmen while in

Rome (125-32). Ferumbras, however, perpetrates greater atrocities against Christians. Sir

Ferumbras, for example, recounts the knight's role in the sack of Rome:

He slow be Pope pat bo was and all pat he my3t tille: 126

Cardynals, Abbotes & Pryours monekys & frerys eke,

& alle clerkes of honours bobe pore & reke,

Saue nunnes slo3 he sykerly be relygyous bat bar war.

Wymen he tok, & lay hem by & afterward duden hem [slee]

l?at Cite a struyded, & banne beer, be relyqes fayre & free,

Of wham y tolde 30W of eer be croune & be nailes three.

Of ierusalem & of al bat londe lord he was about. (59-66)

Ferumbras is responsible for the theft of lands and relics of spiritual significance to Christian believers. The murder of the Pope and other members of religious orders highlight the brutality of the Saracen attack on Christendom.

This incident, however, is omitted in the Sowdone, a later version of the Ferumbras narrative. Although willing to kill Roman soldiers, Ferumbras spares the Pope:

Anoon he sterte on him all ane

His ventayle for to onlace,

And saugh his crown newe shafe,

Ashamed thanne he was.

'Fye, preest, God gyfe the sorowe!

What doist thou armede in the feelde,

That sholdest saie thi matyns on morwe?

What doist thou with spere and shelde?

I hoped thou hadiste ben an emperoure,

Or a cheftayne of this ooste here,

Or some worthy conqueroure. 127

Go home and kepe thy qwere!

Shame it were to me certayne

To sle the in this bataile;

Therfore turne the home agayn!'

The Pope was gladde therof certayne. (555-70).

The Pope is immediately recognizable, both to the reader and the Saracen Ferumbras, as a

man of religious orders because of his "crown newe shafe" (557). Ferumbras knows there is

no honour in killing a holy man, whether Christian or Saracen, and instead chastises the

Pope as to the proper place of religious men: they should be cloistered and engaged in prayer

rather than being on the battlefield. The knight's actions - his refusal to kill an unarmed

man of religious orders and his delivery of the Pope - conforms the precepts of chivalry, a

code that Charlemagne and his knights are entrusted to uphold. Ferumbras safeguards, rather

than attacks, the disempowered priest, an individual in need of knights' protection according

to the chivalric code. By omitting the murder of the Pope in its account of the sack of Rome,

the Sowdone depicts Ferumbras as a powerful knight who acts in accordance with an

honourable code.

Similarly, the Otuel romances mitigate his violence against Christians by

emphasizing his military prowess, his ability to accrue honour through feats of arms, and his

observance of the chivalric code. Both Otuel a Knijt and Duke Rowlande recount the killing

of a French knight who attacks Otuel from behind {Otuel a Kni$t 53-68; Duke Rowlande

158-68). Although Otuel's actions arouse feelings of hostility amongst the Christian knights, his actions are construed as an appropriate and just response to the Christian knight's violation of Charlemagne's offer of protection, extended to the Saracen messenger on his 128 arrival, and the code of honourable conduct to which knights are expected to adhere. The attack on Otuel draws into relief the Christian knight's failure to observe chivalric fellowship and to obey his liege lord.

Although Otuel and Ferumbras fight against Christians, their violent behaviour nevertheless "falls within the norms of chivalric deportment" (Akbari, Idols 166). As Akbari observes, "qualities of aggression and even violence are valued highly within the chivalric system where warfare is the natural state of affairs" {Idols 167). Both Otuel and Ferumbras are desirable as "chivalric recruits to the Christian armies of Charlemagne" (Akbari, Idols

167) because they share a group identity, rooted in class and class values. The Otuel and

Ferumbras romances depict knighthood as a class identity and as a code of conduct that transcends religious and cultural affiliations and is presented as universal and cross-cultural.

The similarity between the noble Saracen warrior and his Christian counterparts extends beyond their shared class identity and virtues, and encompasses armour and fighting methods. As Norman Daniel points out, in the chanson de geste "there is no pretense that the horrors of war were not evenly distributed between them, or that Christians and Saracens conducted war in any way differently" (Heroes 103). Indeed, in Otuel a Kniyt, Roland and the yet-unconverted Saracen are evenly matched in both skill and weaponry:

I>ei riden togidere wip speres kene,

J>at were ste[r]ne and no^t longe;

And pe kni3tes were bobe stronge

And smyten eiber in oberes sscheld

&at bobe hors fellen in be feld

And risen a3ein op from pe grounde, And bobe kn^tes were hole & sounde.

I>o be stedes were risen bobe,

I>e la^tes woxen bobe wrobe,

And drowen swerdes ate laste,

And eiber h.113 on ober faste. (446-56).

Here, each knight bears similar weaponry, attacks on horseback, and resorts to similar

fighting tactics. The poet refers to the opponents collectively ("the knights") and uses words

such as "both" "either/other" in order to create a mirroring effect in the narrative.

Interestingly, the armour Otuel wears during his battle with Roland is borrowed. In

preparation for combat, Belesent, a woman who stands outside of masculine chivalry

(Speed, "Chivalry" 218), arms Otuel and endows him with the accoutrement of western

knighthood: a hauberk, helmet, sword, shield, spurs and a courser {Otuel and Roland 347-

89). Being clad in Christian armour foreshadows Otuel's future membership in the Christian

community (Speed, "Chivalric" 218). The arming sequence featuring Belesant and Otuel

parallels that of Roland: both knights wear comparable armour and wield similar weaponry

(349-372; 409-38), illustrating their participation in the same "knightly economy" (Calkin,

Saracens 24).

Depictions of single combat similarly reveal Ferumbras' conformity to the paradigm of western knighthood, and demonstrate his adeptness in western methods of warfare. In the

Sowdone, Christian and Saracen knights adhere to the same paradigm of knighthood:

Thai smeten togeder with egre mode,

21 Similar depictions of the battle between the Christian peer and the Saracen knight can be found in Otuel and Roland(426-37) and in Duke Rowlands (463-80) In these descriptions of single combat, the poet draws attention to the similarities - in appearance and action - between the two opponents. And nathir of othire dradde;

Thai persed here hauberkes that were so goode

Tille both thayr bodyes bladde.

Thay foughten soo longe that by assente

Thai drewe hem a litil bysyde,

A litil while thaym to avente,

And refresshed hem at that tyde. (1231-38)

Like Oliver, Ferumbras relies on western equipment and battle techniques during battle. In this episode, both knights initially attack on horseback, don comparable protective equipment, such as a helm, and use similar weaponry, such as swords and spears, thereby reinforcing western standards of knighthood. Again, the mirroring of martial appearance and narrative action draws attention to the similarities between two opponents.

In the Otuel and Ferumbras romances, the parallelism structuring arming and combat sequences reinforces "the increasingly anachronistic idea that individual mounted combat is a universal modus operandi for fighting others" (Calkin, Saracens 25). This parallelism, which presents the western manner of warfare as universal and cross-cultural, however, is historically inaccurate. In L 'estoire de la guerre sainte, the crusader Ambroise comments on the differences in armour and weapons that made historical Muslims more effective fighters than their more heavily-armed Christian counterparts:

The Turks had one advantage that brought much harm to us. The Christians

are heavily armed and the Saracen unarmed, but for a bow, a club and a

sword or metalled spear or knife of little weight. When they are chased after,

they have such horses - there are no better anywhere in the world - they seem 131

to fly like swallows. When the Turk is followed he cannot be reached (5649-

56).

Rather than undermining the efficacy of traditional western equipment and battle techniques

(Calkin, Saracens 27), though, the noble Saracen warrior of romance proves to be just as adept as his Christian counterparts in western methods of warfare. Employing similar weapons and techniques, sharing the same knightly class, operating according to the same code of conduct as their Christian counterparts, Otuel and Ferumbras are not unlike their

Christian opponents.

The "sameness" of the chivalrous Saracen highlights his desirability as a Christian recruit, and facilitates his eventual conversion to Christianity. The lack of differentiation, however, also demonstrates the ways in which the noble Saracen warrior blurs classificatory boundaries. Kinoshita argues that La Chanson de Roland "manages this instability [of identity] through its strategic deployment of gender," identifying female Saracen characters as "the site where alterity is both articulated and overcome" ("Pagan" 80, 91). Bramimonde,

Kinoshita asserts, is "marginalized as a subset ('woman') in the larger category of pagan, or as a subset ('Saracen') of that already marginalized category, 'women'" {Medieval Boundaries

35). Her conversion and lapse into silence completes the victory over the Saracens but does not secure her place in Charlemagne's community because she continues to be marginalized as a result of her gender. If, as Kinoshita suggests, gender difference resolves the crisis of differentiation occasioned by the similarity between Christian and Saracen knights, the male convert in the Otuel and Ferumbras romances arguably continues to destabilize, rather than reassert, already troubled boundaries. 132

Troubled Conversions in the Otuel and Ferumbras Romances

"[T]he male Saracen body," according to Jeffrey Cohen, is "obdurately Other" ("On

Saracen Enjoyment" 121). Male Saracens converts such as Otuel and Ferumbras ostensibly disprove Cohen's statement: they accept religious conversion and receive a new Christian life. A closer examination of male conversion in the Otuel and Ferumbras romances, however, reveals the difficulties of integrating into the Christian community. Although Otuel and Ferumbras willingly accept conversion, their presence as apostates evokes cultural anxieties regarding the veracity of conversion and the completeness of assimilation.

In the Otuel and Ferumbras romances, the conversion of the noble Saracen knight is facilitated through divine intervention. During his battle with Roland, Otuel refuses the

Christian knight's offer of conversion and the proposed marriage with Charlemagne's daughter Belecent, opting instead to continue the battle {Duke Rowlande 517-28; Otuel and

Roland 509-29; Otuel a Knty 516-26). The will to fight, however, fades when God's dove - a symbol that the knight's conversion is divinely sanctioned - touches OtuePs shoulder. The yet-unconverted knight announces his desire to convert to Christianity: "3ef i sschal wedden bat faire may, / Ich wille bileuen oppon pi lay, / & alle myne godes forsake, / & to 30ure god ich wille take" {Otuel a Knqt 591-94). The words "forsake" and "take" casts "his decision as a change of allegiance" and demonstrate his willingness to "enter sexually and religiously into the [Christian] group" (Calkin, Saracens 44).

Charlemagne readily accepts Otuel's change in religious and military loyalties in

Otuel a Knijt:

I grante wel bat it so be,

For whi bat he [Otuel] wille dwelle wib me. 133

I>anne hadde ich be [Roland] and oliuer,

Otuwel, &gode ogger,

In all pe world in lenkpe & brede,

I>er nis king bat nolde me drede. (623-28)

As Calkin notes, Charlemagne describes Otuel as an integrated member of his exclusive

group of knights and, in doing so, "projects an image of knightly cohesiveness" (Saracens

45). Similarly, in Duke Rowlande and Otuel and Roland, Otuel's acceptance into the

Christian community is signaled by the supposed fellowship between Otuel and

Charlemagne's knights (Duke Rowlande 625-33; Otuel and Roland 641-61). Otuel joins the

king's military campaign against the Saracen and becomes integral to achieving the Christian

victory.

Similarly, in the Sowdone, Ferumbras accepts conversion to Christianity following

his defeat in single combat. Prior to his battle with Oliver, Ferumbras asks Charlemagne to

grant him a boon:

My body I profre here to the

And requyre the, Kinge, thou do me right,

As thou art gentille lord and fre,

And if I may conquere hem in fere,

To lede them home to my faderis halle;

And if thai me, I graunte the here

To be thy man, body and alle. (1068-74)

Ferumbras will swear an oath of servitude to Charlemagne, if he is defeated by one of the

Peers. The phrase "body and alle" suggests temporal, political vassalage as well as eternal, 134 spiritual vassalage. Ferumbras asserts he will pledge his soul to God, that is, abandon his faith and convert to Christianity.

In the midst of combat, Ferumbras initially refuses the Peer's offer to convert. Oliver eventually overcomes Ferumbras as a result of divine aid, and the Saracen knight is forced to concede defeat. Ferumbras, bound by his trouthe, wilfully accepts religious conversion:

Hoo, Olyvere, I yelde me to the,

And here I become thy man.

I am so hurte I may not stonde;

I put me all in thy grace.

My goddis ben false by water and londe;

I reneye hem all here in this place.

Baptised nowe wole I be.

To Jhesu Crist I wole me take -

That Charles the Kinge shal sene -

And alle my goddes forsake. (1353-62)

As in the Otuel romances, "take" and "forsake" emphasize Ferumbras' willful abandonment of his religious, political and familial allegiances, his desire to convert to Christianity, and his association with the Christian community.

The conversion and integration of the male Saracen convert into the Christian community, however, is more complicated than it first appears. Events following Otuel's conversion demonstrate the need for the convert to re-assert his allegiance to his new religion and his new allies. Although Belecent is offered to Otuel in marriage, he refuses to marry her until "pi [Charlemagne's] were to be ende be brou3t...Whan king garsie is slawe or 135 take, / banne is time marriage to make" (Otuel a Kniy 647-50). Otuel feels he must prove his altered identity by fighting on behalf of Charlemagne against his former Saracen allies.

Charlemagne, too, needs confirmation of Otuel's loyalties. He responds to Otuel's vow, "Nou

I se bou louest me wel" {Otuel a Kniy 652). Otuel must manifest his new allegiances, both religious and political, in a series of battles. In addition to engaging the Saracen Clarel in single combat, Otuel must pursue other Saracen kings, including Garsie, to demonstrate his new identity as Charlemagne's Christian knight. Otuel, as a religious convert, must prove that he has abandoned his Saracen identity and assert his loyalty through feats of arms.

Yet, despite affirming his allegiances to Charlemagne and proving his altered identity, Otuel does not gain admittance into the inner circle of Christian knights represented by Roland, Oliver, and Ogier (Calkin, Saracens 45). Rather these three knights sneak off without Otuel, and cross the river in search of adventure (Otuel a Kniyt 701-10). Otuel reports the absence of the knights to Charlemagne:

... sire, I dwelle to longe,

Roulond, oliuer, an ogger be strange,

Oue[r] be water all pre,

Bep went for envie of me,

To loke wher pei mi3ten spede,

To don any dou3ti deed,

Among pe sarazins bolde:

To sechen hem ich wole ride.

I>au3 bei habben envie to me, Ich wille for be loue of be,

Fonden whober I mi3te comen,

To helpen hem are pei weren inomen. (Otuel a Knijt 1020-30)

As Calkin observes, Otuel views this act as "an instance of competitive disunity" {Saracens

45) that points to the Saracen convert's exclusion from the chivalric community of knights.

While Otuel's conversion implicitly suggests his inclusion to Charlemagne's company of knights, this incident points to a lack of true chivalric fellowship among Otuel and the other knights, even though they are now fighting on the same side. Despite Otuel's repeated expressions of loyalty, there are still doubts about the sincerity of his new allegiance.

Ferumbras' conversion is also haunted by questions regarding changing loyalties raised earlier with respect to the Sowdone. The Saracens successfully sack Rome with the help of Ires, the porter of Rome, who "in his fals ententes, / Purposed treason and sorowe"

(625-26). Ires gives the Saracen attackers the keys to the city but, once the Saracens have entered the city, Ferumbras betrays the porter and kills him:

He lete the portcolys falle.

He smote of the traitourus hede

And saide, 'God gife him care!

Shal he never more ete brede.

All traitours evel mot thai fare.

If he might leve and reign here,

He wolde betraye me;

For go he west, south, or north, 137

Traitor shalle he never be.' (646-54)

Ferumbras suspects Isres of being insincere; having betrayed his fellow Christians,

Ferumbras reasons, it is unlikely the porter will remain constant in his Saracen allegiances.

The fear of inconstancy is raised again when Charlemagne, following Oliver's capture, discovers Ferumbras "with blody woundes fyve" (1450). The number of wounds is provocative because it is reminiscent of the five wounds suffered by Christ during his crucifixion. On the one hand, the text gestures towards Ferumbras' desirability as a convert and his ability to integrate into the larger Christian community through the physical demonstration of his holiness. The Christ-like wounds legitimize the Saracen knight's conversion. On the other hand, Charlemagne remains unconvinced that Ferumbras' desire for conversion and baptism is genuine. The king, unaware of the knight's recent change in allegiance, identifies him as pagan upon learning who he is: '"O fals Saresyn...Thou shalte have sorowe astyte"' (1455-6). Ferumbras must ask a second time to be baptized; the narrative repetition would seem designed to raise concerns regarding the sincerity of his conversion.

Like Otuel, Ferumbras must demonstrate his religious and political allegiance by assisting the French forces. Ferumbras not only saves Charlemagne's life but he also protects the French throne from the treacherous Ganelon, who traps Charlemagne between two castle walls and abandons him in the midst of his Saracen enemies. Ganelon deceives the Frankish knights and convinces them to return with him to France, where he "wele be crownede kinge" (2976). Ferumbras recognizes Ganelon's treason and saves the King, effectively thwarting the plot to depose Charlemagne. In addition to fighting beside, and on behalf of,

Christians, Ferumbras also helps to defeat his father, Laban, and even proposes religious conversion to the conquered Sultan.

The Sowdone not only evokes the cultural anxieties that attend the process of conversion, but also, like the Otuel romances, forecloses the apostate's complete acculturation into the Christian community. The narrator tries to reassure the reader of

Ferumbras' continued faithfulness to Christianity following his conversion:

He [Ferumbras] was cristened in that welle.

Floreyne the King alle him calle;

He forsoke the foule feende of helle

And his fals goddis alle.

Nought for than Ferumbras

All his life cleped was he,

And aftirwarde in somme place,

Floreyne of Rome cite.

God for him many myracles shewed,

So holy a man he bycame.

That witnessith both lerned and lewde:

That fame of him so ranne. (1479-90)

The account of Ferumbras' spiritual devotion as a holy man and witness to divine miracles ostensibly suggests the extent of the knight's acculturation into the Christian community.

However, Ferumbras' vocation as a holy man again evokes the cultural distrust of converts.

As Stephen Kruger observes, converts occupied an uncomfortable position in relation to both their old and new religions (172). Unable to fully assimilate into the "rank and file of the European laity," as Jeremy Cohen suggests, the convert sought refuge "in the ranks of the Christian clergy" (qtd. in Kruger 172). The poem, in making Ferumbras a holy man and denying him the marriage bestowed upon Otuel, closes off sexual possibilities and prevents him from being integrated into Christian sexual and familial structures. Such closing off, according to Kruger, is "one way to maintain the queerness of even the converted Saracen or

Jewish body" (173). In other words, the Sow done suggests that the male Saracen body retains vestiges of its otherness following conversion, and "remains somehow different, still of an other people, gens, races than the Christian society to which he is assimilated" (Kruger

173).

Moreover, the text negates Ferumbras' integration into the Christian community by declaring that the convert's new name is not used: "Nought for than Ferumbras / All his life cleped was he." Interestingly, as Houlik-Ritchey observes, "this moment is phrased not in terms of self-identity but of the way others respond to and view him" (500). Given the importance ascribed to changing names following baptism in historical and fictional accounts of conversion, it is telling that Ferumbras is still referred to by his Saracen name rather than his Christian one. There is, it seems, reluctance in the Sowdone to affirm

Ferumbras' new Christian identity by completely disassociating the convert from his former religious identity.

Fantasies of Easy Conversion?

Benjamin Kedar writes that "conversion of the Muslim enemy was an important component of the fantasy world of the western knight" during the era of crusade

("Multidirectional" 198). Such fantasies seemed to proliferate, or were especially comforting, at times when the crusades were not going well for Western Christians

("Multidirectional" 198). Indeed, the belief that allies might be found among enemy ranks must have been appealing. Siobhain Bly Calkin, in response to Kedar's comments, suggests the conversion of the Saracen knight projects fantasy in which "changing allegiances is a straightforward, clean-cut and easy process" {Saracens 48). But while Saracens were thought to be open to conversion, the process of acculturation into the Christian community is far from "clean-cut." In the Otuel and Ferumbras romances, the chivalrous Saracen is presented as a candidate for conversion because he participates in the same knightly economy as Charlemagne's knights. The similarity between the Saracen knight and his

Christian counterparts, while a necessary condition for conversion, however, occasions a crisis of differentiation. The boundary that separates Christian from Saracen is rendered unstable and indistinct. The religious conversion of the Saracen knight fails in these romances to resolve this crisis by reaffirming difference. The Saracen convert, despite his willingness to enter into the Christian community, evokes cultural anxieties regarding the convert's sincerity of conversion and the completeness of his/her assimilation.

The dream of Muslim conversion was not only attended by anxieties regarding the definitiveness of the convert's new identity but also fears that the process of conversion might happen in the other direction, that Christians might succumb to the lure of the East.

Beues ofHamtoun and Richard Coer de Lyon examine the vulnerability of the Christian knight to cultural contamination while abroad. Physically and discursively proximate to the

Saracen, both Bevis and Richard manifest a hybrid English-eastern identity which threatens to dissolve the boundary between Christian and Saracen. Depictions of the Saracenized

Christian in Beues ofHamtoun and Richard Coer de Lyon are provocative insofar as they appear in romances typically described as nationalist and as working to construct/define

Englishness. 141

"Going Saracen": Problematic Avatars of Englishness

in Beues ofHamtoun and Richard Coer de Lyon

Romances, according to Diane Speed, are particularly well-suited to do the cultural work of nation-building: "It is immediately clear, merely from the overt subject matter, that a number of... romances belong in the discourse of the nation, that they have as a primary function a construction of England that articulates the partially conceptualized impulses observable in the new English-language writing of the preceding century" ("Construction" 145). Romance is, to borrow Geraldine Heng's phrase, "the genre of the nation" {Empire 6). English romances, grouped together according to the national "matter" to which they pertain, helped to "create myths of origins for an emergent nation" (Speed, "Construction" 145). The heroes of English romance - Horn,

Havelok, Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, and Richard the Lionheart - "overtly contribute to the actual construction of England" (Speed, "Construction" 145); in other words, the hero of romance is identified with the nation he represents so that "his origins and destiny come to stand for that of the people as a whole" (Akbari, "Hunger" 198).

Thorlac Turville-Petre, in England the Nation, also identifies "the preoccupation with 'being English,' what that means and how it is to be expressed," as the impetus behind late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century vernacular writings. The Auchinleck manuscript, which contains the oldest extant Middle English version of Beues and the romance of King Richard, serves as "a handbook of the nation" (112). Romances, along with the other English language texts assembled in Auchinleck, actively construct an idea 142

of Englishness. Of the seventeen romances contained in Auckinleck, ten are explicitly concerned with the exploits of exemplary English heroes such as King Arthur, Tristrem,

Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick and his son Reinbrun, and Richard the Lionheart.

Auchinleck's invocation of English identity extends beyond its inclusion of English romance heroes and passing references to English locales. Auchinleck imagines a community of English-speaking readers; the use of the English language, Turville-Petre asserts, contributes to an incipient nationalism: "The use of English was a precondition of the process of deepening and consolidating the sense of national identity by harnessing the emotive energy of the association between language and nationalism" (10).

Beues ofHamtoun and Richard Coer de Lyon (see Appendix A for manuscripts and plots) are often construed as nationalist romances, deeply concerned with the construction of Englishness. Kofi Campbell identifies a nation-building impulse in Beues ofHamtoun that "works to create an imagined community of English readers for the text"

("Nation-Building" 206). The romance "narrates the nation," educating its audience as to what does and does not comprise Englishness (Campbell, "Nation-Building" 232). Beues' nationalism is informed by its colonialist desire for the territorial expansion of the realm and the religious conversion of Saracens to Christianity. English identity is constructed against the Saracens, who are depicted as being both similar and different from their

Christian counterparts: "the text simultaneously argues that they [Saracens] must be contained, and that they are similar enough to the members of its audience that that containment can actually be accomplished. The differences of England's others ...are not 143

portrayed as natural or inevitable cultural differences, but as examples of the very

possibilities of colonialism and conversion" (Campbell, "Nation-Building" 230). Siobhain

Bly Calkin also focuses on the representation of Saracens in Beues ofHamtoun and

examines how they participate in the definition and affirmation of Englishness while

pointing to the challenges of imagining and articulating a unified English identity. Calkin

notes the lack of differentiation between the Christian Bevis and the Saracens with whom

he lives. This lack of differentiation, along with the possibility of Bevis' acculturation to

the Saracen world, prompts the romance to anxiously engage in a process of hyper-

correction, thereby recuperating Bevis as the epitome of English Christian knighthood.

The construction of Englishness and nation in Richard Coer de Lyon has been

discussed by Alan Ambrisco in his article "Cannibalism and Cultural Encounters in

Richard Coer de Lion," Geraldine Heng in Empire of Magic, Heather Blurton in

Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature, and Suzanne Conklin Akbari in her

article "The Hunger for National Identity in Richard Coer de Lion." Richard Coer de

Lyon, according to Ambrisco, embraces cannibalism in an effort to promote English

identity and to distinguish the English from the Saracens as well as their crusading

counterparts. This discursive strategy, however, embroils the romance in "ideological

contradictions" and "thus [the romance] hovers on the brink of a dangerous hybridity in

which barbarism and cannibalism become key elements in the textual construction of an

English national character" (Ambrisco 522). 144

Both Geraldine Heng and Heather Blurton interpret the cannibalism episodes in

Richard Coer de Lyon as unproblematic articulations of nationalist sentiment and as

metaphoric consolidations of colonial ambition. In Empire of Magic, Heng explores

romance as a "literary medium that solicits or invents the cultural means by which the

medieval nation might be productively conceptualized, and projected, for a diverse

society of peoples otherwise ranged along numerous internal divides" {Empire 6). Her

analysis of Richard Coer de Lyon examines the cultural work of cannibalistic jokes;

Richard's joke and the visualization of black flesh that surrounds it are directed toward

the English nation. Crusader cannibalism - the cultural trauma that is, for Heng,

constitutive of romance - is metamorphosed into "a triumphant system of symbolism in

the romance of England" (Empire 68). In other words, cannibalism becomes a means of

forming communal identity, and a way of figuring conquest and colonization. The rise of

the medieval nation coincides with the emergence of "a racializing discourse of

biological and spiritual difference, posited on religion, color, and physiognomy" (Heng,

Empire 70). Racial categories of difference, then, according to Heng, are instrumental in

the formation of the medieval nation. Similarly, Blurton argues that Richard Coer de

Lyon appropriates the discourse of cannibalism in service of a nationalist agenda. By juxtaposing the representation of the Saracen as a physically monstrous cannibal in the

chansons de geste with Richard Coer de Lyon, Blurton argues the romance constructs

English identity by "[transforming] an imagined religious characteristic of Islam into an

imaginary national character of the English" (11). Richard Coer de Lyon "articulates a

discourse of cannibalism as a privileged mode for the conceptualization of English 145 cultural, and ultimately national, identity in the face of the constant trauma of invasion"

(Blurtonll).

In "The Hunger for National Identity in Richard Coer de Lion," Suzanne Conklin

Akbari focuses on the poem's eucharistic symbolism as the framework out of which the discourse of nation emerges. Richard's cannibalism, for Akbari, constitutes a sacrificial act which serves to unite the English community. By consuming Saracen flesh, Richard

"assimilate[s] to himself Saracen identity... [and gives] rise to a reformulated English identity in which all his followers can partake" ("Hunger" 199). In conjunction with

Richard Coer de Lyon, Akbari examines the use of eucharistic symbolism in the description of Henry IV's relationship to his subjects in the parliament rolls, produced following the replacement of Richard II by Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV) during a period of intense consolidation of Lancastrian authority. She argues, "in the years around

1400 it had become possible to conceive of the king in terms of the priest's role in the sacrifice of the mass, and that this new perspective is apparently both in the parliament rolls of 2 Henry IV and in Richard Coer de Lion" (216). Just as the priest consumes the

Host on behalf of the spiritual community, "so Richard as king consumes the flesh on behalf of the national community" ("Hunger" 214).

While Beues ofHamtoun and Richard Coer de Lyon have been identified as romances that engage with a nascent sense of Englishness, less attention has been paid to

Bevis and Richard the Lionheart as "problematic avatar[s] of Englishness" ("National"

116). Bevis, the son of an English earl, is sold into slavery and brought up in the Saracen 146 kingdom of Armenia. He lives amongst Saracens and eventually marries the Saracen princess Josiane, choosing to remain with her in the East and to abandon England.

Richard is king of England and leader of the English crusading forces but he, like Bevis, has connections with the Saracen East. Richard, according to the romance's description of the king's mythological origins, is the son of an eastern princess named Cassodorien.

His lineage is implicitly offered as an explanation for his cannibalism, which, taken together, renders the king genealogically and discursively proximate to the Saracen.

Both Bevis and Richard are unsettling representatives of England and Englishness because they occupy a middle space between the Christian same and the Saracen other.

Rather than reading Bevis and Richard as unproblematic exemplars of Englishness, these characters are more productively understood as figures of instability who expose classificatory boundaries as fragile, and who point to the instability characteristic of collective identity. Beues ofHamtoun and Richard Coer de Lyon, then, offer a more complex narrative of Englishness, pointing to the difficulties in imagining the English nation as a "tidy and well-defined construction" (Turville-Petre, England 7). Beues of

Hamtoun and Richard Coer de Lyon manifest the "inconsistencies and contradictions" which the imaginative construction of the nation tries to conceal {England 14). The hybrid nature of Bevis and Richard ultimately disrupt the coherence of the medieval fantasy of

English national identity as homogenous. 147

Going Saracen: The Problem of Maintaining Cultural Integrity

For the Christian crusader "operating on the borders of Christendom, it was vitally important for him to recognize and stick to the rules, to identity fully with 'us' and to know and recognize 'them'" (Lambert 3). In order to facilitate distinguishing between

'us' and 'them,' cross-cultural contact was regulated in an attempt to maintain the strict segregation of religious and ethnic communities (Lambert 4-5).l Christian crusaders and settlers were thought to be particularly susceptible to cultural contamination as a result of their prolonged presence in the Holy Land (Calkin, Saracens 55; Rouse "National" 118).2

As Robert Rouse notes, "[contemporary commentators expressed concerns about the dangers of sexual intermingling, the taking-on of Eastern customs, and the degeneration of Christian morais" ("National" 118).

Christian crusaders, for example, were enjoined to restrict sexual activity rather than jeopardize military victory by incurring divine disfavour. In the Gestafrancorum, a priest at Antioch experiences a vision in which Christ admits that He is responsible for the Christian victories. Yet, Christ warns that the Christians' good fortune in battle will wane if they continue to commit the sin of fornication: "A great stench has risen up to heaven because you have carried your corrupt desire on Christian as well as depraved

1 For a extended discussion of legal restriction designed to segregate disparate ethnic groups, see chapter three, 56-60. See also Kruger, "Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories," 158-179.

2 See also Alan V. Murray, "Ethnic Identity in the Crusader States: The Frankish Race and the Settlement of Outremer," in Forde, Johnson and Murray, 59-74. 148 pagan women" (58). Sex with conquered Muslim women was especially dangerous, "a double sin of lust and betrayal of church and race" (Lambert 3). As Lambert observes, medieval writers often portrayed interracial sex as deeply threatening to the social order, citing an example from Albert of Aix's LiberChristianae{4). Albert tells of a nun who is captured and ransomed. Infatuated with her Turkish abductor, the nun runs off with him again. The lure of the Orient, exemplified by the sexual desirability of the Turkish captor in Albert's narrative, is "strong enough to subvert [a] bride of Christ and, by implication, to threaten all others" (Lambert 4).

Medieval anxieties regarding cultural contamination were often associated with the failure of the Crusades themselves. The fall of Jerusalem in 1187 was considered by the author of the Itinerarium peregrinorum to be a direct consequence of "the debasement and contamination of the Western Christian culture of the Crusader states"

(Rouse, "National" 118):

Then the Lord's hand was aroused against His people - if we can properly call

them "His," as their immoral behaviour, disgraceful lifestyle, and foul vices had

made them strangers to Him. For shameful practices had broken out in the East,

so that everywhere everyone threw off the veil of decency and openly turned

aside to filthy things. (Chronicle of the Third Crusade 23)

Such admonitions articulate "the fear that western Christians ... might lose their sense of proper mores and become too similar to their Muslim opponents" (Calkin, Saracens 54).

Roger of Wendover recounts how crusaders of the Holy Roman Empire, including the 149

Emperor himself, were accused of eating and drinking with Saracens, and preferring

Saracens and their customs to Christians (Calkin, Saracen 55). Similarly, Jean de

Joinville, in his Life of Saint Louis, laments the blurring or crossing of racial boundaries,

anxiously recounting the influence of Eastern culture on his fellow Christians: "In our

own country, since I returned from the land overseas, I have come across certain disloyal

Christians who follow the Bedouin faith in holding that no man can die except on the

appointed day. This belief is in effect a denial of our religion.. ."(228). Christians are,

for Joinville, at risk of cultural and theological infection. Joinville views the "potential

for cultural contamination not only as a danger to those Christians in the East, but also as a feared contagion that may spread to the body of Christendom itself (Rouse, "National"

119).

To encounter the eastern other is to enter the contact zone (Uebel, Ecstatic 41;

Rouse, "National" 117); physical proximity to the other in this space of cultural encounter is potentially hazardous for the western Christian, who risks cultural contamination. Such concerns animate Beues ofHamtoun and Richard Coer de Lyon and their portrayal of Christian heroes abroad in the Near East. Both poems depict the Near

East - whether the Saracen kingdom of Armenia or the contested territories of the Holy

Land -as a place of cultural encounter where the self-definition of the English Christian hero is compromised, where the boundaries that mark the limits of collective identity become blurred. The contact zone is a place of "intrinsic hybridity" (Uebel, Ecstatic• 41).

Interaction in the contact zone is "charged with ambivalence - oscillation or hesitation 150 between extremes of attraction and repulsion, of mastery and anxiety" (Uebel, Ecstatic

41).

A 'kni3t of Cristen lawe'?: Cultural Hybridity in Beues ofHamtoun

In Beues ofHamtoun, the Near East is a place of geographical and cultural otherness in which the English Christian knight becomes estranged from the identity to which he was born. Disinherited and deprived of his baronial rights, Bevis is exiled from

England, sold into slavery and forced to live amongst Saracens in the "painim londejs]"

(496). Bevis' geographical distance from England results in his cultural distance from

Christianity as well. While riding with King Ermin's men on Christmas Day, Bevis is questioned about the significance of the day by a Saracen knight:

A Sarasin be-gan to say

And askede him what het bat day.

Beues seide: "For sob y-wis,

I not neuer what dai it is,

For i nas boute seue winter old,

Fro Cristendome ich was i-sold;

>ar fore I ne can telle noujt be

What dai bat hit mijte be." (591-98) 151

Bevis' ignorance regarding the religious significance of Christmas is attributed to his long absence from England and his lack of immersion in Christian culture. The Saracen laughs at Bevis and says,

Ms dai...i knowe wel inou-j;

I>is is be ferste dai of 30UI,

I>e god was boren wib outen doul;

For bi men maken ber mor blisse

I>an men do her in hebenesse.

Anoure be god, so I schel myn,

Bobe Mahoun and Apolyn! (600-06)

The Saracen knight educates the young Bevis as to the significance of Christmas in light of Christian doctrine and practice, encouraging him to follow his Christian traditions and honour his God as the Saracens honour their own. That a Saracen knows more about being Christian than the Christian Bevis only draws into relief the hero's cultural dispossession, his lack of access to his cultural heritage. Moreover, the Saracen familiarity with Christian belief evokes anxiety regarding the separateness of Christian and Saracen identities expressed elsewhere in the poem (Rouse, "National" 120).

Bevis responds to the Saracen's taunts by insisting that he does, in fact, know something about Christmas and about being Christian:

Of Cristendom 3k ichaue a-braid, 152

Ichaue seie on J>is dai rijt

Armed mani a gentil kni3t,

Torneande ri3t in be feld

Wib helmes brijt and mani scheld;

And were ich alse stij> in plas,

Ase euer Gii, me fader was,

Ich wolde for me lordes loue,

I>at sit W3 in heuene aboue,

Fijte wib 30W euerichon,

Er ban ich wolde hennes gon! (608-18)

Bevis remembers the tournaments he witnessed as a child, briefly alluding to his father

Guy and his aristocratic English origins; he associates Christmas, however, not with religious observance but rather martial spectacle and knightly exploits.

This childhood memory emboldens Bevis and he boasts that he could defeat all fifty of Ermin's knights, if he wanted to. Offended by Bevis' audacity, the Saracen knight endeavours to teach "be 3onge cristene hounde" a lesson: "'Lo, brebern, hire 3e noujt bis sawes, / How be 3onge cristene hounde, / A saib, a wolde vs fellen te grounde: / Wile we aboute him gon / And fonde bat treitour slon?" (620-24). Bevis then engages the Saracen knights in battle and kills all fifty of them. The Saracen accusation of treachery that precedes the battle reveals the extent of Bevis' immersion in Saracen culture. The 153

Saracen knight characterizes Bevis as a "treitour," explicitly accusing him of betraying his kinship even though he is not nominally Saracen.

Bevis' prolonged habitation in Armenia fosters his interactions with Saracens and his immersion in Saracen culture. When he is exiled from England, Bevis finds solace in the Saracen court of King Ermin and becomes an attendant in the king's household:

I>e king him louede wel be more,

For him ne stod of noman sore,

& seide: "Beues, while bow ert swain

I>ow schelt be me chaumberlain,

And bow schelt, whan bow ert dobbed kni3t,

Me baner bere into eueri fi3t!"

Beues answerde al wib skil:

"What 3e me hoten don ich wil!"

Beues was ber 3er and ober,

I>e king him louede also is brober... (569-78)

Bevis is trained as a knight by Saracens and eventually serves a Saracen ruler in various inter-Saracen conflicts. Although Bevis refuses religious conversion to Islam, he willfully 154

pledges his fealty to Ermin. Ermin loves Bevis "as a brother," characterizing their affinity in chivalric and familial terms.3

Bevis' kinship with Saracens is further exemplified later when he travels back to

Armenia to find Josiane following his imprisonment in Damascus:

He bou3te, bat he wolde an hie

In to be londe of Ermonie,

To Ermonie, bat was is bane,

To his lemman Iosiane.

And also a wente beder ri-jt

A mette wib a gentil kni3t,

I>at in be londe of Ermonie

Hadde bore him gode companie;

I>ai kiste hem anon wib bat

And aber askede of oberes stat. (1981-90)

The unnamed knight reveals that Josian has married Yvor and directs the Christian knight to Mombraunt, the location of which is unknown to Bevis despite being one of the most splendid cities in "al be londe of Sarsine" (2046). This unnamed knight is only identified as Saracen when his swears by one of the conventional Saracen gods: "Sere... be

Teruagaunt / I>ow mi3t mnrjt bus wende forb, / I>ow most terne al a3en norb'" (2038-40).

3 Twice Bevis is described as a brother to King Ermin, once by the king himself and later by Bevis when he meets Terri(578; 1332). 155

While this Saracen knight serves the requirements of the plot - he directs the hero to

Mombraunt - there is a genuine sense of familiarity in the poet's description of the

knights's encounter, the way which each knight greets the other and inquires about the other's situation.

Returning to the Christmas Day episode, the accusation of treason reveals the extent of Bevis' immersion in Saracen culture because he is charged with violating the bonds of kinship he forged while living amongst Saracens. Implicit in the Christmas Day

episode are concerns about the cultural integrity of the transposed Christian knight;

Bevis' proximity to Saracens - his immersion in Saracen culture, his affinity with

Saracens - threatens his English Christian identity. Jeffrey Cohen observes that "when pagan and Christian subjectivities seem close enough to touch, violence erupts to redraw the faltering self/other boundary" ("On Saracen Enjoyment" 205). The romance seeks to remedy Bevis' "lack of Christian self-identity through a bloody martial baptism. Denied the community of fellow-Christians... Bevis inscribes the inviolability of his Christian

identity upon the bodies of Saracens" (Rouse, "National" 120). The battle between Bevis and King Ermin's knights is intended to violently re-inscribe the boundary that separates the English Christian Bevis from the Saracen people of Armenia.

There are other moments in Beues ofHamtoun in which the boundary between self and other threatens to dissolve, and which expose the fragilitycharacteristi c of collective identity. After being imprisoned in the Saracen King Brademond's dungeon for seven years, an opportunity arises for Bevis to escape. When Bevis prays to Christ and 156

Mary to grant him either death or escape, one of the jailers becomes enraged and enters

Bevis' cell. Bevis promptly kills the jailer but remains trapped within the twenty-foot deep dungeon. In order to escape from the dungeon, Bevis poses as the deceased jailer and asks the remaining jailer for aid: "For be loue of sein Mahoun, / Be be rop glid bliue adoun /And help, pat pis bef wer ded" (1625-27). Bevis verbally impersonates the deceased Saracen jailer and invokes the Saracen deity in order to imply his membership in the Saracen community. That the jailer mistakes the imprisoned knight for his comrade and enters the cell suggests Bevis' appropriation and performance of Saracenness (albeit temporary) is successful. Bly Calkin figures this act of "passing" as a moment "which provokefs] consideration about the relative permanence and veracity of an asserted identity" (Saracens 79). The episode also raises the unsettling possibility that "Saracens are not the only objects of the conversionary impulse" and the cultural fear of Christian conversion to Islam (Rouse, "National" 121).

Kofi Campbell acknowledges the similarities between Christians and Saracens in

Beues, but he interprets this as a "pre-emptive strategy of containing difference" rather than a failure to maintain a strict delineation of cultures ("Nation-Building" 229). This sameness, according to Campbell, speaks the possibilities of territorial expansion and religious conversion, and exemplifies "the colonialist desire of the text" ("Nation-

Building" 229). But Campbell's consideration of Beues, as Rouse suggests, "too readily sutures the inherent fractures within the rhetoric of identity" insofar as he ignores the concomitant fears of cultural contamination and miscegenation associated with the 157 colonial impulse he identifies (Rouse, "National" 118). As Rouse observes, "we must remind ourselves that acculturation is rarely unidirectional, and even the dominant culture

in the process is itself changed through colonial and other forms of cultural interaction"

("National" 118).

Bevis' hybrid English-Eastern identity prompts a series of narrative reminders of the hero's English origins and his religious affiliation. Bly Calkin argues that the romance engages in a process of hyper-correction in response to the cultural slippages, reading the

famous St. George episode, in which Bevis battles and slays a dragon, as a recuperative

strategy which seeks to minimize anxieties regarding the hero's Saracenness. In other words, the poem forecloses the possibility of acculturation to the Saracen world by re­ affirming Bevis' English Christian identity.

In order to liberate the townspeople of Cologne, Bevis battles a dragon for three days; it is only when Bevis appeals for divine aid by invoking the name of St. George that he prevails and defeats the dragon (2817). Beues thus constructs, according to Bly Calkin, the hero as a "second St. George" in order to "decisively dissociate [him] from his lapses into Saracen behaviours and affiliations" {Saracens 58). The allusion to the saint represents "an explicitly anti-Muslim corrective to Bevis' moments of assimilation into

Saracen culture" (Calkin, Saracen 58).4 For Calkin, the invocation of St. George, which

4 A vision of St. George is said to have inspired Christian crusaders at the Battle of Antioch in 1098 in the Gesta Francorum. Raymond d'Aguilers narrates the saint's appearance on the march to Jerusalem in the Historia Francorum. St. George, who became the patron saint of England by the mid-fourteenth century, also functioned as the patron for the Order of the Garter. The letters patent (c. 1351) refer to him as "the most invincible athlete of Christ, whose name and protection the English race invoke as 158 is unique to the Aucbinleck version of the poem, demonstrates "a keen editorial interest in depicting Bevis as the epitome of English Christian knighthood" and "ensures that the dangerous potential of Bevis' acculturation to the Saracen world is decisively contained and rejected" (Saracens 58-9). But while Beues ofHamtoun anxiously attempts to recuperate its hero by constructing him as an exemplary English Christian knight, the conclusion of the romance - the street fight in London and the return to Armenia - demonstrates the narrative's inability to decisively contain and resolve the effaeement of difference that Bevis' immersion in Saracen culture occasions.

Bevis returns to England in order to restore confiscated lands to Saber's son.

Upon Bevis' arrival in London, he is accused of treason by one of his English countrymen. The king's steward cries out, 'Ajilt be, treitour, bow foule pef. / I>ow hauest be kinges sone islawe/ I>ow schelt ben hanged & todrawe!" (4374-76). The steward's accusation alludes to an earlier episode in which King Edgar's son dies when Bevis' horse, Arondel, kicks the young prince. The steward's charge of treason at first seems groundless because Bevis is not directly responsible for the death of the prince nor does the king, upon hearing the news of his son's tragic demise, condemn Bevis to death. The questions remains: what constitutes Bevis' treason?

Bevis is perhaps accused of treason because he is perceived to violate his allegiances to his sovereign and to his country, a perception fueled by anxieties regarding

that of their peculiar patron, especially in war" (qtd. in Calkin, Saracens 58). See also Jennifer Fellows, "St. George as Romance Hero." Reading Medieval Studies 19 (1993): 27-54. 159

the hero's cultural contamination occasioned not only by his prolonged habitation with

Saracens but also his marriage and sexual interaction with a Saracen convert. Bevis'

relationship with Josiane occasions the transgression of sexual and religious boundaries through their interfaith union. Although Josiane converts to Christianity and receives the

sacrament of baptism, vestiges of her Saracenness potentially remain as I have argued in chapter three. Bevis, through the physical bond of marriage, is thus physically vulnerable to cultural contamination that cannot be purged through baptism. The steward's charge of treason suggests the ways in which Bevis, despite textual efforts to recuperate him, retains a hybrid English-Eastern identity that precludes his permanent return to England and his re-integration into the English Christian community.

Structurally, the ending of Beues ofHamtoun breaks with the traditional romance narrative of exile and return. Typically, the hero will undertake the chivalric quest and leave the familiar and the security of self-definition that it provides. Upon the completion of his quest, the hero will return and, as Diane Speed points out, "[his] eventual restoration at the end of the process marks a return to order for himself and his society"

("Construction" 146). But the exile and return structure of medieval romance is complicated in Beues ofHamtoun. While the narrative begins with Bevis' disinheritance and culminates with the recovery of his baronial rights, Bevis does not remain in England but rather returns to Armenia after bequeathing his property and his earldom to Saber, his former tutor in England. Indeed, the ending of the romance suggests the impossibility of the hero's return to his country of origin found so often in romances. Bevis' inability to 160 return definitively to England, because of the charge of treason and the subsequent fight between members of the same cultural group, no doubt stems from his perceived un-

Englishness. His marriage and sexual union with a Saracen convert, his immersion in

Saracen culture, his willingness to fight on behalf of the Saracen King Ermin, and his

dispossession from England and Christianity suggest that Bevis' English identity and, consequently, his ability to reintegrate himself into the English Christian community have been compromised.

Devouring Boundaries: The Problem of Crusader Cannibalism in Richard Coerde

Lyon

Richard the Lionheart is, much like the hero of Beues ofHamtoun, a "problematic avatar of Englishness" (Rouse, "National" 116). In Richard Coerde Lyon, the celebrated crusader-king consumes, and develops an appetite for, Saracen flesh. Richard's barbarity as a crusader cannibal "enacts a decisive break with normal romance paradigms of alterity," reversing the conventional image of the cannibal as a non-Christian other

(Ambrisco 518). Although nominally Christian, Richard falls into the representational schema of the Saracen, becoming discursively similar to a figure traditionally associated with cannibalism and barbarity in the chansons de geste and in romances. While critics have interpreted Richard's cannibalistic incorporation as "ultra-English" (Akbari,

"Hunger" 200), a means of forming communal identity, such readings ignore the ways in which cannibals and cannibalism have been associated with monstrosity. Richard occupies the border space between Christian and Saracen. Inhabiting these in-between 161

spaces are monsters, "anomalous hybrids" who expose "classificatory boundaries as fragile by always threatening to dissolve the border between other and same" (Uebel,

"Unthinking" 266). Michael Uebel's conception of the monster as boundary phenomena offers a useful lens through which to interpret the incidents of crusader cannibalism in the

Middle English romance Richard Coer de Lyon. Richard is monstrous because he not only violates the taboo prohibiting the consumption of human flesh, but also occupies a middle space between the Christian same and the Saracen other. The cannibal and cannibalism are, then, more productively understood as symbols of permeability which point to the instability characteristic of collective identity, to the effacement of the boundaries between self and other.

The cannibal has traditionally appeared across medieval genres, from histories and travelogues to romances and chansons de geste, "as a shorthand for indicating the radical alterity that constitutes the imaginary boundaries of Western Christendom"

(Blurton 5). Christian identity was "imagined as being constructed and contained inside a border of marvelous races considered monstrous in their appearance and character

(Blurton 108). Christian thinkers later placed Saracens, considered ideologically monstrous as a result of their adherence to Islam, into this representational schema

(Blurton 108). The Borgia world map (c. 1430), for example, conflates the cynocephali, traditionally included among the monstrous races, and Saracens. The rubric reads,

"Ebinishebel is a Saracen Ethiopian king with his dog-headed people" (qtd. in Friedman

67). As Blurton observes, "the Borgia map makes visible the conceptual slide that 162 medieval writers performed in their imagination of Saracen identity, as they inserted new meaning into a previously existing structure" (108).

Romances and chansons de geste appropriate the representation of Eastern peoples as cannibals fromth e Marvels of the East tradition in their depiction of Saracens

(Blurton 108). The Saracen, imbricated in discourses of barbarism and alterity, is most

often accused of consuming human flesh in imaginative literatures (Blurton 105). In La

Prise d'Orange, a chanson fromth e Guillaume cycle, Guillaume is warned that, if

captured, the Saracens will eat him "sanz pain et sanz farine" [without bread and without

flour] (341). Saracen kings lead armies of cannibals who will eat "la gent cum dragun et leppart" [like dragons and leopards] in the twelfth-century Chanson de Guillaume

(1717); moreover, the poem features a giant who threatens to eat a Christian knight "cum une meure pome" [like a ripeapple ] (3170-77). Here, the Saracen giant not only engages in the practice of cannibalism but also threatens to figuratively devour and incorporate the West, represented by the Christian knight. A cannibal giant resides at Mont St.

Michel in the Alliterative Morte Arthure: "Here is a tyraunt beside that tormentes thy pople, / A grete giaunt of Gene, engendered of fendes; / He has freten [devoured] of folk mo than five hundredth, / And als fele fauntekins of free-born childer"(843-46). Arthur's confrontation with the giant in the Alliterative Morte Arthure is derived from source material in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, in which the cannibal giant is explicitly described as a Saracen (Heng, Empire 36-7). In imaginative literatures, the discourse of cannibalism becomes a mode for conceptualizing difference, in which 163 the Saracen cannibal is ethnically and ethically other, thereby entrenching the medieval understanding of Islam as monstrous.

In the Christian polemical tradition, Islam is depicted as a heresy - a debased version of the true religion - and a precursor to the Antichrist (Tolan xx, 88). Roger of

Howden's chronicle similarly depicts Islam this way in relation to Christianity and the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. According to Howden, in 1190, Richard I visits Joachim, the abbot of Curazzo, who interprets for the king one of the visions of Saint John the

Evangelist as related in the Book of Revelation: "There are seven kings; five are fallen, and one is, and other is not yet come" (2:178). The seven heads, Joachim explains, represent the seven persecutors of the Church: "The seven kings are Herod, Nero,

Constantius, Mahomet, Melsermut, Saladin, and Antichrist" (2:178). Of these seven kings, five have passed including Muhammad. The "one who is" refers to Saladin,"who is now oppressing the Church of God; and, together with it, the Sepulcher of our Lord, and the Holy City of Jerusalem and the land on which stood the feet of our Lord are kept in his possession;" Joachim also predicts Saladin's defeat at the hands of Richard I

(2:178). These persecutors anticipate the arrival of the Antichrist, the "one...not yet come" (2:179). Joachim's interpretation of the Book of Revelation associates Muslims, through his references to Muhammad and Saladin, to the "monstrous instruments of the

Antichrist" (Uebel, "Unthinking" 268).

Islam, in the medieval Christian imagination, functioned as "a sign of deviancy"

(Uebel, "Unthinking" 274). Inspired by hostile Christian biographies of the prophet, Alan 164 of Lille asserts, in Contra paganos, that Muhammad established a religious sect based on carnal pleasure:

The monstrous life, more monstrous sect, and most monstrous death of

Machomet is clearly found in his biography. Inspired by a malign spirit, he

invented an abominable sect consonant with carnal delights, not dissonant

with delights of carnal men. For this reason, many carnal men are seduced

by his sect, thrown into the abyss through various errors, miserably they

have perished and continue to perish. These men are in the common

vernacular called pagans or Saracens, (qtd. in Tolan 166)

Islam, for Alan, is an admixture of Jewish and Christian law; devotees of Islam are not

"led by reason (ratione ducti) but dragged by their own desire (propria voluntate).. .It is a carnal cult for a carnal people: its physical rites contrast with the spiritual sacraments of

Christianity" (Tolan 166). Islam is not only characterized by its preoccupation with the pleasures of the flesh, but also its willful error, "by its monstrous transgression of the norms and bounds of Christianity" (Uebel, "Unthinking 275).

Such monstrous transgressions are recounted by chroniclers who detail the profanation of the sacred places of the Holy Land. Saracen invaders, considered

"unclean" as a result of their perceived alienation from God, engage in the desecration of churches and other holy sites: [the race of Persians] has either overthrown the churches of God or turned

them over to the rituals of their own religion. They throw down the altars

after soiling them with their own filth, circumcise Christians, and pour the

resulting blood either on the altar or into the baptismal font. {Robert the

Monk 79-80)

Saracens also defile the spiritual sanctity of holy sites through their very physical presence in Baudry of Bourgueil's account of Urban IPs speech:

Of holy Jerusalem, brethren, we dare not speak, for we are exceedingly

afraid and ashamed to speak of it. This very city, in which, as you all

know, Christ Himself suffered for us, because our sins demanded it, has

been reduced to the pollution of paganism and, I say it to our disgrace,

withdrawn fromth e service of God. (Peters 30)

Infidel pollution provided the impetus for the renewed conquest and purging of the Holy

Land. Crusaders, as Geraldine Heng observes, were seen as pilgrims "enjoined to rescue from infidel pollution the sacred places of the Holy Land, not to visit the contagion of heathen pollution upon themselves" (Heng, "Cannibalism" 107). Yet, Christian crusaders did just this: they defiled themselves by cannibalizing Muslim cadavers.

On the brink of starvation, Christian crusaders apparently did the unthinkable and cannibalized the bodies of the dead. Three eyewitness accounts of the First Crusade, written independently by Latin participants, reluctantly confess horrific acts of cannibalism perpetrated by Christian crusaders in the Syrian desert. The Gesta

Francorum, written by an anonymous crusader in the army of Bohemond and completed shortly after the conquest of Jerusalem, says:

While we were there, some of our men could not satisfy their needs, either

because of the long stay or because they were so hungry, for there was no

plunder to be had outside the walls. So they ripped up the bodies of the

dead, because they used to find bezants hidden in their entrails, and others

cut the dead flesh into slices and cooked it to eat. (80)

Fulcher of Chartres places greater emphasis on the crusaders' own suffering and desperation than the Gesta author when describing crusader cannibalism:

Then they [the leaders Bohemond and Count Raymond} hastened to [the city of

Marra] and besieged it for twenty days. Here our men suffered from excessive

hunger. I shudder to say that many of our men, terribly tormented by the madness

of starvation, cut pieces of flesh from the buttocks of Saracens lying there dead.

These pieces they cooked and ate, savagely devouring the flesh while it was

insufficiently roasted. This way the besiegers were harmed more than the

besieged. (112-13)

Heather Blurton observes that later chroniclers of the First Crusade, such as Guibert of Nogent, and authors of crusade cycle epics (i.e., Chanson d'Antioche) strategically introduce an internal difference into the Christian army. Cannibalism becomes associated with the Tafurs, who form a separate community on the crusade and who are not integrated into the main Christian force. Both narratives subsume the potential disruption of the crusading ideology occasioned by the anomaly of Christian cannibalism. See Blurton 116-19. See also Heng, Empire 334-35, n. 3. The savagery associated with devouring human flesh is further underscored in the

Historia Francorum, in which Raymond d'Aguilers details the Saracen response to incidents of crusader cannibalism and to the inhumanity of the Christians:

Meanwhile, there was so great a famine in the army that the people ate

most greedily the many already fetid bodies of the Saracens which they

had cast into the swamps of the city two weeks and more ago. These

events frightened many people of our race, as well as strangers ... the

Saracens and the Turks said... 'And who can resist this people who are so

obstinate and inhuman, that for a year they could not be turned fromth e

siege of Antioch by famine, or sword, or any other dangers, and who now

feed on human flesh?5Thes e and other most inhuman practices the pagans

said exist among us. For God had given fear of us to all races, but we did

not know it. (214)

The practice of cannibalism, even in dire circumstances, is presented as universally abhorrent, a prohibition the violation of which incites fear amongst Christians and

Saracens. Incidents of cannibalism signal the degree to which Christian crusaders have lost sense of their proper mores and "function as signs of Christian monstrosity prior to their practical explanation or moral justification" (Uebel, "Unthinking" 282). Indeed, the horror of crusader cannibalism is encapsulated by the Muslim response;6 not only are the

6 For an account of the cannibalism at Ma'arra froma n Arab perspective, see Maalouf 37-55. Usamah Ibn Munqidh writes, "All those who were well-informed about the Franj saw them as beasts superior in courage and fighting ardour but in nothing else, just as animals are superior in strength and 168 crusaders inhuman but they are considered inhuman by a pagan — a figure associated with barbarism in imaginative literatures and in crusading rhetoric (Blurton 115).

Medieval Christian theorists rejected the possibility that Christians might commit cannibalism. Theophilus sees "cannibalism as the most heinous charge leveled against

Christians, and the most heinous act performed by pagans" (Bynum 31). Similarly,

Athenagoras asserts that Christians cannot be cannibals, arguing that "pagans are the real cannibals" (Bynum 33). Cannibalism was considered a "dehumanizing, monstrous condition [to medieval Christians] that canceled out the coordinates of recognizably human identity, and reduced the sentient to the subhuman" (Heng, "Cannibalism" 110).

Thus, "Medieval texts of social history and popular tradition," according to Geraldine

Heng, "cannot conceive of the European Christian as a cannibal: instead, they enact the supposition that the act of cannibalism decisively constructs a living creature as something other than Christian, European or human" ("Cannibalism 109). The concept of the cannibal precludes the Christian; yet, cannibalism, while traditionally characteristic of the Saracen in imaginative literatures, becomes the "unsought attribute of the Christian crusading knight" (Blurton 114) in accounts of the First Crusade and in the Middle

English romance Richard Coer dehyon.

aggression." This assessment, according to Maalouf, "reflects the impression made fromth e Franj upon their arrival in Syria: they aroused a mixture of fear and contempt, quite understandable on the part of an Arab nation which, while far superior in culture, had lost all combative spirit. The Turks would never forget the cannibalism of the Occidentals. Throughout their epic literature, the Franj are invariably described as anthropophagi." See Maalouf 39. 169

The instances of crusader cannibalism are incongruent with the image of the crusaders as milites Christi and with the crusading ideology in the chronicles. Chroniclers writing after the liberation of Jerusalem embraced the idea of the Crusades found in Pope

Urban's speech of 1095 and developed a refined, more elaborate crusading ideology in which the Crusades were not only sanctioned by the pope but by God himself, and in which knights were perceived to be in the service of Christ (Riley-Smith 30). Crusaders were not only milites Christi but they were also devout pilgrims engaging in a penitential act, and accruing spiritual indulgences as a result of carrying out God's divine will and defeating the enemies of Christendom (Riley-Smith 23-4). The barbarity of Christian cannibalism is more notable because the image stands in stark contrast to the idealized portrait of the crusader knight as a virtuous agent of divine will and disrupts the crusading ideology that underpins the chronicles. This incongruent image of the crusader cannibal also appears in Richard Coer de Lyon, reversing the traditional representation of the cannibal as a non-Christian figure of radical alterity.

Medieval Christian authors traditionally imagined the Saracen as ideologically, and at times physically, monstrous: in imaginative literatures, the Saracen giant engages in the ostensibly non-Christian practice of cannibalism; in polemical writings, the

Saracen devotes himself to a perceived heretical sect. Yet, Richard Coer de Lyon presents its readers with a different image of monstrosity through its ambivalent portrayal of

Richard the Lionheart. The crusader king can neither be comfortably categorized as

Christian because of his barbarity, nor as Saracen because of his role as heroic Christian 170

crusader. Richard is monstrous precisely because he is a figure of instability who demonstrates the fragility of classificatory boundaries through his cannibalistic incorporation.

Richard Coer de Lyon recounts two incident of cannibalism perpetrated by the crusader-king, Richard I. While Christian forces are besieging the city of Acre, Richard falls ill with fever.7 In addition to the arduous journey undertaken to reach the Holy Land, the poet blames the "strong eyr" of the country, its "vnkynde cold and hete," and the lack of suitable food in the Near East for the king's weakened constitution (3044-48).

Displaced westerners were considered to be vulnerable to the dangers of the East. These dangers were not limited to cross-cultural contact in the forms of sexual temptation and religious heresy; rather, the eastern climate itself was considered hostile, capable of affecting those exposed to it. As mentioned elsewhere, physical appearance as well as moral disposition were firmly rooted in the medieval concept of place; as Suzanne

Conklin Akbari observes, "the physical qualities of a nation are altered by the climate its members inhabit" ("Due East" 25). Both Isidore of Seville and Bartholomeus Anglicus

Richard's illness is historically documented. Ambroise writes in his Estoire de la guerre sainte, "However, King Richard was ill, his mouth and lips pale, because of an illness - may God curse it - called arnaldia" (4601-2). According to Marianne Ailes, "various theories have been put forward about it, including Vincent's disease (trench-mouth) and scurvy, although given that Richard had only just arrived fromCyprus , where he had presumably eaten well, neither seems likely.. .It may, however, have been a recurrence of an illness fromwhic h he had suffered in the past which, according to William of Newburgh...manifested itself in pallor and swellings" (95, n. 305). Richard of Devizes also notes in his chronicle the occurrence of Richard's illness: "The king too to his bed, very ill indeed. His fever was continuous, and the physicians whispered of an acute semi-tertian fever. They were the first to give way to despair, and from the king's dwelling dire despair was diffused throughout the camp" (74). No episodes of cannibalism are historically associated with Richard's crusade, the Third. 171 insist on the geographical and climatic effects on the character and physical appearance, arguing that "climate is the only factor that determines the characteristics of a nation"

(Akbari "Due East" 25). The most significant climatic feature is the sun; its intensity affects the distribution of the humours, the bodily fluids which governed disposition and character (Cohen, Hybridity 33). The climate precipitates bodily adaptation, affecting over time its outward appearance and immediately influencing the body's (internal) humoral composition. It is the humoral effects of the climate upon both character and behaviour that "underpins the cultural anxiety over the dangers to Western Christians of prolonged habitation of the Saracens lands of the East" (Rouse, "National" 119). The eastern climate is thus hostile and potentially threatening, both physically and ethically, to the Christian. Implicit in the poem is the causal relationship between Richard's cannibalism and his prolonged presence in the Near East, that is, his geographical and cultural removal from England.

The king, on his sickbed, craves pork; however, when no pork can be found, an old knight convinces Richard's steward to prepare and serve Saracen flesh. Following the knight's detailed instructions, the steward flays the skin of a young, fat Saracen and flavours the flesh with saffron and other spices (3088-3102). This treatment of the Saracen is notably spiteful and dehumanizing: his flesh becomes a substitute for pork, which is considered unclean in Islam.

When the meal is presented to Richard, the king greedily devours his food:

Beffore Kyng Rychard karf a knyjte, 172

He eete ffastere ban he karue my3te.

I»e kyng eet be fflesch, and gnew be bones,

And drank wel afftyr, for be nones:

And whewne he hadde eaten jnowj,

Hys ffolk hem towrnyd away and lowj. (3109-14)

This description of Richard's consumption of Saracen flesh paradoxically both highlights

the heartiness of his male, English appetite and depicts a monstrous violation of the taboo

against consuming human flesh. The way in which Richard violently attacks his meal

draws attention to his barbarism, to the animal-like savagery with which he eats and

gnaws on the bones.

The consumption of Saracen flesh has the desired effect; the king quickly

recovers and wins a substantial battle against the Saracens. Following his victory, he once

again feels faint and asks the steward to bring him the head of the "pig" he recently ate.

At first, the steward refuses but, threatened with the loss of his own head, he acquiesces

and brings Richard the remnants of the partially eaten Saracen. The description of the

Saracen head, with its emphasis on racial alterity, while grotesque, is reminiscent of the

conventional Saracen portraits found in the chansons de geste and romance: " Hys swarte

vys... be kyng seep,/ Hys blacke berd, and hys whyte teeb,/ Hou hys lyppys grennyd wyde" (3211-13). The king's response of laughter and amusement to his unintentional cannibalism fails to register moral outrage or guilt: 173

"Wat deuyl is bis?" be kyng cryde,

And gan to lai^e as he were wood.

"What, is Sarezynys flesch bus good?

And neuere erst j nou3t wyste?

By Goddys deb and hys vpryste,

Schole we neuere dye for defawte,

Why! we may in any assawte

Slee Sarezynyz, be flesch mowe take,

Seben, and roste hem, and doo hem bake,

Gnawen here fflesch to be bones.

Now j haue it prouyd ones,

Ffor hungry ar j be woo,

J and my ffolk schole eete moo!" (3214-3226)

Richard's oath "by God's death and his resurrection" ironically invokes divine sanction for engaging in an abhorrent practice, that is, habitual and strategic cannibalism. The eagerness with which Richard considers the military benefits of cannibalism and his unquenchable appetite for Saracen flesh reverses the traditional paradigm of alterity found in romances, drawing attention to the barbarity of a Christian, rather than a

Saracen, king. 174

In the second incident of cannibalism, Richard invites Saladin's ambassadors to dinner. When the guests remark that the table is bare, the king has the meal brought in, which consists of the severed heads of imprisoned Saracen princes. Here, Richard re- stages the earlier image of the cannibalized Saracen: the captive princes have been decapitated, their heads boiled, and their mouths stretched into a hideous grin. Each head is then labeled with the name of the hostage and finally set before their kinsmen (3585-

3604). The Saracen guests are horrified as the king carves the human head with a "scharp knyff" and eats "wip herte good" (3480-81). Richard's eating habits are reminiscent of the unusual eating habits of Saracens in romance. Pagans in the Sowdone ofBabylone, for example, "drinke Wilde beestes bloode, / Of tigre, antilope and of Carnarvon" in order to

"egre her mode" (1007-9).

The ambassadors, horrified by what they have witnessed, exclaim, "bis is be deuelys brober, / bat sles oure men and bus hem eetes" (3484-85). Noticing his guests's reticence to eat their meals, Richard tells them not to be afraid and explains that the consumption of Saracen flesh is merely an English custom: '"In my court pis is be seruyse / Be seruyd fferst, j and myn hynys / Wip hedes hote off Sarezynys" (3630-33).

As in the previous episode, Richard underscores the strategic military benefits of the

English custom of cannibalism. The king informs the messengers that attempts made by

Saladin to disrupt Christian supply lines will fail:

We schal neuer dye ffor hungry,

Whyl that we may wenden to ffy3t, 175

And slee be Sarezynes dounry3t,

Wassche be fflesch, and roste be hede;

Wib oo Sarezyn j may wel ffede

Wei a nyne, or a ten

Off my goode Crystene-men.(3 542-46)

Richard also threatens that his army will systematically depopulate the Holy Land of

Saracens, promising "Into Yngelond wol we noirjt gon / Tyl bay be eaten euerylkon"

(3561-62). Leaving no man, woman or child alive, Richard will simultaneously conquer and eat Saracens (3648-55). For Richard, Englishness becomes a function of cannibalism: what unites the English people is their shared appetite for Saracen flesh.

Richard's threat to literally and figuratively devour his Saracen opponents inspires fear and horror among his enemies. A Saracen messenger reports to Saladin that Richard means to "go fforth / To wynne est, west, soup and norp, / And eete our children and vs"

(3667-69). Indeed, Richard's barbarity as crusader cannibal exceeds that of the Saracen and, as a result, the king is frequently associated with the demonic. The English king is described, by Christians and Saracens alike, as a "sauage" (485), "no man" (530), and a

"deuyl off helle" (2580; 2677). At the battle of Acre, Richard wreaks such havoc that

Saladin states that the devil is among them (3166). Later, when presented with the severed heads of their kinsmen, the Saracen ambassadors comment, "bis is be deuelys brober, / bat sles oufe men and bus hem eetes" (3485-85). Here, a mechanism of othering, typically employed in imaginative literatures, is used to describe a group "on whom no 176

residue of alterity should remain" (Ambrisco 519). Richard is affiliated with radical

alterity, a notable departure from typical characterizations of heroic Christian knights

found in romance.

Incidents of cannibalism in Richard Coer de Lyon have been interpreted by critics

such as Geraldine Heng and Heather Blurton as metaphoric consolidations of colonial

ambition and as articulations of nationalist sentiment. Geraldine Heng examines the episodes of Richard's cannibalism in light of Freud's theory of jokes. She writes,

what defines the Englishman - the national subject - is his delight in

eating up the natives in his march of conquest into foreign - international

- territory. As Richard gleefully mimes that foreign aggression through a

cannibalistic joke, he perceptibly conjures up a national collectivity of

souls, materializes a unity of Christian Englishmen whose extraterritorial

gustatory habits define their very identity. {Empire 74)

Similarly, Blurton argues that the romance appropriates the discourse of cannibalism in

service of a nationalist agenda, "[transforming] an imagined religious characteristic of

Islam into an imaginary national characteristic of the English" (Blurton 11). Cannibalism becomes a mode for conceptualizing English cultural and national identity, allowing

Richard Coer de Lyon to make "a very strong political and ideological claim on behalf of the English. It suggests that the English threat has replaced the Muslim threat, and that, on the international scene, the English are the new ones to watch" (Blurton 131). The 177 poem, in other words, appropriates the discursive strategy for representing Saracens in

order to construct and articulate Englishness.

Such arguments for a coherent nationalist discourse in Richard Coer de Lyon gloss over what is monstrous about the crusader-king, that is, his hybrid English-eastern identity. According to Ambrisco, a national discourse requires "not only that a nation's others are essentialized but that the nation and its people themselves have a distinctive, unifying, and essential character" (522). However, Richard's discursive proximity to the

Saracen renders the notion of an absolute alterity untenable; in other words, the Saracen cannot be the radical other against whom English identity is constructed because

Richard's heterogeneous nature dissolves the boundary between Christian self and

Saracen other.

Moreover, Heng and Blurton ignore that cannibalism can be a metaphor for the annihilation of identity. The notion of incorporation central to the idea of cannibalism, as

Maggie Kilgour observes, "depends upon and enforces an absolute division between inside and outside," yet at the same time* the act "dissolvefs] the structure it appears to produce" (4). Cannibalism - the literal incorporation of one body into another - becomes a metaphor for the effacement of the boundaries between self and other - because of the disconcerting similitude that marks the practice. The cannibal demonstrates the permeability of, rather than consolidates, boundaries (Guest 2). By consuming Saracen flesh, Richard incorporates the Saracen other into himself and, in doing so, blurs categorical distinctions. Rather than serving to circumscribe the limits of English 178

collective identity, and to differentiate the English from the French and the Muslims,

Richard's cannibalistic practice threatens to dissolve the very borders the romance seeks

to concretely demarcate.

Richard, as the crusader cannibal, falls into the representational schema of the

Saracen, becoming tinged with alterity and associated with barbarity. As a result, he is a

heterogeneous figure occupying the middle space between the Christian same and the

Saracen other. This in-betweenness also manifests in the poem's description of the king's

genealogical origins. Richard Coer de Lyon re-imagines the king's historical origins and

replaces his French heritage with an eastern one. In the poem, Richard's mother is not

Eleanor of Aquitaine but rather Cassodorien, the daughter of the king of Antioch.

Cassodorien's status as an eastern princess accounts for her inability to look upon the

sacrament and her subsequent flight from church (193-94). Richard's descent from an

Eastern woman draws into relief the king's cultural hybridity, both actual and imagined.

His mythological origin is perhaps implicitly offered as an explanation for his barbarous

cannibalism and his monstrosity.

Despite the pejorative resonances of cannibalism found in imaginative literatures,

cannibalistic incorporation was also a metaphor for the "positively charged creation of religious and social identity" (Blurton 5). Medieval Christians "inhabited a world in which eating was overlaid with sacramental, ritual,an d symbolic significance, in which time itself was experienced as a pattern of fasts and feasts that shaped the liturgical year, with allowed and proscribed foods on particulars, occasions, and seasons: the regiment of 179 a culture in which what one ate, how much or how little, and when, distinguished

between sin and grace, orthodox and heretical practice, inclusion or exclusion in the

fellowship of God and of Christian humanity" (Heng, "Cannibalism" 107). Eucharistic devotion participates metaphorically, as Heather Blurton observes, in concepts of the

body, incorporation, communion, and community (7). Orthodox medieval doctrine

asserts the sacrament undergoes a substantial change at the moment of consecration,

becoming the flesh and blood of Christ.8 Eating the body of Christ,9 according to

orthodox belief, "incorporates individuals into that body and, by extension, incorporates

them into the Christian community" (Blurton 7). Eucharistic communion not only

"created and bound the identity of the individual Christian to a symbolic community," but also ensured salvific reward (Heng, "Cannibalism" 107).

If "sacred cannibalism" - the ritualized consumption of the flesh of Christ by the

Christian faithful - ensured one's membership into the Christian community, what did it

mean to consume the flesh of Saracens, a race associated with alterity, barbarism and the

infernal in popular literatures of the Middle Ages, a race whose practices and physical presence had been described by Pope Urban II and medieval chroniclers as polluting the

"[T]he bread and wine which are placed on the altar are not merely a sacrament after consecration, but are rather the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ - and that these are truly, physically, and not merely sacramentaliy, touched and broken by the hands of the priests and crushed by the teeth of the faithful." See Paul C. Jones 79-80.

See Gary Macy regarding the anxiety aroused by the proximity of eucharistic communion to cannibalism, especially 28-51. 180

Holy Land? For Richard the Lionheart, the consumption of Saracen flesh has a transformative effective on him. He is what he eats, and becomes discursively similar to the cannibal Saracen found in imaginative literatures. His assimilation of the Saracen into himself enacts the dissolution of classifactory boundaries, transforming him into a monstrous hybrid of Christian and Saracen subjectivities.

Louise Fradenburg notes that the Christian knight was "to uphold the lightness and sameness of western Christendom against the threat of the Eastern other" (198).

However, contact with the Saracen other, and prolonged presence in the Near East is potentially hazardous to the Christian knight, who is vulnerable to cultural contamination.

The very nature of the contact zone, the space of cultural encounter, suggests the difficulty of upholding the "sameness of western Christendom." This frontier region where the Christian same meets and interacts with the Saracen other is characterized, as

Michael Uebel observes, by two intersecting paradoxes. The first "holds that alterity is never radical, because the terms of any binarism interdepend, interanimate"

("Unthinking" 265). The other is, in other words, integral to imagining the self. The second paradox "arises from the boundary line's double status as both marker of separation and line of commonality" so that "points of differentiation between two bodies are also their common points" ("Unthinking" 265). In Beues ofHamtoun and Richard

Coer de Lyon, this border between other and same always threatens to dissolve. As a

Geraldine Heng examines similar questions in her article "Cannibalism, the First Crusade, and the Genesis of Romance." 181 result of their physical and discursive proximity to Saracens, both Bevis and Richard manifest a hybrid English-eastern identity that renders them unsettling exemplars of

Englishness. If Beues ofHamtoun and Richard Coer de Lyon can be said to articulate an

English national identity, that identity is characterized not by its cultural purity but by its heterogeneity. Conclusion

The modern West, Akbari remarks in her conclusion to Idols in the East, has little difficulty "seeing the Islamic world as backward, uneducated - and, worst of all, 'medieval'"

(283). Modern western views of Islam, which generally characterize the religion as fundamentalist and puritanical, diverge from medieval perspectives. Whereas medieval polemicists denigrated Muhammad and his followers for their licentiousness and preoccupation with worldly pleasures, "[m]ore recent perspectives on Islam ... especially those engendered since the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, have invariably depicted

Islam as a rather puritanical, abstemious religion, characterized by excessive modesty and even 'unnatural' sexual restraint" (Akbari, Idols 283). What medieval and modern views of

Islam have in common is their tendency to pathologize Islamic practice (Akbari, Idols 283).

Scholarship devoted to medieval perceptions of Muslims and Islam has, for the most part, focused on the vitriolic images found in polemical and vernacular literatures. As Sharon

Kinoshita observes in her introduction to Medieval Boundaries, "medieval treatises furnish vivid and copious material to those interested in tracing the long genealogy of Christian hostility toward Islam" (6). Medieval anti-Muslim polemics contain "much that is appalling to the [modern] reader: crude insults to the Prophet, gross caricatures of Muslim ritual, deliberate deformation of passages of the Koran, degrading portrayals of Muslims as libidinous, gluttonous, semihuman barbarians" (Tolan, Saracens xvi). The caricature of the racialized Saracen who engages in idolatrous worship equally participates in an historical tradition which disparages Muslims and their belief in Islam. Medieval chansons and romances frequently depict the Saracen as figure of otherness: a follower of the "wrong" 183 religion; a military rival; an inhabitant of the exotic East; a physically different being, who is dehumanized and even demonized.

Despite the pervasiveness of the negative portrait of the Saracen in medieval literature, European attitudes towards Muslims and Islam in the Middle Ages cannot be viewed as uniformly hostile (Cruz 55). Studies such as Norman Daniel's Islam and the West:

The Making of an Image and Richard Southern's Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages have erroneously emphasized the uniformity, consistency and universality of medieval attitudes towards Islam among Christians. Medieval perceptions of Islam, however, have been shown to be varied and complex: hostile views of Muslims and Islam existed alongside more tolerant ones, and popular attitudes did not necessarily conform to the official doctrinal stance of the Church.1

In his introduction to Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, Albrecht Classen moderates the perception of medieval society as a "persecuting society" that was intolerant of other races and minorities. He observes, "[tjolerance in the modern sense of the word hardly ever existed in the Middle Ages, but nevertheless there were certain early indications that some individuals espoused a remarkable open mind towards other cultures, other peoples, other religions, and other philosophies" (Classen, "Introduction" xvi). At this time, many Christian writers "seemed to have transgressed the rigid xenophobic paradigm and opened perspectives towards the heathens which stood in stark contrast to Christian ideology" (Classen, "Introduction" xxiv). Indeed, the varied treatment of the Saracen in medieval literature suggests that perceptions of Islam were more complex than previously

1 For further discussion of popular attitudes towards Islam in comparison to the official stance of the Church, see Cruz 55-82. 2 This phrase is coined by Robert Ian Moore in his book The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250. thought.

Indeed, while there is some consistency to the portrait of Saracens in medieval chansons and romances, there are also shifts: the desirable Saracen princess and the chivalrous Saracen knight can be found alongside the stereotypical Saracen. The noble

Saracen warrior, epitomized by Balaguer in La Chanson de Roland and the converts Otuel and Ferumbras in the Middle English Charlemagne romances, is praised for his chivalric qualities. The chivalrous Saracen is imagined not only as a potential convert to Christianity but also as a brother-in-arms who can fight alongside, rather than against, the Christian knight. In the Otuel and Ferumbras romances, the Saracen knights assume a heroic status and, as a result, they escape defamation, instead appearing dignified and respectable. The enamoured Saracen princess, like the noble Saracen warrior, is set apart from other Saracens.

She is not blackened or demonized as other Saracen women are. Rather, she is cast as a desirable bride for the Christian knight. Josiane's actions in Beues ofHamtoun, for example, even though they include murder, trickery and treachery, are never explicitly condemned by the narrator. Indeed, her deeds are laudable because they, in some way, further the cause of the Christian knight. While the noble Saracen warrior and the white Saracen princess reflect the colonialist desires of romance, they are nevertheless remarkable because they, unlike many Saracens who appear in medieval vernacular literature, are not disparaged, but rather portrayed sympathetically and endowed with a humanity denied to other literary Saracens.

These characters are not only provocative because they offer a countermodel to the conventional (demonized) Saracen, but also because they, along with the Saracenized

Christian, offer insight into the complexity of identity formation in the medieval period. The

Christian princess in The King of Tars, the enamoured Saracen princess and the exiled 185

Christian knight in Beues ofHamtoun, the male Saracen convert in the Otuel and Ferumbras romances, and the Saracenized crusader-king in Richard Coer de Lyon frustrate, as we have seen, neat categorizations of identity. Representations of cross-cultural contact reveal the intermediacies that exist between the desired absolutes of "Christian" and "Saracen."

Although conversion offers a route towards assimilation and integration in a new community, religious converts in Middle English romance occupy an ambivalent position, because they remain posed between cultures, and evoke cultural anxieties regarding the procession of conversion and the inclusion of converts. While the conversion of Saracens remained, throughout the Middle Ages, a desirable goal, there was a fear that conversion might happen in the other direction, that Christians might succumb to the lure of Islam.

Concerns regarding "the dangers of sexual intermingling, the taking-on of Eastern customs, and the degeneration of Christian morals" (Rouse, "National" 118) animate depictions of

Christian heroes abroad in the East in Beues ofHamtoun and Richard Coer de Lyon. Rather than icons of a burgeoning nationalism, Bevis and Richard are more productively understood as figures of instability, who manifest a hybrid English-Saracen identity and who point to the instability characteristic of collective identity.

The late medieval period, as Kathy Lavezzo observes, "gave rise to a preponderance of literary texts depicting Saracens" ("Complex Identities" 448), including The King of Tars,

Beues ofHamtoun, the Otuel and Ferumbras romances, and Richard de Lyon. Romance interest in Saracens perhaps reflects the overwhelming presence of Islam at this time.

"The existence of Islam," R. W. Southern argues, "was the most far-reaching problem in medieval Christendom," a danger that was "unpredictable and immeasurable" (3,4). With the rise of the Ottoman Turks in the fourteenth century, Islam continued to be perceived as a threat to Christendom. (Lavezzo, "Complex Identities" 448).

The problem of Islam, according to Michael Uebel, was "essentially one concerning the integrity and preservation of apparently inviolable boundaries" ("Unthinking" 268).

Islam was "rarely understood on its own terms, but grasped in its relation to Christianity"

(Uebel, "Unthinking" 272). Medieval polemical writings, for example, explained Islam as a heretical deviation of Christianity or understood it within the framework of Christian providential history. Constructing the other "in the shape of the known" epitomizes, according to Uebel, the "type of analogical thinking - recognizing oneself in the other, as in a mirror- that dominated Western conceptions of otherness" ("Unthinking" 268). Medieval

Christian identity was paradoxically defined against, and threatened by, its own imagining of the Muslim as other.

Middle English romances, in their treatment of the desirable Saracen and the

Saracenized Christian, reflect a cultural nervousness surrounding Islam and its proximity (in the sense of physical presence and a shared cultural heritage) to Christianity. Christians and

Saracens are depicted in these cases as being not all that different from one another. The noble Saracen warrior is the mirror image of the Christian knight, both adhering to the same martial ethos. This similarity casts the chivalrous Saracen as a potential convert and facilitates his movement between communities. The enamoured Muslim princess conforms to the European paradigm of beauty; her physical resemblance to Christian ladies legitimizes her love of the Christian knight and renders her conversion to Christianity acceptable. The

There were no major crusading expeditions during the late medieval period when the romances investigated in this study were written. As Lavezzo observes, "And although those high medieval crusades at times enjoyed some success, with the creation of Crusader states and the Christian occupation of Jerusalem, those martial enterprises ended in failure, with the lost of the last Crusader colony of Acre in 1291." See Lavezzo, "Complex Identities" 448. 187

Saracenized Christian, exemplified by the exiled Christian knight Bevis and the crusader- cannibal Richard the Lionheart, is physically and/or discursively proximate the Saracen.

These instances in Middle English romance suggest that the boundary separating self from other, Christian from Saracen is not always self-evident or fixed.

This study's consideration of the "impure" identities that emerge through colonial encounters and cross-cultural interaction complements current research trends in the field of postcolonial medievalism. Sharon Kinoshita unpacks representations of cross-cultural contact in medieval French literature, which, she argues, are "inextricably linked to historical situations of contact between French-speaking nobles and peoples they perceived as their linguistic, religious and cultural others" {Medieval Boundaries 1). In doing so, Kinoshita explores the complexities of Christian-Muslim interaction and reveals "an almost continuous history of political accommodation, commercial exchange, and cultural negotiation across the Muslim-Christian divide" {Medieval Boundaries 7). In addition to understanding the multifaceted interactions between the Christian and Muslim worlds during the medieval period, postcolonial medievalism continues to explore the complexity of medieval identity formations, as evidenced by Suzanne Conklin Akbari's recent monograph Idols in the East.

Similarly, this study demonstrates the insufficiency of the binary self/other model for grasping the multiplicity of identity found in Middle English romance.

My consideration of Saracen alterity and cultural hybridity also supplements existing scholarship on Saracens and their role in the process of nation- and empire-building. While the romances of this study have been imbricated in nationalist and/or colonialist projects by

Heng, Campbell and Calkin, such projects, as we have seen, are attended by identity uncertainty. Imagining a homogenous national identity in Beues ofHamtoun and Richard Coer de Lyon is frustrated by the hybrid nature of the very heroes through whom these romances attempt to construct and articulate Englishness. Similarly, depictions of cross- cultural contact undermine, rather than entrench, the strict separation of communities.

Religious conversion, intermarriage, and acculturation to a new community all expose the fragility of the classificatory boundaries that maintain romances' colonialist fantasies. In other words, identities are far messier than the nationalist and colonialist narratives of romance initially suggest.

The King of Tars, Beues ofHamtoun, the Otuel and Ferumbras romances, and

Richard Coer de Lyon were circulated during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a period that witnessed the rise of English nationalism. Constructing an English national identity was, as Turville-Petre observes, a fraught process, requiring writers to "project a tidy image" of a well-defined (undivided, racially pure) community (7). Defining Englishness requires that the "inconsistencies and contradictions" - that is, the disparity between the imaginative construction and reality - be concealed (14). This study reveals and examines the

"inconsistencies and contradictions" inherent in nationalist and colonialist romances but not fully explored in existing criticism. My consideration of cultural hybridity in Middle English romance points to the "tempestuous intermediacies" (Cohen, Hybridity 2) concealed by nationalist and colonialist narratives, and their attendant fantasy of well-bounded communities.

Moreover, the romances of this study gesture towards the difficulty in defining the self over and against a proximate other. As depictions of cross-cultural contact reveal,

"Christian" and "Saracen" are never discrete identities but rather are always in contact with one another. Issues of identity formation and differentiation would have been pressing in England during a time of increasing hostility between England and France, as Calkin has shown in her discussion of the Auchinleck manuscript. English authors must have been keenly aware of the difficulties inherent in imagining the English as different from the

French, a people with whom the English were culturally very close.

Instances of cross-cultural contact in The King of Tars, Beues ofHamtoun, the Otuel and Ferumbras romances, and Richard Coer de Lyon function as a means through which to interrogate urgent issues of identity and difference. Such issues seem especially pertinent in light of the continued opposition between the West and Islam, which has intensified following the events of September 11, 2001. Islam, particularly in our post- 9/11 climate, has become synonymous with terrorism and religious extremism. The Muslim, as portrayed primarily by the media, continues to be a "feared and hated 'other'" who is "understood as being different from 'us'" {Idols 1). Such divisions, it seems, are playing out at a microcosmic level, in our communities.

Sarah Palin, in response to plans to build a Muslim community centre and mosque near the location of Ground Zero, recently urged New Yorkers and "peace-seeking

Muslims," via the social media site Twitter, to "refudiate [sic]" such plans because the

"catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real." Reactions to the plan, as

Palin's comments suggest, have been divisive: while some feel the building of a mosque near Ground Zero is insensitive, others see it as a powerful symbol of tolerance. Yet, Palin's comments are also rather telling: there is a tinge of xenophobia and mistrust of Muslim

Americans.

Current debates surrounding the place of Islam and Islamic practice within Western communities also point to how we continue to struggle with notions of selfhood, community and alterity. In July 2010, France's lower house of parliament overwhelmingly approved a ban on face-covering veils, despite constitutional concerns. The French president Nicholas

Sarkozy insists the wearing of the burqa or niqab is incompatible with the ideals of a French republic because they are perceived symbols of women's subjugation. Other countries, such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and the United Kingdom, have either proposed a similar law banning face veils or voiced their support of such a ban. Closer to home, Quebec is embroiled in its own debate about face coverings. In March, Quebec's Justice Minister Weil tabled Bill 94. If passed, it would prevent women wearing a burqa or niqab from accessing government services or working in public offices. Such debates over when and where

Muslim women should be allowed to wear the burqa or niqab are admittedly complex; lawmakers must weigh issues of security and the promotion of women's rights against the individual's right to freedom of religious expression. Yet, regardless of the intentions behind these proposed bans, such debates demonstrate how aspects of Islamic practice continue to be stigmatized.

"Representations of Muslims," Akbari writes, "have never been more common in the

Western imagination than they are now" (Idols 1). Yet, given the preponderance of Saracen figures in Middle English romances, the Muslim also occupied a prominent place within the medieval western imagination. Middle English romances do not present us with a single image of the Saracen but rather a variety of portraits, from the monstrous giant and the defeated emir to the chivalrous Saracen warrior and the beautiful Saracen princess. While such representations are divorced from an "Islamic reality" (Daniel, Heroes 263), they nevertheless offer a glimpse into the desires and anxieties of medieval English Christians during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 191

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Because some readers may not be familiar with one or more of the romances

discussed, I have included synopses of the romances dealt with extensively in this study:

the King of Tars, Beues ofHamtoun, the Otuel and Ferumbras romances, and Richard

Coer de Lyon. In addition to a summary of each romance's principal characters and major narrative events, an overview of what is known about each romance with regards to manuscripts, dating, and source material has also been included. This will give the reader

a sense of when these particular romances were being produced and circulated; of the number of manuscripts in which each romance appears; and of the textual relationship between a particular romance and its source material as well as other extant versions.

The Auchinleck King of Tars:

The King of Tars survives in three fourteenth-century manuscripts: Auchinleck (c.

1330); MS Vernon (c. 1390); and MS Simeon (British Museum Additional 22283, c.

1390-1400). According to Loomis, the Auchinleck version is probably not much later than the original version (45). Ferryman dates the poem somewhere between 1280, when the Tars story first appears in chronicles, and the date of the Auchinleck manuscript (17).

The Vernon manuscript version is likely derived from the same source as the Auchinleck

King of Tars1 and is closely related to British Museum Additional 22283 (Loomis 45).

MSS Vernon and Simeon are, according to Ferryman, sister manuscripts "not only

1 The version of The King of Tars found in Vernon and Simeon "cannot be derived directly from MS A [Auchinleck} because in three of MS A's found incomplete stanzas, stanzas 30,63, and 96, MSS [Vernon and Simeon] have lines which correspond to the gap in MS A." See Perryman, "Introduction" 31. 211 sharing a scribe but having a substantial proportion of their items in common" (11).

Similarly, Perryman suggests mat all three manuscript versions may derive from a single composition, now lost (11).

Lillian Herlands Horstein, Robert Geist, and Judith Perryman agree that the King of Tars represents an extensive literary elaboration of historical military successes achieved by the Tartars in the Middle East and recorded in medieval chronicles. In 1279,

Abaga, a Mongol ruler, triumphed over Egyptian Muslim forces in Syria. Later, Abaga's brother, united with Christian Armenians and Georgians, fought against the Muslim

Sultan near Damascus in 1281. Finally, in 1299, Ghazzan (Abaga's grandson) along with his Christian allies defeated Muslim forces and captured Damascus (Perryman 45). These incidents become "confused, merged, and duplicated, as well as altered as a result of rumour and embellishment" (Perryman 44). Perryman concludes, "On balance, it is probable that the victory of 1279 began the tradition of the Tartar king fighting on behalf of the Christian faith, but that the victory of Ghazzan in 1299 (recounted in the 1300 entry of the Chronicle of Bury St. Edmunds] gave it its popularity" (45). These historical events "became intertwined with motifs of miraculous conversion and monstrous birth"

(Calkin, Saracens 104) shortly after they were reported by European chroniclers

(Perryman 45).

In the Auchinleck King of Tars, the Sultan of Damascus sends ambassadors to the

Christian King of Tars to secure the princess' hand in marriage, after hearing of her

2 For an overview of the history and relationship of the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts, see Perryman, "Introduction" 12-14,27-29. 212 extraordinary beauty. When his marriage proposal is refused, the Sultan amasses his army and marches on the dominions of the King. A battle ensues which in which 30,000

Christians are slain. The King's daughter, in order to prevent further bloodshed, announces that she will marry the Sultan. However, the Sultan refuses to marry the

Christian princess unless she converts to the Saracen religion. That night, the princess dreams that she is attacked by a hundred barking black hounds and three devils. One of the hounds then changes into a man in white armour, who assures her of Christ's protection. The followingday , the Sultan takes the princess to the temple and insists she forsake Christianity in favour of the Saracen religion. The princess outwardly converts but secretly continues to believe in Christ. The union between the Christian princess and the heathen Sultan results in a disfigured offspring, a formlesslum p of flesh. The Sultan prays to the Saracen deities to restore the child but to no avail. The mother then arranges for the child to be baptized following which the child miraculously transforms into a fully formed little boy. Induced by the miracle he has witnessed, the Sultan agrees to convert to Christianity. The baptismal water causes the Sultan's skin to change from black to white. The Sultan, now named Cleophas, then joins the King of Tars in converting his

Saracen vassals or killing those who refuse to accept Christianity.

Analogues to The King of Tars resemble the Auchinleck text insofar as they include a Christian wife's conversion of a non-Christian king, their monstrous child's miraculous transformation, and the military defeat of Saracens (Perryman 42). According to Perryman, six texts that pre-date Auchinleck contain this narrative: the Anglo-Latin 213

Flores historiarum (c. 1300-7), Villani's Italian Istoire Florentine (c. 1307-30), a

Hispano-Latin letter to Jayme II of Aragon (c. 1300-7), the Germano-Latin Annates of

Sancti Rudberti Salisburgenses (c. 1280-1300), and Ottokar's German Osterreichische

Reimchronik (c. 1306-8). To these, Calkin adds the Chronicon de Lanercost which contains an entry for 1280 that describes a lump-child bom to the King and Queen of

Norway made human by the intervention of St. Francis. While that narrative recounts the monstrous birth and miraculous transformation of the lump-child, it lacks the interaction between Christians and non-Christians as well as the Middle Eastern setting (Calkin,

Saracens 105). None of the chronicles, as Calkin observes, is precisely duplicated by the

Auchinleck King of Tars {Saracens 105). The inability to definitively identify a known direct source for The King of Tars suggests 1) the redactor's familiarity with, and adaptation of, one or more of the analogues (Horstein 442); or 2) the redactor used a version of the tale (now lost) that combines the features found in extant versions of the tale.

It is notable that the nature of the child born of an interfaith marriage varies in the analogues, which Hornstein groups by type of monstrous birth: (A) the hairy child; (B) the half-and-half child (half-hairy, half-human and half animal, half-black and half- white); (C) the formless lump (Hornstein 434). The tale of the birth of the hairy child is found in five Anglo-Latin texts, the earliest of which appear in the fourteenth-century

Flores Historiarum (Hornstein 434-5). The tale in which the child is half-hairy appears in

3 For a summary of these analogues, see Perryman, "Introduction" 42-44. 214 six Germanic chronicles, including the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century Annates

Sancti Rudberti Saliburgenses; Osterreichische Reimchronik (c. 1306-8); and Jeande

Victring's chronicle (c. 1343) (Hornstein 435-7). A significant variation of the monstrous birth can be found in fourteenth-century Franco-Latin accounts, including Gilles Le

Muisit's Chronique et Annates and Chronicon Muevini, in which the infant is described as half-black, half-white (Hornstein 438-9). Giovanni Villani's Istorie Florentine (written between 1300 and 1348) alone identifies the newborn child as a formless lump of flesh, as in the Auehinleck King of Tars (Hornstein 441).

Not all analogues feature conversion. In those analogues in which conversion does appear, it is not accompanied by the miraculous change of "hewe" found in the

Auehinleck King of Tars (Hornstein 442). The Auehinleck version is peculiar in other respects, as well. Auehinleck is unique in its identification of the Princess as the daughter of the Christian King of Tars (rather than the Christian King of Armenia), and of the converted ruler as the Saracen Sultan of Damascus (rather than the ruler of the Tartars)

(Calkin, Saracens 105), the latter of which "[testifies] to a particular manuscript interest in Saracens" (Calkin, Saracens 105). Finally, when the conversion of the sultan's people is mentioned there is no suggestion of the forced, violent conversion that concludes the

Auehinleck King of Tars (Calkin, Saracens 105).

The Auehinleck Beues ofHamtoun:

Bevis of Hampton is one of the most popular narratives of the medieval and early modern periods, rivaled only by Guy of Warwick. The Middle English verse romance 215

Bevis of Hampton survives in eight extant manuscripts produced during the early fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: Auchinleck MS (1330); Biblioteca Nazionales MS

XIII.B.29 (c. 1450); Caius College, Cambridge, Gonville and Caius MS 175/96 (c. 1450-

1475); MS Egerton 2862 (late fourteenth/early fifteenth century); Chetham's Library MS

8009 (late fifteenth century); Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.2.38 (late fifteenth/early sixteenth century); and two fragments found in Cambridge, Trinity

College, MS 0.2.13 (mid- to late fifteenth century) and Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Poet. d.208. The poem survives into the eighteenth century through various print editions, including those produced by Wynkyn de Worde.4 Of the eight extant manuscripts,

Auchinleck is the earliest and, because it "can be shown to have unique points of contact with [the Anglo-Norman] Boeve [de HautomeJ, it has acquired a position of presumed textual authority" (Fellows 81). However, the authority of Auchinleck has recently been challenged, as Djordjevic explains: "[tjhe distribution of verbal echoes of the extant

Anglo-Norman texts among the Middle English manuscripts indicates a process of textual transmission so intricate that no manuscript can justifiably be singled out" (68).

The Auchinleck manuscript, as a whole, "shows a deliberate process of acquisition and translation of material already available in vernacular narrative as well as the adaptation and writing of new narratives" (Field 302). The Auchinleck Beues as well as the other extant versions descend from an earlier Middle English version of the poem,

4Jeimifer Fellows includes a complete list of print editions dating fromth e sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in the appendix to her article "The Middle English and Renaissance Bevis: A Textual Survey" in Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition. Ed. Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjevic" (D. S. Brewer, 2005), 80-113. 216

which no longer survives (Baugh 34; Fields 304; Fellows 81). The source of the various

Middle English redactions is the Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone (Baugh 34).

Rosalind Field describes Boeve de Haumtone as a "spurious history written to flatter the

family and honour of Arundel and drawing on already established motifs in romance and

chanson de geste to give a lively ancestral romance laced with Saracen adventures"

("Romance" 304). Boeve, which dates from the late twelfth century, is written in the

laisse form of the chansons, "as were other AN narratives of the time" (Field, "Romance"

304), It survives in two incomplete versions and a fragment, all of which were copied

between the second half of the thirteenth and the early fourteenth centuries (Field,

"Romance" 304). Boeve was translated into Middle English between the late thirteenth

and the early fourteenth centuries (Field 304). Djordjevic notes, however, "{i}t is

impossible to tell which of the two incomplete Anglo-Norman texts the translator might

have used (probably neither)" (68). Moreover, as Jennifer Fellow's textual study of Bevis

demonstrates, it is hard to establish which of the extant Middle English texts best

preserves the original form of the resulting translation.

There are major differences between the Middle English and Anglo-Norman

versions of the poem. Middle English redactions include entirely new episodes not found

in the Anglo-Norman version, such as Bevis' battle with the dragon and the street fight in

London (Weiss, "Major Interpolations" 116). Laura Hibbard Loomis adds a third scene to the two described by Weiss: the Christmas Day battle (116). These interpolations further

complicate the textual relationship between the Middle English versions and their 217 putative source. "In the absence of a clear line of descent between source and translation," as Field observes, "it is impossible to determine at what stage in the transmission such additions were made" ("Romance" 305).

Among the Middle English versions, there are also differences that extend beyond the lexical and stylistic (Fellows, "Middle English" 80). The Auchinleck Beues differs substantially from other extant versions of the romance in, for example, its treatment of the dragon fight. The identification of Bevis with St. George, the dream which precedes

Bevis' encounter with the dragon, and the invocation of the Virgin Mary are unique to

Auchinleck (Fellows, "Middle English" 81).5 Indeed, the manuscripts are so different from one another that A. C. Baugh suggests that "[i]nstead of speaking of a single Middle

English romance of Bevis of Hampton it would be more in accordance with the facts to say that we have at least five versions, each of which is entitled to be considered a separate romance" (34). It is important to keep in mind that the Auchinleck version represents a single poem within the Bevis tradition rather than a copy of a singular Bevis text.

Bevis of Hampton begins with the marriage between the aging Guy, the Earl of

Southampton, and the beautiful young daughter of the King of Scotland. Following the birth of Bevis, his mother becomes dissatisfied with her marriage and plots her husband's

5 Fellows identifies five principle episodes which include features unique to Auchinleck: Bevis' encounter with Terri while journeying to Damascus; the dragon fight; Josiane's seven-year separation from Bevis and her sons; the fightbetwee n Bevis and King Yvor; and the street fighti n London. For a complete discussion of Auchinleck's treatment of these episodes in comparison with other version, see Fellows, "The Middle English and Renaissance Bevis: A Textual Survey." Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition, ed. Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjevid. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008.80-113. 218 murder with her lover, the Emperor of Germany. Although the young Bevis is initially spared, his mother later asks Saber, a steward, to kill the child and to provide proof of his death. However, Saber spares the child who is then, upon the request of his mother, sold to merchants. Taken from England, Bevis finds himself in the "painim londefs}" and in the court of King Ermin, the Saracen ruler of Armenia.

It is while Bevis resides in the Saracen lands that the poem's central theme emerges: the princess' love for the exile hero. King Ermin's daughter, Josiane, initially falls in love with Bevis after witnessing his battle with a man-eating boar and the subsequent attack on Bevis by an envious steward and some of the king's men. Bevis slays his attack and cuts off the steward's head in order to expose the steward's treachery to the Sultan. However, Bevis reconsiders and instead presents the boars head.

Following his victory of the rival Saracen king, Brademond, Josiane declares her love for

Bevis. Initially, Bevis refuses to reciprocate Josiane's love but later reconciles with her after she agrees to convert to Christianity. Meanwhile, Brademond falsely accuses Bevis of seducing Josiane as retribution for his own defeat at the hands of the English knight.

When King Ermin hears of this rumour, he orders Bevis to take a letter to Brademond demanding the Christian knight's death. Meanwhile, back in England, Saber sends his son, Terri, to find Bevis.

Terri travels throughout Europe and the Middle East in search of Bevis. While resting under a tree, Terri inadvertently meets Bevis, whom he does not recognize. Bevis reveals his identity but convinces Terri to send a message to Saber to spread the rumour 219 that Bevis is dead. Bevis then continues on to Damascus where he presents himself to

Brademond, still unaware of Ermin's betrayal or Brademond's treachery. When

Brademond reads Ermin's letter, he imprisons Bevis in a pit twenty fathoms deep, where the knight is bound to a great stone, and fed only bread and water. Meanwhile, Josiane remains unaware of Bevis' imprisonment and becomes a victim of her father's scheming: he convinces her that Bevis has married an English princess and later grants the marriage suit proposed by King Yvor.

After seven years of imprisonment, Bevis falls into despair. Yet, he miraculously escapes after praying for divine aid and returns to the Armenian court to discover that

Josiane, believing that Bevis is betrothed to an English princess, is now married to King

Yvor, who has acquired Bevis5 treasured possessions: his sword (Morgelai) and his horse

(Arondel). Bevis travels to Mombraunt, Yvor's stronghold, in order to rescue Josiane and defeat the giant, Ascopard, who has been ordered to track and kill the knight. Bevis,

Josiane and the subdued Ascopard then travel to Cologne where Josiane is baptized and

Bevis defeats a dragon that has been terrorizing the city and its inhabitants.

In order to avenge bis father's murder and to regain his rightfulinheritance , Bevis then travels back to England, leaving Josiane behind and assigning Ascopard the task of protecting her. The scene then shifts to Josiane who has been admired from afar by an earl named Miles. After enticing Ascopard away with a false letter from Bevis, Miles abducts Josianee and forces her into wedlock. Josiane, who remains loyal to Bevis, murders Miles on their wedding night before the marriage is consummated. When the 220 murder is discovered, Josiane is sentenced to death. When Ascopard finally breaks free from his imprisonment, he finds Josaine only to realize Bevis is already there. Bevis berates the giants for neglecting his duties but his anger is assuaged when Ascopard explains what happened. After rescuing Josiane together, all three sail to the Isle of

Wight.

When the emperor hears of Bevis' return to England, a battle between the knight and his stepfather ensues, during which the latter is rescued. Ascopard later delivers the emperor to Saber's castle where he is thrown into a kettle of molten lead. Bevis' mother, after witnessing her lover's death, falls from her tower and breaks her neck. Upon the death of his mother and her lover, Bevis is recognized as the rightful successor to

Southampton and he marries Josiane. However, Bevis is once again forced to leave

England when his horse, Arondel, inadvertently kills the son and only living heir of the

English King Edgar. Bevis, the pregnant Josaine, Terri, and Ascopard are forced to leave and return to Armenia. When Terri is made Bevis' page, Ascopard begins to plot his betrayal.

King Yvor later convinces Ascopard to abduct Josiane, who has just given birth to her twin sons (Guy and Miles) and is forced to leave them unattended. Josiane uses her knowledge of herbs to turn her skin leperous in the hopes that King Yvor will reject her, which he does. Meanwhile, the children are discovered by Bevis and Terri who foster them - one to a forester, the other to a fisherman - with instructions to baptize them. 221

Back in Hamtoun, Saber has a dream and initiates a search for Josiane and the children. He finds where Ascopard has imprisoned Josiane and defeats the giant.

Together, Saber and Josaine resume their search for Bevis and Terri, during which time

Saber fails ill and only recovers when Josiane prays for him to be healed. Once the family is reunited, Bevis defeats King Yvor in battle and convinces Ermin to ransom the king rather than execute him. Prior to Ermin's death, Bevis' son Guy is named the king's heir.

Together Bevis and Guy convert all of Armenia to Christianity.

Bevis later meets King Yvor in single combat; when Yvor is defeated, Bevis is crowned king of Mombraunt. At this point, a messenger arrives declaring that Saber's lands have been confiscated by the King Edgar. Bevis promises to aid Saber in his war against the English king and returns to England to appeal for the restoration of the confiscated lands. Before the king complies with Bevis' request, the steward declares the knight an outlaw and streetlight ensues.

The poem ends with the marriage of Miles to King Edgar's only daughter, the decision to appoint Saber Earl of Southampton, and the ascension of Guy to the throne of

Armenia. Bevis and Josiane return to Mombraunt where they live and rule peacefully for twenty years until they die in sanctity. Their son, Guy, constructs a chapel and founds a religious house in his parents' honour.

The Outel and Ferumbras Romances: 222

Ten anonymous verse texts fromth e fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, two prose translations by William Caxton, and a prose translation by Sir John Bourchier, Lord

Berners, are known collectively as the English Charlemagne romances (Smyser 80-1;

Cowen 149). The Matter of France in Middle English is comprised of several

Charlemagne-related romances, the majority of which are based on French originals

(Cowen 150).6 One of the most favoured chansons de geste outside of France was

Fierabras (Smyser 81). The Ferumbras group of romances consists of four English reworkings of the French Fierabras: the fragmentary Fillingham Firumbras (MS British

Museum Add. 37492, c. 1375-1400), the Ashmole Sir Ferumbras (MS Ashmole 33, c.

1380), The Sowdone of Babylon (MS Garrett 140, c. 1400), and Caxton's prose Charles the Grete (c. 1485).7 A number of English renditions of the French chanson Otinel also survive and are known as the Otuel group (Smyser 81). These include the Auchinleck

Roland and Vernagu (Auchinleck MS, c.1330), the Fillingham Otuel and Roland

(Auchinleck MS , c.1330), the Auchinleck Otuel a Kniyt {Auchinleck MS, c.1330), The

6While many of the English Charlemagne romances derive from French source material, The Tail! ofRauf Coliyear, The Sege ofMelayne, and Roland and Vernagu are notable exceptions. The Taill ofRattfColiyear is a Scottish poem which "adapts a folk-tale motif to a context composed of typical figures and situations of the Charlemagne corpus" (Cowen 150). No French source has been found for The Sege ofMelayne, which seems to be original to England (Cowen 157; Smyser 92). Finally, the story of Roland and Vernagu does not belong to the chanson tradition but rather derives fromth e Latin Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle (Smyser 90-

Caxton's Charles the Grete is a close translation of a Swiss redaction of Fierabras, "though actually it is a 'whole life' of Charlemagne in three Books, of which only the second has to do with Ferumbras (Smyser 86). The late date of Charles the Grete precludes its inclusion in this study. 223

Sege ofMelayne (Thornton MS, c. 1400), and Duke Rowlande and Sir Otuell ofSpayne

(Thornton MS, c. 1400).8

The character Otuel is notably absent from Roland and Vernagu and The Sege of

Melayne, invariably leading to questions regarding the romances' inclusion in the Otuel group. Roland and Vernagu and The Sege ofMelayne are nevertheless closely related to other romances of the group and, when read in conjunction with other Otuel romances, offer readers a larger context within which to place the story of Otuel and his conversion.

There is, for example, a narrative link between Roland and Vernagu and the Auchinleck

Otuel a Kni3t, which suggests the latter should be read as "a sequel in which Otuel fulfils the role of convert rejected by Vernagu" (Cowen 154). Roland and Vernagu, which precedes Otuel a Knijt in the Auchinleck manuscript, concludes with Roland's victory over the Saracen giant Vernagu (Ferragus) in single combat, and with the statement that the Saracen Otuel hears of Vernagu's fate (878-80). Then, in Otuel a Knijt, Otuel challenges Roland to single combat for killing his uncle, Fernagu. The Sege ofMelayne

similarly introduces characters (Garcy) and places (Lombardy) that will continue to be important in Duke Rowlande and Sir Otuell of Spain. Duke Rowlande follows the Sege in

British Library MS Additional 31042, giving critics grounds to suppose that the Sege of

To the Ferumbras and Otuel groups, Smyser adds several "detached" romances: the fragmentary Middle English version of the Chanson de Roland (c. 1400);1 The Taill ofRaufColiyear (c. 1515); a second prose translation by Caxton entitled The Right Pleasaunt and Goodly Historie of the Foure Sonnes ofAymon (c. 1489); and The Boke of Duke Huon ofBurdeux (c. 1530), a prose translation by Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners. This study concerns itself with only those English Charlemagne romances featuring the Saracen convert knight. 224

Melayne "forms a kind of introduction to Otuel in the same way as the Destruction of

Rome is introductory to Fierabras" in the Egerton manuscript (Smyser 93).9

As Rosalind Field notes, "[tjhere is a complex network of interrelationships between the various ME versions of the two groups of romances" ("Romance" 313), making their relation to their putative source material and to one another difficult to discern (Cowen 151). But, although the textual transmission of the chansons Fierabras and Otinel into Middle English is complex, there is some critical consensus among scholars.

The chanson Fierabras is a truncated version of Balan, a lost twelfth-century

French epic described in Phillipe MouskS's Chronique rimee (c. 1243). Balan recounts the sack of Rome by Saracen forces, led by the sultan Balan, and the recapture of Rome by Charlemagne with the aid of Fierabras (Smyser 81-2). According to Smyser, a later author wrote a prefatory poem entitled La Destruction de Rome and placed it before

Fierabras in the Hanover manuscript, effectively replacing the lost material from Balan

(82).10 Anglo-Norman redactions of La Destruction de Rome and Fierabras are found in the Egerton manuscript, which served as the primary source material for the Middle

English Sowdone ofBabylone. The Ashmole Sir Ferumbras, on the other hand, is a close

9 The place of the Sege remains a matter of debate. Smyser, for example, qualifies the classification of the Sege among the Otuel romances: "The Sege never names Otuel and we do not know how its story ended. No version of Otuel has been adapted to accommodate it to the Sege as a prologue" (93). 10The two poems - La Destruction de Rome and Fierabras - have "in no way been adapted to form a consistent whole" (Smyser 82); Hausknecht similarly notes in his introduction to his edition of the Sowdone ofBabylone that the two poems are not directly connected and "the poem of the Destruction of Rome cannot be said to be identical with the first part of the Balan romance" (xiv). 225 translation of the chanson Fierabras, "although the precise source is not known" (Cowen

159). Both the Ashmole Sir Ferumbras and the Fillingham Firumbras are believed to derive fromth e same French textual tradition (Cowen 161; Field, "Romance" 313).11

The Auchinleck Roland and Vernagu and the Fillingham Otuel and Roland derive from Charlemagne and Roland, the name given to a lost Middle English romance "based the French Estoire de Charlemagne, into which an English redactor inserted episodes from a French version of OtineF (Cowen 155; Smyser 88-9). The existence of

Charlemagne and Roland is conjectural but based on textual evidence, specifically the corresponding tail rhyme of the Auchinleck Roland and Vernagu and the Fillingham

Otuel and Roland (Cowen 155-6). Roland and Vernagu and Otuel and Roland are then narrative fragmentso f a composite romance that would have described Roland's battle with Vernagu, Otuel's fight with Roland and his subsequent conversion, the defeat of the

Saracen Garcy, and a version of the battle of Roncesvalles.

There are textual similarities between the imperfect opening of Roland and

Vernagu and the prologue of Otuel and Roland which enumerates narrative events, including the slaying of Vernagu by Roland, that do not form part of Otuel and Roland

(Cowen 155). The close resemblances between the opening lines of Roland and Vernagu and the concluding lines of the prologue in Otuel and Roland "give good grounds for conjecture that a version of the whole of the prologue originally stood at the head" of the former poem (Cowen 155). Thus, the Auchinleck romances - Roland and Vernagu and uSee also Ailes, Marianne. "Comprehension Problems and their Resolution in the Middle English Verse Translation ofFierabras? Forum for Modern Language Studies 35 (1999): 396-407. 226

Otuel a Kniyt - "would originally have been preceded by a general prologue setting out the context of Charlemagne romances, which now survives in the Fillingham Otuel and

Roland" (Field 313).

Although there are some variations between the Middle English redactions, both the Ferumbras and Otuel romances follow a similar narrative and share a recurring theme: Saracen conversion. The Sowdone ofBabylone, a romance from the Ferumbras group, begins with the siege of Rome by Saracen forces, led by Laban (Balan in

Fierabras), the Sultan of Babylon and his son, Ferumbras. Following the Saracen conquest of Rome and the seizure of the sacred relics, Charlemagne and his knights sail to the Saracen capital of Aigremore, where they lay waste to the countryside and engage in a prolonged battle with Ferumbras and his forces. Here, as Smyser notes, the

Destruction part of the Sowdon ends.

The Fierabras portion of the Sowdon begins with Ferumbras and his battle with

Oliver, during which the Saracen knight is wounded and overcome. Following his defeat,

Ferumbras accepts baptism, becomes a member of Charlemagne's retinue, and later helps to defeat the Sultan, his father. Roland and Oliver are subsequently captured by the

Sultan and imprisoned. Floripas, the Sultan's daughter, however, resolves to help the

Christian knights by providing them with provisions. The rest of the romance details the knights' escape from prison, the defeat of Laban, and the punishment of the traitor

Ganelon. The poem ends with the conversion and baptism of Floripas, her marriage to Sir

Guy of Burgundy, and with the bequeathal of Spain to Ferumbras. The Ashmole Sir 227

Firumbras and Fiiiingham Firumbras follow the basic plot of the Sowdon of Babylon (c.

1400-50), although the Ashmole Sir Ferumbras begins with Ferumbras' battle with

Oliver. This battle is notably absent in the Filiingham Firumbras, because the manuscript has been badly damaged. The Filiingham fragment begins with the Peers trapped m

Floripas' tower.

The tale of Otuel, as narrated in Otuel and Roland, bares striking similarities to that of Ferumbras insofar as both knights convert to Christianity following their defeat in single combat. Otuel and Rolandbegins with Otuel's arrival at Charlemagne's court at

St. Denis where he delivers an ultimatum from Garcy, the ruler of Lombardy. During the ensuing battle between Roland and Otuel, the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove alights on

Otuel's helmet. Otuel immediately yields to Roland and agrees to join Charlemagne following his baptism. Charlemagne then leads a military expedition to invade Lombardy and defeat Garcy. Meanwhile, Roland, Oliver and Ogier set out looking for battle and overhear four Saracen kings discussing their desire to meet the infamous Peers in combat.

A fight ensues and three Saracen kings are slain and the fourth, Clarel, is captured.

However, the Peers and their captive encounter a host of a thousand Saracen knights and are overcome. The now freed Clarel offers to protect Ogier and sends the seriously injured knight to his sweetheart, Enfamy, for safekeeping.

Meanwhile, Otuel notices the absence of the three Peers and comes to rescue

Roland and Oliver. After routing the Saracens, Otuel agrees to meet Clarel in single combat the following day, during which Clarel refuses to convert and is eventually killed. 228

Ogier escapes from Enfamy's jailors and rejoins Charles' army in the midst of battle with

Garcy's forces. Once the enemy is defeated, Garcy, now a prisoner, is taken to Paris where he is baptized by Archbishop Turpin. Otuel a Knijt and Duke Roland and Sir Otuel of Spain follow a similar narrative but end with the defeat of Garcy. Otuel and Roland, however, continues and concludes with an account of Roland's death at Roncesvalles,

Charlemagne's victories in Spain, and the punishment of Ganelon.

The a Versian of Richard Coer de Lyon'. Richard Coer de Lyon survives in seven imperfect manuscripts and two early print editions, produced by Wynkyn de Worde in the sixteenth century. Critical consensus holds that Richard Coer de Lyon derives from a {now lost) Anglo-Norman original (c. 1230-50) and it was translated into Middle English before the end of the thirteenth century. There are two distinct traditions of the poem, designated a and b versions by Karl Brunner: the a version is represented in British Library MS Additional

31042 (MS Thornton, mid fifteenth century), Gonville and Caius 175 (early fifteenth century), and the two early printed versions by de Worde; whereas b is represented in

Auchinleck MS (c. 1330), Egerton 2862 (end of fourteenth century), Harley 4690

(fifteenth century), College of Arms MS Arundel 58 (first half of fifteenth century), and

MS Douce 228 (late fifteenthcentury) .

The longer a version is distinguished from the shorter b version by the inclusion of romance-like material, such as the story of Richard's fabulous birth; the flighto f

Cassodorien from the presence of the Eucharist; an extended narrative of Richard's 229

German captivity; his eventual escape by defeating a lion in single combat; and Richard's first cannibalism (Finlayson, "Richard" 160).12 The b version, which predates a and begins with the events leading to the Third Crusade, is shorter and is considered by some scholars to be "the closest to the 'original'" (Brunner cited in Finlayson, "Richard" 179).

The oldest extant manuscripts, Auchinleck (c. 1330) and Egerton 2826 (c. 1375-1400), are representative of the b version. As Nicola McDonald notes, the "defective nature of

Richards manuscripts make it difficult to assert with confidence exactly how much fabulous material each extant text originally contained" (147)

The Middle English romance Richard Coer de Lyon combines historical and romance materials in its retelling of the putative history of the Third Crusade. The story begins with King Henry of England's marriage to Princess Cassadorien, the daughter of the King of Antioch, who bears him three children, Richard, John and a daughter. One day, Cassadorien, who cannot endure the presence of the Host at Mass, is detained in the church; upon seeing the Host, she flies up through thereof, bearing off the daughter but dropping her son, John. Soon after, Richard ascends to the throne and then tests his knights by meeting them in combat dressed successively in black, red, and white armour.

Taking the best of them, Sir Thomas Mutton and Sir Fulk Doyly, he visits the Holy Land in pilgrim's habit. He is imprisoned by the Emperor of Germany, has an affair with

Emperor's daughter, and kills the Emperor's son in a match. Later, Richard tears out the

Brunner's archetype for the a version is MS Caius Cambridge 175 (c. 1425-50), which includes not only the "A" version of RCL but also two other romances featuring English heroes: Beves and Athleston. The a version of RCL also appears in British Library Additional MS 31042 ("Thornton") which features The Romaunce of Duke Rowland and of Sir Ottuel offSpayne. 230

heart of a lion sent to devour him, and finally returns to England after being ransomed for half its wealth.

A few months later, Richards amasses an army and embarks on a Crusade. In

Acre, Richard falls ill and longs for pork. When no pork can be found, an old knight convinces Richard's steward to prepare and serve a boiled Saracen head. Richard relishes his meal and merely laughs when he later learns he has inadvertently consumed Saracen flesh. Later, Richard invites Saladin's messengers to dinner and serves them the heads of the executed Saracen princes. The King, to the horror of his guests, dines on another head and remarks that the Christian army will not starve so long as a Saracen is left. When the

Saracens deny that they have the True Cross, he slays all his prisoners except twenty, preserved to report the news.

As the war continues, Richard and Multon take several cities and slay all the inhabitants. The French king, Philip, accepts a financial reward and in return spares the cities he intended to capture. Richard berates Philip, takes the cities, and kills the inhabitants. Later, the English and the French besiege Babylon, Saladin gives the English king a demonic horse with the intention of killing the unsuspecting monarch. Richard receives heavenly guidance for the handling of the horse and then slays the pagan host.

After capturing Jaffa, Richard arranges a three year truce with Saladin, and sails back to

England.