Abstract
Romance was the most popular secular genre in late medieval England, and approximately 120 romances in Middle English survive today.1 Written in the vernacular, these popular texts circulated widely and enjoyed a diverse audience, composed of both elite and lower status readers and listeners. Composed, on the whole, in verse, Middle English romances flourished in the years 1350–1500 and feature stock characters, motifs, and storylines, including references to Saracens and to the East that occur with surprising regularity. In the course of my research for this book, I identified forty-two Middle English verse romances that refer to Saracens or the East, albeit in widely varying ways, including descriptions of monstrous Saracens, cross-religious battles or tournaments, the wearing of Saracen textiles, and the conversion of Saracens to Christianity. Appendix 1 details these forty-two romances, their date of composition, number of extant manuscripts, and their Saracen elements, indicating an enduring fascination with the Saracen East throughout the Middle Ages.
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Notes
Harriet E. Hudson, “Toward a Theory of Popular Literature: The Case of the Middle English Romances,” Journal of Popular Culture 23.3 (1989): 35.
Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval Romance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
Carol F. Heffernan, The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 2
Anna Czarnowus, Fantasies of the Other’s Body in Middle English Oriental Romance (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013), 20–21.
Lynn Tarte Ramey, Christian, Saracen and Genre in Medieval French Literature (London: Routledge, 2001); Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries; Heng, Empire of Magic; Calkin, Saracens; Akbari, Idols.
For more on Bevis after the medieval period, see Jennifer Fellows, “Bevis Redivivus: The Printed Editions of Sir Bevis of Hampton,” Romance Reading on the Book: Essays on Medieval Narrative Presented to Maldwyn Mills, ed. Fellows and Maldwyn Mills (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), 251–268. For a comprehensive list of extant manuscript and print versions of Bevis to 1711, see Fellows, “Bevis: A Textual Survey,” Fellows and Djordjevic, 104–113.
Judith Weiss, “The Date of the Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone,” Medium Aevum 55 (1986): 237–241. On the relationship between Boeve and the Middle English Bevis, see Ivana Djordjevic, “From Boeve to Bevis: The Translator at Work,” Fellows and Djordjevic, 67–79.
Unless otherwise indicated, all references for the Middle English Bevis of Hampton are taken from Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury, ed., Four Romances of England (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999). Hereafter referred to in the text as Bevis.
All references unless otherwise indicated are from Floris and Blancheflour, Sentimental and Humorous Romances, ed. Erik Kooper (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2006). This edition is based upon the Auchinleck text, with the first 366 lines supplemented from Egerton.
References to all other versions are from George H. McKnight ed., King Horn, Floriz and Blauncheflur, the Assumption of Our Lady (London: Oxford University Press, 1901). Hereafter referred to in the text as Floris.
Frances McSparran, ed., Octovian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 41–42. All references to Octavian are from this edition. Hereafter referred to in the text as Octavian.
Hsu-Ming Teo, “Orientalism and Mass Market Romance Novels in the Twentieth Century,” Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual, ed. Ned Curthoys and Debjani Ganguly (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 279.
jay Dixon, The Romance Fiction of Mills and Boon 1909–1990s (London: UCL Press Ltd, 1999), 53.
See also Juliet Flesch, From Australia with Love: A History of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels (Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2004), 213.
A dedicated African American romance imprint, “Arabesque,” emerged in 1994, published by Kensington and which was subsumed into Harlequin Mills & Boon’s Kimani Press in 2005. Rita B. Dandridge and Gwendolyn E. Osborne led early scholarship on these romances (see, e.g., Dandridge, Black Women’s Activism: Reading African American Women’s Historical Romances (New York: Peter Lang, 2004)
Osborne, “‘Women Who Look Like Me’: Cultural Identity and Reader Responses to African American Romance Novels,” Race/Gender/Media: Considering Diversity across Audiences, Content, and Producers, ed. Rebecca Ann Lind (New York: Pearson, 2004), 61–68.
Jessica Taylor, “And You Can Be My Sheikh: Gender, Race, and Orientalism in Contemporary Romance Novels,” Journal of Popular Culture 40.6 (2007): 1036.
Julia Bettinoti and Mari-Françoise Truel, “Lust and Dust: Desert Fabula in Romances and Media,” Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 3.1–2 (1997), 184
E. M. Hull, The Sheik (London: E. Nash and Grayson, 1919).
See Patricia Raub, “Issues of Passion and Power in E. M. Hull’s The Sheik,” Women’s Studies 21 (1992): 119–128
and Ellen Turner, “E. M. Hull and the Valentino Cult: Gender Reversal after The Sheik,” Journal of Gender Studies 20.2 (2011): 171–182.
See Susan L. Blake, “What ‘Race’ Is the Sheik? Rereading a Desert Romance,” Doubled Plots: Romance and History , ed. Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 67–85
and Elizabeth Gargano, “‘English Sheikhs’ and Arab Stereotypes: E. M. Hull, T. E. Lawrence, and the Imperial Masquerade,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48.2 (2006): 171–186.
See, in particular, Hilary P. Dannenberg, “Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup and the Desert Romance Tradition in Post/Colonial Anglophone Fiction,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 20.1 (2008): 69–88; and Hsu-Ming Teo, “Historicizing The Sheik : Comparisons of the British Novel and the American Film,” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010): n.p.
Emily A. Haddad, “Bound to Love: Captivity in Harlequin Sheikh Novels,” Empowerment versus Oppression: Twenty-First Century Views of Popular Romance Novels, ed. Sally Goade (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 42–64
Anne K. Kaler, “Conventions of Captivity in Romance Novels,” Romantic Conventions, ed. Anne K. Kaler and Rosemary E. Johnson-Kurek (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999), 86–99.
Amira Jarmakani also briefly discusses abduction in “‘The Sheikh Who Loved Me’: Romancing the War on Terror,” Signs 35.4 (2010): 1004–1006.
Teo, “The Romance of White Nations: Imperialism, Popular Culture and National Histories,” After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation, ed. Antoinette M. Burton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 279–292
Hsu-Ming Teo, Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012); Jarmakani, “The Sheikh Who Loved Me”
Amira Jarmakani, “Desiring the Big Bad Blade: Racing the Sheikh in Desert Romances,” American Quarterly 63.4 (2011): 895–928.
Taylor, “Be My Sheikh,” 1042; Rachel Anderson, The Purple Heart Throbs: The Sub-Literature of Love (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974), 189; Jarmakani, “The Sheikh Who Loved Me,” 1010.
“About Us,” Mills & Boon, May 29, 2015, https://www.millsandboon.co.uk/Content/ContentPage/5. The British publishing company Mills & Boon was set up in 1908 and in 1971 was bought by the Canadian company Harlequin Enterprises (established in 1949). For more on the publishing company, see Dixon, Romance Fiction; and Joseph McAleer, Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills and Boon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Since the end of 2010, Mills & Boon have started to move away from formulaic title conventions. Thus, some more recently published sheikh romances have titles that do not always include the signifiers “sheikh,” “desert,” or “sultan,” for example, Abby Green, Secrets of the Oasis (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2011)
and Maisey Yates, Forged in the Desert Heat (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2014).
Louise Gerard, A Sultan’s Slave (London: Mills & Boon, 1921).
Elizabeth Milton, Desert Quest (London: Mills & Boon, 1930)
Maureen Heeley, Flame of the Desert (London: Mills & Boon, 1934)
Marjorie Moore, Circles in the Sand (London: Mills & Boon, 1935).
Violet Winspear, Tawny Sands (London: Mills & Boon, 1970)
Margaret Rome, Bride of the Rif (London: Mills & Boon, 1972)
Violet Winspear, Palace of the Pomegranate (London: Mills & Boon, 1974).
E. S. Stevens, The Veil: A Romance of Tunisia (London: Mills & Boon, 1909).
E. S. Stevens, The Earthen Drum (London: Mills & Boon, 1911)
E. S. Stevens, The Mountain of God (London: Mills & Boon, 1911)
Ida Wylie, The Red Mirage (London: Mills & Boon, 1913)
E. S. Stevens, Sarah Eden (London: Mills & Boon, 1914).
Jean Herbert, Desert Locust (London: Mills & Boon, 1951).
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© 2016 Amy Burge
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Burge, A. (2016). Saracens and Sheikhs: Romance in Context. In: Representing Difference in the Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-59356-6_2
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