The medieval reception of Alexander the Great inspired a complicated literary corpus not simply because it involved so many source-texts and languages, but because it incorporated such diverse perspectives on the conqueror. Beginning with a discussion of the evolution of this corpus, this book examines the manuscripts, readership, and historical contexts of the earliest surviving Alexander romance in England, Thomas de Kent's Anglo-Norman Roman de toute chevalerie. To shed light on the origins and treatment of this romance, Charles Russell Stone reads each manuscript within the contexts of its production, scribal interpolations, and patronage and readership in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. While Thomas recalls a range of attitudes towards his protagonist in the late twelfth century, when the recovery of classical histories and composition of vernacular romance informed conflicting attitudes towards Alexander's legacy, scribes and readers of his poem appropriated it as a continuing commentary on power, politics, and the relevance of the Alexander legend in their own time. Each of the three major manuscripts of Thomas's poem thus offers a unique text informed by unique literary and political contexts, which this book situates within the ongoing debate over Alexander's reception as a paradigm of imperial authority or failure in late medieval England.

Representations of Muslims have never been more common in the Western imagination than they are today. Building on Orientalist stereotypes constructed over centuries, the figure of the wily Arab has given rise, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, to the "Islamist" terrorist. In Idols in the East, Suzanne Conklin Akbari explores the premodern background of some of the Orientalist types still pervasive in present-day depictions of Muslims-the irascible and irrational Arab, the religiously deviant Islamist-and about how these stereotypes developed over time. Idols in the East contributes to the recent surge of interest in European encounters with Islam and the Orient in the premodern world. Focusing on the medieval period, Akbari examines a broad range of texts including encyclopedias, maps, medical and astronomical treatises, chansons de geste, romances, and allegories to paint an unusually diverse portrait of medieval culture. Among the texts she considers are The Book of John Mandeville, The Song of Roland, Parzival, and Dante's Divine Comedy. From them she reveals how medieval writers and readers understood and explained the differences they saw between themselves and the Muslim other. Looking forward, Akbari also comes to terms with how these medieval conceptions fit with modern discussions of Orientalism, thus providing an important theoretical link to postcolonial and postimperial scholarship on later periods. Far reaching in its implications and balanced in its judgments, Idols in the East will be of great interest to not only scholars and students of the Middle Ages but also anyone interested in the roots of Orientalism and its tangled relationship to modern racism and anti-Semitism.

A collection of original essays exploring the intersections between medieval and postcolonial studies.

As one of the most important, influential and capacious genres of the middle ages, the romance was exploited for a variety of social and cultural reasons: to celebrate and justify war and conflict, chivalric ideologies, and national, local and regional identities; to rationalize contemporary power structures, and identify the present with the legendary past; to align individual desires and aspirations with social virtues. But the romance in turn exploited available figures of value, appropriating the tropes and strategies of religious and historical writing, and cannibalizing and recreating its own materials for heightened ideological effect. The essays in this volume consider individual romances, groups of writings and the genre more widely, elucidating a variety of exploitative manoeuvres in terms of text, context, and intertext. Contributors: Neil Cartlidge, Ivana Djordjevic, Judith Weiss, Melissa Furrow, Rosalind Field, Diane Vincent, Corinne Saunders, Arlyn Diamond, Anna Caughey, Laura Ashe

The medieval reception of Alexander the Great inspired a complicated literary corpus not simply because it involved so many source-texts and languages, but because it incorporated such diverse perspectives on the conqueror. Beginning with a discussion of the evolution of this corpus, this book examines the manuscripts, readership, and historical contexts of the earliest surviving Alexander romance in England, Thomas de Kent’s Anglo-Norman Roman de toute chevalerie. To shed light on the origins and treatment of this romance, Charles Russell Stone reads each manuscript within the contexts of its production, scribal interpolations, and patronage and readership in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. While Thomas recalls a range of attitudes towards his protagonist in the late twelfth century, when the recovery of classical histories and composition of vernacular romance informed conflicting attitudes towards Alexander’s legacy, scribes and readers of his poem appropriated it as a continuing commentary on power, politics, and the relevance of the Alexander legend in their own time. Each of the three major manuscripts of Thomas’s poem thus offers a unique text informed by unique literary and political contexts, which this book situates within the ongoing debate over Alexander’s reception as a paradigm of imperial authority or failure in late medieval England.

Alexander the Great was one of the legendary Nine Worthies in the medieval canon of ancient and modern heroes, and medieval writers exploited his legend in a wide variety of literary and didactic texts. Addressing the classical legacy to the Middle Ages as expressed in four centuries of vernacular narratives, this volume offers the first systematic collective study of Alexander the Great's thematic prominence in medieval culture. Contributors from Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States combine sensitive textual analyses with perspectives from such diverse fields as art history, codicology, anthropology, sociology, the history of mentalities, and postcolonial theory. Overall, the collection offers a provocative rethinking of the monumental medieval French tradition of Alexander the Great, as well as valuable insight into the emergence and transformations of French literature between the early twelfth century and the end of the Middle Ages.

This Companion presents fifteen original and engaging essays by leading scholars on one of the most influential genres of Western literature. Chapters describe the origins of early verse romance in twelfth-century French and Anglo-Norman courts and analyze the evolution of verse and prose romance in France, Germany, England, Italy, and Spain throughout the Middle Ages. The volume introduces a rich array of traditions and texts and offers fresh perspectives on the manuscript context of romance, the relationship of romance to other genres, popular romance in urban contexts, romance as mirror of familiar and social tensions, and the representation of courtly love, chivalry, 'other' worlds and gender roles. Together the essays demonstrate that European romances not only helped to promulgate the ideals of elite societies in formation, but also held those values up for questioning. An introduction, a chronology and a bibliography of texts and translations complete this lively, useful overview.