Space is such a fundamental part of human experience that it is difficult to imagine a spaceless reality. In everyday life, we rely continually on the concept of universally valid spatial measurements in order to read maps and exchange directions. So pervasive is the concept of space as uniform, measurable distance that we can forget that extension is not the only quality of space. One square mile in downtown Tokyo is not the same as one square mile in Montana. Furthermore, one identical square mile in Montana is not the same for each person living there. For human beings, real...

Having now examined some of the contextual questions that underlie a study of spatiality and place in medieval literature, I would like to begin with an examination of the Life of Saint Alexis (ca. 1080). As we will see, spatiality and place often function interdependently in a literary work. They represent different facets of space—distinct ways of writing and thinking about what is in reality an irreducible whole: the work. They are meant to help us tease out the work’s complexities in order to better distinguish the multiple ways in which space functions within a literary text. The notions...

At first glance, a warrior would appear to be quite different from a saint such as Alexis. War involves a resolute engagement with the real spaces of this world and the values attached to them. Alexis would surely have considered such engagement antithetical to his saintly calling. Roland, however, must strategize, fight, kill, and die in order to ensure his lord’s sovereignty over certain spaces. In other words, his role and his destiny are very much of this world.

In reality, however, despite their extremely different earthly vocations, Roland and Saint Alexis are remarkably similar characters. This similarity appears especially...

The legend of Tristan and Iseut has reached us through multiple, sometimes fragmentary, textual manifestations and wide-ranging poetic and linguistic traditions. Because of this textual diversity, I will take a broader approach with this medieval legend than I have done with the Life of Saint Alexis and the Song of Roland. The many versions of the legend begin with Marie de France’s Le Lai du chèvrefeuille (ca. 1165), the fragmentary Old French verse romances of Thomas (ca. 1170), Béroul (ca. 1180), and the Folies Tristan of Oxford and Bern (ca. 1185), and continue through various verse and prose “translations” well...

The unlawful, magically induced love shared by Tristan and Iseut is the legend’s most apparent and powerful locus of belonging. And yet, if we consider that belonging is typically associated with values such as stability, community, and identity, we see that their love, like so much else in the legend, represents yet another deficient form of belonging. In an incisive essay, Robert Castel evokes the systematic disaffiliation experienced by the lovers throughout the story: “Leur vie est un arrachement perpétuel par rapport à toutes les territorialisations familiales, sociales, géographiques” (“Their life is a perpetual tearing away from all familial, social,...

As we have seen, in western thinking since Kant, human subjectivity and its categories of understanding are seen as ineluctable filters for all perception, including that of space. Epistemologically speaking, we have no guarantee that our perceptions of the world are identical with the world. This centrality of the human subject in perception has become incontrovertible in our time. Historically speaking, however, this was not always true. When we study literature of other time periods, especially those far removed from our own, we must not forget that people of other times may have understood themselves and their world very differently....