Abstract
In the South English Legendary, Thomas Becket’s mother, Alisaundre Becket, is a resilient, non-Christian woman who speaks Arabic. Although Alisaundre Becket eventually converts to Christianity, adopts a Christian name, and lives in England, she never learns English. Drawing on feminist theory by black feminists and women of color, I argue that the characteristic that racializes and marginalizes Alisaundre Becket – her voice, perceived as foreign and strange – also empowers her, and makes it possible for her to resist erasure as a raced woman in an oppressive space. In the process of asserting her will, we witness one of the earliest moments of racial identity perceived, translated, and portrayed as distinct from religious identity in the Middle Ages.
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Notes
I am referring to Bodleian Library MS Laud Miscellaneous 108 as the South English Legendary. All citations are from Carl Horstmann’s 1887 EETS edition and are given by page number followed by line numbers.
I deliberately do not refer to Alisaundre as a ‘Saracen,’ since the text does not label her as such. While the specific language she speaks does not affect my argument, for the sake of clarity I’ve described it as Arabic, since this was the language the majority would have spoken in thirteenth-century Jerusalem.
I am theorizing Alisaundre Becket’s racialization with Geraldine Heng’s new definition of race from her phenomenal book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, in mind: ‘a repeating tendency […] to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups’ (Heng, 2018, 3).
Robert Mills has made significant contributions to our understanding of the way difference operates in the SEL. However, I disagree with Mills’ arguments about Alisaundre Becket’s assimilated, Christian identity. Mills concludes his analysis of Alisaundre’s identity with her conversion and overlooks this crucial post-conversion moment that depicts how she has held onto her native language and how limited her contact with English society is.
While modern scholars relegate Alisaundre Becket to the footnotes, she became a historical and literary sensation in the Victorian period. Charles Dickens discusses her in his A Child’s History of England (Dickens, [1851–53] 1905). Sir Lewis Morris writes a poem titled ‘Gilbert Beckett and the Fair Saracen’ (Morris, n.d.).
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Rajabzadeh, S. Alisaundre Becket: Thomas Becket’s resilient, Muslim, Arab mother in the South English Legendary. Postmedieval 10, 293–303 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00132-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00132-0