'Es Tu De Paenisme U De Crestiënté

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'Es Tu De Paenisme U De Crestiënté Rebecca Anne Taylor ‘ES TU DE PAENISME U DE CRESTIËNTÉ?’: REPRESENTATIONS OF RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MUSLIMS AND CHRISTIANS IN THE EARLIEST CHANSONS DE GESTE MA Thesis in Medieval Studies Central European University Budapest CEU eTD Collection September 2017 ‘ES TU DE PAENISME U DE CRESTIËNTÉ?’: REPRESENTATIONS OF RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MUSLIMS AND CHRISTIANS IN THE EARLIEST CHANSONS DE GESTE by Rebecca Anne Taylor (United States of America) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Medieval Studies. Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU. ____________________________________________ Chair, Examination Committee ____________________________________________ Thesis Supervisor ____________________________________________ Examiner ____________________________________________ Examiner CEU eTD Collection Budapest September 2017 ‘ES TU DE PAENISME U DE CRESTIËNTÉ?’: REPRESENTATIONS OF RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MUSLIMS AND CHRISTIANS IN THE EARLIEST CHANSONS DE GESTE by Rebecca Anne Taylor (United States of America) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Medieval Studies. Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU. ____________________________________________ External Reader CEU eTD Collection Budapest September 2017 ‘ES TU DE PAENISME U DE CRESTIËNTÉ?’: REPRESENTATIONS OF RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MUSLIMS AND CHRISTIANS IN THE EARLIEST CHANSONS DE GESTE by Rebecca Anne Taylor (United States of America) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Medieval Studies. Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU. ____________________________________________ External Supervisor CEU eTD Collection Budapest September 2017 I, the undersigned, Rebecca Anne Taylor, candidate for the MA degree in Medieval Studies, declare herewith that the present thesis is exclusively my own work, based on my research and only such external information as properly credited in notes and bibliography. I declare that no unidentified and illegitimate use was made of the work of others, and no part of the thesis infringes on any person’s or institution’s copyright. I also declare that no part of the thesis has been submitted in this form to any other institution of higher education for an academic degree. Budapest, 30 September 2017 __________________________ Signature CEU eTD Collection Abstract This thesis analyzes the literary representations of religious difference between Christians and Muslims in the earliest twelfth-century Old French chansons de geste: La Chanson de Roland, La Chanson de Guillaume, and Gormond et Isembart. Scholarship has tended to focus on a single chanson or on the evolution of the representations, either in the genre at large or comparatively. Novel approaches favor postcolonial readings, tracing the medieval roots of racism, violence, and intolerance. This study maintains that the primary form of difference in these texts is religion. Accordingly, the first chapter considers alternative forms of difference (racial/physical and ethnic/cultural), ultimately showing that alterity is principally imagined and reinforced through religion. The second chapter turns to how the representations both correspond to and deviate from medieval Christian perceptions of Islam and Muslims. The final chapter examines how religious difference is intensified and legitimized through violence, holy war, conversion, and martyrdom. Though foremost an analysis of the representations of religious difference in the three earliest chansons de geste, the thesis situates these texts within the broader medieval dialogue between Christians and Muslims and against the backdrop of Crusader ideology. CEU eTD Collection i Acknowledgements Above all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Marianne Sághy, who graciously provided supervision during her own sabbatical and after I postponed my thesis submission. I am particularly grateful for her patience, her positivity, and her support of my every decision. I am also grateful to Dr. Tivadar Palágyi of Eötvös Loránd University for his suggestions on research and feedback on my work and to Dr. Andreea Marculescu, my former French professor and undergraduate honors thesis supervisor, who is herself an alumna of the CEU Department of Medieval Studies and who encouraged me to come to CEU in the first place. I would like to thank all my professors, my colleagues, and the staff of the Department of Medieval Studies for a memorable year, but especially our Department Head, Dr. Katalin Szende, for her kindness to me. I would like to thank my parents and sisters for their love and understanding from 6000+ miles away and the DiCarlo family for generously offering to let me write at their home. Last but far from least, I would like to thank two of my colleagues particularly, Sibil Gruntar-Vilfan and Mihaela Vučić, for their precious friendship that kept me going throughout our unforgettable one-year adventure. CEU eTD Collection ii Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Christian-Muslim Relations and the Chansons de Geste ....................................................... 1 The Earliest Chansons de geste ............................................................................................. 3 Genre: Definition, Form, and Content ............................................................................... 3 Corpus: The Earliest Chansons de Geste ........................................................................... 5 The Chansons de Geste: Historical Models ........................................................................... 7 Methodology .......................................................................................................................... 9 Thesis Structure ................................................................................................................... 10 Chapter 1—The Imagination of Religious Difference: Collective Identity, Mirror Images, and Alterity ..................................................................................................................................... 13 1.1 Collective Identities: Pagan Saracens and Christian Franks .......................................... 14 1.2 Mirror Images and Alterity ............................................................................................ 18 1.3 Forms of Difference ....................................................................................................... 24 1.3.1 Physical and Racial Others ..................................................................................... 24 1.3.2 Ethnic and Cultural Others...................................................................................... 28 CEU eTD Collection 1.3.3 Religious Others...................................................................................................... 31 Chapter 2—The (Mis)representation of Religious Difference: The Context of Medieval Christian-Muslim Relations and the Chansons de Geste ......................................................... 33 1. Writing Christian-Muslim Encounters and the Chansons de Geste ................................ 34 iii 1.1 Historical Background on Medieval Western Christian Perceptions of Islam .......... 35 1.2. The Place of the Chansons de geste in Christian-Muslim Relations ........................ 37 2. (Mis)representations of Religious Difference .................................................................. 38 2.1 Misrepresentations of Islamic Beliefs ........................................................................ 39 2.2 The Polemics of the Chansons de geste: Fiction and History ................................... 45 Chapter 3—The Extremities of Religious Difference: Violence, Holy War, Conversion, and Martyrdom ............................................................................................................................... 49 3.1 Rethinking Violence .................................................................................................. 49 3.2 “Chrestïentét aidez a sustenir!”: Holy War ............................................................... 57 3.3 Crossing the Confessional Divide: Conversion ........................................................ 62 3.4 The Ideal of Martyrdom ............................................................................................ 69 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 73 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 75 CEU eTD Collection iv Preliminary Note on Editions and Translations All textual references in this thesis are to the Old French originals (i.e., not in modern French or English translation). For Gormont et Isembart, I have relied solely on the Old French. In the cases of La Chanson de Roland and La Chanson de Guillaume, I have used the bilingual, parallel-text critical editions with the modern French translations
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