To be a medievalist, Bernard Cerquiglini has written, is to take a stand on the Chanson de Roland.¹ In the song’s long critical history, this has meant taking sides on questions such as Roland’s heroism or his démesure, on the poem’s composition by a poet of genius or a singer of tales. Two things, at least, seemed beyond debate: first, that the poem casts the Saracens as a fierce and intractable Other, as epitomized in Roland’s unforgettable rallying cry, “Pagans are wrong and Christians are right” (1015) (Paien unt tort e crestïens unt dreit); and second, that women have little...

In Chapter 1 we read the Chanson de Roland as a text transforming the culture of parias into a culture of crusade, fixing the binary opposition between Christians and Saracens through its differential deployment of the female characters Bramimonde and Aude. In this chapter, we turn to La Prise d’Orange, the most fully elaborated version of the epic of the Saracen queen. Ostensibly set during the reign of Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious, it recounts epic hero Guillaume Fierebrace’s conquest of the city, giving him the name by which he is known to literary history: Guillaume d’Orange. A pivotal part...

“In the beginning was the road.”¹ With this one famous line, the eminent medievalist Joseph Bédier summed up his theory on the origins of the Chanson de Roland. The road was the pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostela and the theory was that the Roland was composed by a poet of genius—possibly a cleric from one of the monasteries on the trail—to popularize pilgrimage sites along the way. In Chapter 1, we examined the way the Roland negotiates the transition from a culture of parias to a culture of crusade. In this chapter we turn to another work...

In Chapter 3 the Iberian setting of Floire et Blancheflor served as the starting point for an alternate vision of translatio, displacing our focus from feudal Europe toward the mercantile Mediterranean. In this chapter, I read the Welsh setting of two lais of Marie de France as what Mary Louise Pratt calls a contact zone: an area of “the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, whose trajectories now intersect” in ways that reveal “the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination.”¹

Though...

In the twelfth century, Old French verse articulated the feudal nobility’s emerging self-consciousness in tension with the hegemony of Latin church culture. As we have seen in Parts I and II, the vernacular genres of the chanson de geste and courtly romance served as vehicles to explore (among other things) the complexities of cultural contact and the contradictions of feudal society. The vitality of these genres was linked to that of the historical conjuncture in which they appeared. But it was not to last. Already in 1180, the political balance among the princes who patronized the first wave of vernacular...

The diversion of the Fourth Crusade and the Western sack of Constantinople in 1204 inaugurated a Latin “empire” that, like the crusader states themselves, constituted an early example of European colonialism. Of the two vernacular accounts of this expedition, Robert de Clari’s La Conquête de Constantinople has long suffered by comparison with the more celebrated chronicle of Geoffroy de Villehardouin, one of the crusade’s organizers.¹ Impugned for its historical inaccuracies and stylistic poverty, it at best attracts notice for Robert’s fondness for colorful detail, condescendingly praised as revealing the perspective of the common man.² Alexandre Micha’s assessment is typical: Clari,...

In this chapter, we turn to La Fille du comte de Pontieu, a curious thirteenth-century prose romance that radically unsettles the medieval Europe “of simple paternity and unambiguous truths and meanings” underlying so much literary historiography.¹ Sometimes called the first French “nouvelle,” it tells a strange tale of rape, attempted murder, apostasy, and reconversion.² Like La Conquête de Constantinople, it emanates from the region where vernacular prose first emerged. Like Floire et Blancheflor, it takes the Santiago pilgrimage trail as a plot device to transport its heroine deep into medieval Iberia, imagined as a space of hybridity where military confrontation...

In his 1882 essay “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation,” Ernest Renan singled out the Albigensian Crusade, along with the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, as historical traumas all Frenchmen had in common: “Tout citoyen français doit avoir oublié la Saint-Barthélemy, les massacres du Midi au XIIIe siècle.”¹ The notion that the cohesion of a nation is grounded in its past is of course central to the Romantic nationalisms of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Yet Renan’s formulation, as Benedict Anderson points out, is somewhat peculiar: “in the ominous tone of revenue-codes and military conscription laws,” he was instructing his readers already to...