Abstract
This chapter discusses the handling of mixed ethnic or cultural identity, primarily in Middle English romances, through a focus upon children of mixed origin. While ‘mixed marriages’ are very common in romances, offspring from such relationships are rarely mentioned, a rarity perhaps suggestive that hybridity is viewed as problematic and disruptive. Romances address issues of hybridity broadly and exhibit a range of strategies to deal with the presence of mixed offspring. While some narrative strategies suggest hostility and a refusal to recognize hybridity’s existence, texts which include offspring of mixed origin illustrate hybridity in action extinguishing itself by pointing to sameness. Any lingering difference is minimized to the point of irrelevance so that the hybrid ceases to be hybrid but becomes recognized as same, or at least as same enough. Among these stories, a hero born with partial supernatural origins is common. However, stories of supernatural origin ought not to be read in literal terms but as coded expressions at the popular level of discourse as to how a ‘mixed’ individual can resolve unwanted hybridity and become welcomed fully into the group. These texts reflect the concerns and coping mechanisms of a profoundly hybrid medieval English society.
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Notes
- 1.
Daniel Kline, “Children and Childhood”, pp. 21–22. The “Ariès effect” is an allusion to the work of Philippe Ariès who argued in Centuries of Childhood that “In medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist” (p. 129).
- 2.
Paul Broyles, “Foreign Guardianship”, pp. 171–194.
- 3.
“Introduction”, pp. xxii–xxvi. In her commentary note upon lines 4303–8 in Volume 2, p. 404, of her edition, Fellows notes, “It is a characteristic of the ME Romance that it envinces much less interest in the hero’s children than does Boeve” (the Anglo-Norman version).
- 4.
Brian Lee, “Seen and Sometimes Heard”, p. 41.
- 5.
Salisbury and Weldon, Explanatory Notes to Lybeaus Desconus, p. 182, note 2199. However, it is not at all uncommon for romances to end without mention of children within a marriage.
- 6.
In “Victimized Children”, Tasdelen, for example, points out on p. 160 that Floris’s father “does not approve of his son Floris’ affair with Blanchelour, a non-Christian [sic] slave girl …. Apart from the difference in social rank, the difference of race and faith is presented as a reason for rejection of the lovers’ union, and implies the significance of keeping the bloodline pure”. Given that children are not mentioned at the end of the story, is the reader to understand that the father’s concern about the purity of his bloodline narratively lingers?
- 7.
Calkin, Saracens and the Making of English Identity, pp. 81–82. See also Stephen F. Kruger, “Conversion and Medieval Categories”, pp. 169–76; Ambrisco, “Process of Conversion”, pp. 213–21.
- 8.
Dialogus de Scaccario, edited and translated by Johnson, p. 53. For some contextualizing discussions of FitzNigel’s statement, see Thomas, p. 68, p. 154 and Christopher Daniel, p. 31.
- 9.
Thomas, pp. 67–69; for a less optimistic view see Daniel, pp. 26–33. The situation for the native English was better, of course, relatively speaking in comparison to the immediate aftermath of the 1066 Conquest. In Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity, Cohen points out that during the reign of Stephen and not that many years before FitzNigel’s statement, the divide was very much a part of people’s ordinary lived experience in medieval Norwich: “the city was still composed of a privileged minority of former aliens living alongside a majority population who could not fail to notice that differences in status and prestige may have lessened over the years but continued everywhere to be visible. Norwich was a hybrid space, a geography that melded differences but left them disjunct” (p. 157). Similarly, in Cultural Difference and Material Culture, Dominique Battles argues “the cultural distinctions and conflicts between Anglo-Saxons and Normans originating with the Norman Conquest of 1066 prevailed well into the fourteenth century and are manifest in a significant number of Middle English romances including King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Sir Orfeo, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Tale of Gamelyn, among others” (p. 2). Interestingly, of the texts which Battles mentions, only Havelok the Dane includes reference to children of mixed ancestry, and that a very cursory one at the very conclusion of its story.
- 10.
Matthews, pp. 26–27.
- 11.
Thomas, p. 73. Three excellent recent discussions of Gerald’s hybridity as shaped on the colonial frontier of the Celtic periphery are those of Cohen in Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity, pp. 77–108; Khanmohamadi in In Light of Another’s Word, pp. 37–56; and various chapters in the volume edited by Henley and McMullen, Gerald of Wales, especially that written by Owain Nash. A more general discussion of Marcher identity can be found in Rhonda Knight’s article “Werewolves, Monsters, and Miracles”, especially at pp. 57–60.
- 12.
Cohen, p. 82.
- 13.
Critical to any debate on hybridity is who is doing (or who is allowed to do) the thinking. Following on from Stephen Silliman’s argument observed in the Introduction, in a discussion over the hybridity of the Eastern Pequot, for example, whose point of view takes precedence in case there is a disagreement? The Eastern Pequot? Those Eastern Pequot judged by someone’s definition (whose?) to be ‘true’ Eastern Pequot? The expert cultural anthropologists with their supposedly impartial academic eye as outsiders? The federal or state government? The United Nations? Different answers to these questions will result from different agencies. The hybridity of the Welsh Marchers in the medieval period was no less a case of whose voice was being listened to in its authoritative definition.
- 14.
Warren, History on the Edge, p. 8.
- 15.
Dolmans, “Locating the Border: Britain and the Welsh Marches in Fouke le Fitz Warren”, pp. 133–34.
- 16.
William Langland: Piers Plowman A Parallel-Text Edition, edited by Schmidt, B.5.312–17.
- 17.
Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, pp. 8–9.
- 18.
For two groundbreaking arguments that race as a concept existed in the Middle Ages, see Thomas Hahn’s 2001 “The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World” and Geraldine Heng’s 2011 two-part article, “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”.
- 19.
Lewis-Simpson, “Assimilation or Hybridization? A Study of Personal Names from the Danelaw”, p. 19. The reference to “situational construct” is to Geary’s article “Ethnic Identity as a Situational Construct”. Lewis-Simpson’s other references are to Barth’s introduction to his edited collection Ethnic Groups and Boundaries.
- 20.
As Robert Bartlett has pointed out in “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity” using examples from the twentieth century, “Ethnic identity results from a process of labelling (identification). This may be self-labelling, but labelling by others is also involved, since ethnic identity may be contested. In the 1930s many people who considered themselves Germans were told they were not; they were Jews instead. It made a good deal of difference which label stuck. This labelling and self-labelling is also strategic and situational. To identify oneself or others in this way is almost invariably to claim something or deny something. To call oneself, or be called, ‘black’ or ‘British’ or ‘Irish’ or ‘Jewish’ is not a neutral statement of the obvious but a political and historical assertion, with implications for one’s rights and relationships. Different identities can be asserted in different situations” (p. 40).
- 21.
See especially Robert Stacey, “The Conversion of Jews to Christianity”, pp. 276–278, pp. 281–283, and Kathy Lavezzo’s summary of scholarship, “Jews in Britain-Medieval to Modern”, pp. 1–10. See also Calkin, pp. 80–82; Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain, pp. 28–29.
- 22.
The mingling of ethnicities is necessary in the Aeneid, first, because in Book V the remaining Trojan women were left behind in Sicily and, second, because presumably so many young Ausonian men have died in battle against the Trojans. Of the romances considered in this chapter, Havelok the Dane perhaps comes the closest to envisioning something similar to Vergil’s conception in that Havelok presents a foreign Danish (Trojan) army invading and defeating a national English (Ausonian) army. But in Havelok there is a dominant culture and the result of the action is not a new original blending of two old cultures, but the acculturation of one group (the small band of militarily triumphant Danes) into the other group (the defeated majority English) just as happened historically to the militarily triumphant Normans whose descendants were soon absorbed into an ‘English’ identity, however that murky concept might have been construed. The dominant culture, then, to which everyone in medieval English literature wanted to belong—the ethnic identity that mattered in medieval English literature—was, understandably enough, English, even if what that meant was unclear.
- 23.
On Medea in the classical period, see the sources compiled in Ogden’s Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts, pp. 78–94. On Medea in the medieval period, see Morse’s The Medieval Medea, Saunders’s Magic and the Supernatural at pp. 162–69, and also Irvin’s Poetic Voices of John Gower at pp. 217–25.
- 24.
Amanda Holton, Chaucer’s Poetics, p. 15.
- 25.
Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale at ll. 428–30 in The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Benson; Gower’s Confessio Amantis at 2.685–92.
- 26.
On the medieval horror of crossing the colour line as seen particularly in The King of Tars, see Heng’s detailed discussion in Empire of Magic, pp. 227–36 and p. 421 n.75.
- 27.
Handlyng Synne, edited by Furnivall, ll. 198–201.
- 28.
Arthour and Merlin, edited by Macrae-Gibson, ll. 416–19.
- 29.
Ipomadon, edited by Purdie, ll. 6145–63. The term India notoriously lacks geographic precision in medieval texts, but in Book 3 of Marco Polo’s Travels, Greater India roughly corresponds to modern-day Pakistan and India. Lyolyne’s animalistic description in Ipomadon should be noted.
- 30.
Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”, p. 15.
- 31.
Dives and Pauper, edited by Barnum, Part 1, Vol. 2, pp. 118–19, ll. 30–33, l. 19.
- 32.
For the same story in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, see 2.964–74.
- 33.
In The Prose Merlin, “the wemen were sore afeerde, for they sye [the new-born Merlin] more roughe than other childeren that they had seyn …. And ther was none othir women that durste norishe it but the moder, for it was so grysly to sight” (‘Birth of Merlin’, pp. 27–28, at ll. 252–263). Merlin, of course, demonstrates that a child’s physical condition at birth need not be always due to the mother.
- 34.
The King of Tars, edited by Chandler, ll. 770–71. According to Irina Metzler, “Medieval notions of congenital disability were … extremely gendered, in that the prime causes for any disability present (or observable) at birth, or within the first few weeks in the life of an infant, tended to be blamed on some failing of the mother. One should remember, however, that this blame was not exclusively placed on the mother, even if in a majority of arguments the maternal physiology, maternal behavior or moral laxitude were identified as factors. In that minority of causations where paternal blame was identified, it was alongside maternal error …. Since in medieval medical discourse, taken on from classical traditions, the female tended to be viewed purely as a vessel receiving the procreative powers that resided exclusively in the male, it was readily assumed that when things went wrong, this was the result of maternal malfunctioning, whether at a purely anatomical or at a moral level, which caused the pristine paternal seed deposited in the maternal body to be corrupted” (p. 179). The King of Tars neatly fits Metzler’s description: the mother’s paradigmatically unacceptable conversion is an example of corruptive maternal behaviour and moral laxitude, but the father’s unacceptable religion and his imposition of marriage upon his Christian wife are complementary to the child’s disability. When the father converts, his “pristine paternal seed” somehow retroactively converts and the child’s disability is gone. For discussion of the lump baby in King of Tars, see Chandler’s Introduction to his edition, pp. 14–16, as well as Gilbert, “Unnatural Mothers and Monstrous Children”, pp. 333–36, and Heng, Empire of Magic, pp. 228–29.
- 35.
In Fallen Bodies at p. 59, Dyan Elliott has suggested that Muldamarec “represents a kind of transitional stage in perceptions of the supernatural …. The times were changing and that the bird-knight was, historically, doing his last medieval shape-shift from fairy into demon. Fifty years later, Vincent of Beauvais would doubtless have included this remarkable bird-knight in his list of demon-lovers”.
- 36.
References to Bevis of Hampton are from the text edited by Herzman, Drake, and Salisbury. A good discussion of “the fantasy of Englishness” in Bevis of Hampton is that of Thomas Crofts and Robert Rouse in “Middle English Popular Romance and National Identity” at pp. 83–85.
- 37.
Bildhauer, “Medieval European conceptions of blood”, at S72.
- 38.
Two particularly strong recent discussions of the language situation in medieval England are those of Jennifer Alberghini in “Matriarchs and Mother Tongues”, especially at pp. 150–53 in regard to French, and of John Scattergood in Occasions for Writing, pp. 17–37. For an extended study, see Ardis Butterfield’s The Familiar Enemy.
- 39.
But what did looking and acting English entail? The stereotypes associated with the English in the Middle Ages include a reputation for hospitality, rowdy overindulgence in drinking ale, prodigal wastefulness, and, most intriguing of all, the possession of a tail! For these and other medieval stereotypes about the English, see Thomas, The English and the Normans, pp. 297–306.
- 40.
Kofi Campbell for instance, notes the strong connection between Bevis, land, and identity in “Nation-Building Colonialist-Style in Bevis of Hampton”: “Bevis, the wronged and exiled Englishman, has traveled to the lands of the East and South, taken a Christian wife and sired Christian children, taken lands away from the Saracens, and united a great deal of property under his family name. What remains? Why, only to unite all of England under that same name, which the English King Edgar conveniently steps in to do by marrying his daughter to Bevis’s son. So while Bevis himself never becomes king, his actions allow for a unified England to emerge, an England which has now taken land from the Saracens to enlarge its own kingdom and sphere of influence. Bevis’s travels in the Saracens’ lands also allow the text to construct a sense of Englishness against those Saracen, constructing an Englishman who is brave, strong, an able fighter, capable of taking land from his enemies and converting them to Christianity and, most importantly, of bringing these aspects together under a unified banner of Englishness, symbolized by his family’s eventual ascension to the throne” (p. 231). Campbell, however, somewhat overstates his argument: the Saracen lands do not become part of England ruled by Miles but remain separate kingdoms ruled by either Guy (Armenia) or by Bevis himself (Mombrant).
- 41.
Malory: Works, edited by Vinaver, p. 699.
- 42.
Gareth Knight, The Book of Melusine in History, Legend and Romance, pp. 76–77. For another point of view on this matter, see also Kenneth Hodges’s excellent article “Why Malory’s Launcelot is not French” in Mapping Malory, pp. 135–55.
- 43.
On the ambivalent status of Hengest in the medieval and early modern period, see Margaret Lamont’s article “Hengist” in Heroes and Anti-Heroes, pp. 43–57.
- 44.
See Layamon’s Arthur: The Arthurian Section of Layamon’s Brut, edited by Barron and Weinberg.
- 45.
The murky political situation between England, Scotland, and Orkney (which is recognized here as not officially being a part of Scotland until the late fifteenth century) as shadowed in Malory’s Arthurian context is well covered by Hodge in “Sir Gawain, Scotland, Orkney”. For English/Scottish relations during the reign of Edward I, see Matthews, pp. 52–90.
- 46.
On Lanfranc, see Daniel in From Norman Conquest to Magna Carta at p. 32. See also Thomas, pp. 72–73, pp. 285–86.
- 47.
Calkin, p. 90.
- 48.
Cohen, “On Saracen Enjoyment”, p. 121.
- 49.
Hahn, “The Difference the Middle Ages Makes”, p. 10.
- 50.
Whitaker, Black Metaphors, p. 45.
- 51.
In Empire of Magic, p. 229, Heng points out that in this story centred on acts of conversion, it is the Christian princess who first converts to Islam. Heng suggests “perhaps the princess’s terrifying public act of betraying the Christian faith [through conversion to Islam] procures a monstrous lump of flesh” as its result. Texts such as Bevis and King of Tars, of course, accept without question the supposed superiority of Christianity as a religion. Religion—the correct religion—indeed matters very much.
- 52.
Thomas, p. 140.
- 53.
Matthews, p. 68, p. 136.
- 54.
Metzler, p. 166. According to Metzler, the mother is imprinted by the visual images she sees or imagines during intercourse and then pregnancy. A woman who thought of a cow during intercourse, for example, could produce a child which resembles one. The phenomenon is also known as the mother’s mark. According to Angela Florschuetz, “Simply speaking, the mother’s mark writes upon the child’s body the unruly and unpredictable content of his mother’s mind and emotions. A stray thought, a desperate craving, or an abject terror might give rise to the phenomenon, which manifests as an imprint of the women’s mind upon the child’s body—a birthmark in the shape of a longed-for pickle, a deformed nose reminiscent of a wolf’s muzzle” (Marking Maternity, p. 1).
- 55.
See McCracken, The Curse of Eve, The Wound of the Hero at p. 71. For Honorius III’s views on inappropriate wet nurses, see Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 98.
- 56.
The Lays of Marie de France, edited and translated by Gallagher, ll. 463–70.
- 57.
Sir Degaré, edited by Laskaya and Salisbury. In both cases, the recognition of familial connection must happen before catastrophe strikes. If Degaré does not recognize his mother in time he will commit incest with her. If he does not recognize his father in time he may kill (or be killed by) him in battle. Fortunately, Degaré remembers in time to ask his mother (whom he has just married) to try on the magic gloves which fit only his mother’s hands, and Degaré’s father notices the broken tip of his son’s sword, the token he left with Degaré’s mother to be able to recognize his son.
- 58.
Degaré must also not become a faery like his father, but his father will need to become human, as I will discuss later in this chapter.
- 59.
Degaré can be seen to rewrite history when he kills the knight who attempts to rape his beloved, ll. 881–89. He also rewrites the bad history of his father in the way that Degaré comes together with his mother, as Kenneth Eckert points out in “Absent Fathers”: “Degaré, moreover, wins the princess’s body fairly in open trial as his father emphatically did not, in a thematic redo of the fairy knight’s covert molestation of her”.
- 60.
Only Gawain or one of his kin can survive the kiss, a regular feature of the ‘fierce kiss’ literary trope. Lybeaus Desconus, edited by Salisbury and Weldon, Naples MS, p. 134, ll. 2130–38.
- 61.
In their introduction, Salisbury and Weldon note at p. 22 that Guinglain’s “story demonstrates the ramifications of illegitimacy and the lack of a ‘proper’ name in a world that demands identities, genealogies, and verification at every turn”.
- 62.
In his edition of Marie de France’s Lays, Edward Gallagher points out on p. 100 that Yonec affords another example of liminality: “the tunnel in the hillock through which the lady follows the wounded Muldamarec marks a boundary between the ordinary realm of mere mortals and the otherworldly region inhabited by exceptional beings”.
- 63.
Salisbury and Weldon, Explanatory Notes to Lybeaus Desconus, p. 182, note 2192 ff. See also Salisbury’s article “Illegitimacy and the Spurious Mother”, pp. 80–82.
- 64.
Thomas, p. 140.
- 65.
One hopes Guinglain pauses to bury the corpse first, though the text does not mention such! Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival offer a parallel instance. In Wolfram, raised in the forest by a mother who has withdrawn from the world after the violent death of her husband in battle and who has instructed her servants to “keep all knighthood” from her son, when at the start of Book III Parzival by chance encounters three knights while out hunting he immediately begins to pressure his mother into letting him go to Arthur’s court. See Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, edited and translated by Mustard and Passage, pp. 66–71. Chrétien’s version is similar, except it is the deaths of his two brothers in battle which motivate Perceval’s mother to attempt to prevent her third son from also becoming a knight. See Perceval, Or, The Story of the Grail, edited and translated by Ruth Harwood Cline, ll. 310–488.
- 66.
In his edition of the Ashmole Codex 61 Lybeaus Desconus, George Shuffelton observes that there is no manuscript version in which Lambard’s portrayal is “entirely coherent” (p. 479 n1574).
- 67.
As Michelle Warren notes in History on the Edge on p. 10, “In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the most active struggles for ethnic and family identity deployed Trojan ancestors. By the end of the twelfth century, many of the ruling families of Europe had traced their genealogies back to Troy. The process did not create bonds of identification among these families, but rather sought to differentiate each group from its potential rivals. The genealogical use of the Trojans shows how the perception of difference rather than identity structures the boundaries between groups”.
- 68.
Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance, pp. 89–90. English hatred of the Lombards could be insistently determined. In Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal, the eponymous hero travels from Britain to Lombardy to fight the giant Sir Valentine, whom he kills. Launfal also slays all the lords of Lombardy before he returns joyfully to a hero’s welcome in Britain. See Sir Launfal, edited by Sands, ll. 505–612.
- 69.
In “Of Mimicry and Man”, Bhabha describes mimicry as “In mimicry, the representation of identity and meaning is rearticulated along the axis of metonymy. As Lacan reminds us, mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization of repression of difference, but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically”. The Location of Culture at p. 90. See also pp. 120–21.
- 70.
Salisbury, “Illegitimacy and the Spurious Mother”, p. 78.
- 71.
Perhaps only temporarily, however. Salisbury notes that Guinglain embraces only his father and that his nameless mother, unlike in other versions of this tale, does not marry Gawain at the end. Salisbury argues that something “spurious”, illegitimate, remains attached to the mother. In my reading of the text, figuratively that illegitimacy would be her own essential nature as a giantess. See “Illegitimacy and the Spurious Mother”, pp. 82–98.
- 72.
Degaré technically becomes a mantle child—that is, a child born out of wedlock whose parents later married. As Moss points out, the legal status of such children differed between canon law and English common law but parents could make appropriate arrangements to provide for their mantle child’s future. See Moss, Fatherhood and its Representations, pp. 169–70.
- 73.
Alcuin Blamires in “Twin Demons” has suggested that Sir Gowther expresses deep-seated fears about breeding and dynasty—the illegitimate heir, the failure of heredity, and the corruption of dynasty. Blamires’s point is about the binary of unacceptable difference in social stratification rather than fears about biological miscegenation.
- 74.
Sir Gowther edited by Laskaya and Salisbury, ll. 119–20, l. 130.
- 75.
Mitchell-Smith, “Defining Violence”, p. 158. See also Dana Oswald’s discussion in Monsters, Gender and Sexuality, pp. 183–85.
- 76.
Ambrisco, “Process of Conversion”, pp. 207–11. Ambrisco questions the successfulness of what he argues is Gowther’s attempted conversion to Christianity, positing that “Gowther becomes more, rather than less, like a Saracen after his supposed conversion early in the romance, and this peculiar identification serves to question the legitimacy of his religious commitments. Occupying the position of both Saracen and Christian, Gowther’s post-conversion self is as much a hybrid figure as his pre-conversion, demonic self, and this unstable identity casts asper- sion on the work of conversion, on its ability to effect lasting change” (p. 225).
- 77.
Huber, “Redeeming the Dog”, p. 311
- 78.
Ambrisco, “Process of Conversion”; Bradstock, “Penitential Pattern”.
- 79.
The Sultan at lines 620–60 places the lump on the altar of his gods and prays for their help in his time of need. Even after the Sultan beats them and smashes their idols, they do not have the power to transform the lump into a child. Only baptism into the Christian faith can save the child, proving the superiority of Christianity. The idols, of course, reveal that the author of King of Tars has, to say the least, a very poor understanding of Islam.
- 80.
It is a peculiar restart, given the implied ages of Gowther’s mother and new stepfather; nonetheless, because the emphasis at the end is upon new beginnings and second chances, in that thematic sense, the marriage works.
- 81.
The emperor, of course, is Gowther’s father-in-law. The editors of Sir Gowther note at this point that the term father-in-law does not appear in the English language before the late sixteenth century. However, Chaucer uses the term in The Legend of Good Women at F l. 2272 to describe Pandion, the father-in-law of Tereus.
- 82.
Oswald, pp. 193–94. Merlin, another human/demon hybrid, also has no children. Another parallel instance of seemingly necessary hybrid sterility is possibly Geoffroy Big Tooth, one of the sons of Melusine, who also dies without issue, although in his case the supernatural parent is a faery and a younger, fertile brother (who is equally biologically mixed in ancestry) exists to inherit his position and carry on the family line.
- 83.
For tales of Richard’s demonic ancestry and his historical response to the rumours, see the sources cited by Larkin on p. 6 in his edition of Richard Coer de Lyon.
- 84.
McDonald, “Eating People”, pp. 140–43. For two other eucharistic readings of Richard’s cannibalism in this text, see also Akbari, “The Hunger for National Identity”, pp. 199–200; and Leverett, “Reading the Consumed”, pp. 302–307.
- 85.
See Dives and Pauper, edited by Barnum, Commandment VI, chapter 21 in particular. “And þe fendis þat temptyn folc to lecherie ben mest besy for to aperyn in mannys lycnesse & womannys to don lecherye with folc & so bryngyn hem to lecherie, & in speche of þe peple it arn clepyd eluys” (Vol. 1, Part 2, p. 118, ll. 10–13).
- 86.
“In many derne weye/grete compaygnie men i-seoth of heom: boþe hoppie and pleiȝe,/þat Eluene beoth i-cleopede: and ofte heo comiez to toune,/And bi daye muche in wodes heo beoth: and bi niȝte ope heiȝe dounes./þat beoth þe wrechche gostes: þat out of heuene weren i-nome,/And manie of heom a-domesday: ȝeot schullen to reste come”. The Early South-English Legendary, edited by Carl Horstmann, Chapter 45, lines 253–58, on p. 307. The supplemental life of St. Michael in The Gilte Legende regards all elves in the same straightforward manner as does Dives and Pauper: elves are wicked spirits, also known as the “mare” (incubi), who tempt men and women into illicit sexual behaviour in desolate fields and woods. See Supplementary Lives, edited by Hamer and Russell, 27.23–34, on p. 275.
- 87.
The situation made bad by sexual assault, of course, is further complicated by the fact that the rape results in pregnancy. See Kenneth Eckert’s comment on Degaré’s predicament in his open-access article “Absent Fathers”: “The fairy knight’s actions must be presented as deeply consequential but non-human and thus non-moral, for Degaré cannot as a chivalrous knight punish his own father for rape; the only choice is that his assault must be seen as injurious without being sinful, allowing Degaré to heroically atone for his father while pursuing his own attainment. In brief, the rape is not the moral problem, for this is what fairies do, but the fairy knight’s intrusion into human affairs precipitates the material and ethical challenges that humans must deal with. It is the fairy knight’s abandonment of the princess and the charged space he leaves behind which chiefly troubles and motivates Degaré to corrective action”.
- 88.
Black Metaphors, p. 7.
- 89.
Some critics suggest that the incorporation exists on a literal level. In “The Hunger for National Identity” at p. 208, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, for instance, suggests “By eating the lion’s heart, Richard becomes lion-hearted, earning an altered name to suit his altered identity: the lion’s strength becomes his own”. Lynn Shutters has similarly argued that literally eating the heart of a lion infuses Richard’s masculinity with animalistic qualities.
- 90.
Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 106. See Heng’s discussion generally, pp. 101–07.
- 91.
Larkin notes in the introduction to his edition that Richard Coer de Lyon doubly distances Richard from his French ancestry, first by displacing Eleanor of Aquitaine as his mother (p. 13) and secondly by dispatching the French language “to near oblivion” (p. 14). A parallel instance to this “Englishizing” of the king of England can be found in comparison of two elegies written upon the death of Edward I in 1307, the Anglo-Norman original and a Middle English translation. Matthews argues that the Middle English version of the elegy is specifically English in context in ways that the more internationally focused Anglo-Norman text is not. See Writing to the King, pp. 91–94.
- 92.
Chapman in “Demon Queen” at p. 394 points out that legends had attached to Eleanor of Aquitaine in her lifetime that she was a demoness. He suggests that Cassodorien is nonetheless meant to be recognized by readers as Eleanor. See also Angela Florschuetz’s discussion in Marking Maternity, pp. 121–154.
- 93.
Robert Allen Rouse, “For King and Country?”, p. 121. There may be present an element of ‘enlarging’ England’s sphere of influence and ‘twinning’ England and Armenia through the twin sons both becoming kings, such as Kofi Campbell in “Nation-Building Colonialist Style” (p. 231) and Emily Dolmans in Writing Regional Identities (p. 154 and p. 159) both suggest, but ultimately Armenia does not become England any more than England becomes Armenia. The two kingdoms remain geographically, politically, historically, and culturally separate entities and their peoples represent two separate gens, though united by a common religion and shared blood between their kings.
- 94.
Some manuscripts of The Gilte Legende also include a somewhat truncated version of this story. See Supplemental Lives, 28.1–87, on pp. 285–87.
- 95.
The history of Becket’s Saracen mother story has been briefly outlined by John Jenkins in “St Thomas Becket and Medieval London” at pp. 668–670.
- 96.
27.57, 60–61, 108, 113, 131, 135, 152–54, 176–78. Textual references are found on pp. 108–111.
- 97.
Following the lead of Jill Frederick in “Anglo-Saxon saints”, Battles in Cultural Difference on p. 122 argues that English identity is “at the heart of the entire collection” of The Early South-English Legendary. Neither Frederick nor Battles discusses the Becket story.
- 98.
Robert Mills, “Invisible Translation”, p. 127, p. 131. Mills, in contrast to my argument, does not regard the French incipit rubrics as necessarily bearing any significance. At p. 135 he posits, “We should not necessarily attribute too much significance to the apparent incongruity of French headings”. Given that Mills’s argument in the chapter centres on language as a means to express translating across religious identities, his point of view is understandable.
- 99.
In Horstmann’s edition of The Early South-English Legendary, Becket’s life is given unusual treatment in being headed with a chapter title written in French, one of medieval England’s other languages.
- 100.
For relations among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in early thirteenth-century Sicily during the reign of Frederick II, see such studies as Abulafia’s Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor, Metcalfe’s Muslims and Christians in Norman Sicily (especially pp. 55–70, pp. 99–113), and Birk’s Norman Kings of Sicily (especially pp. 1–6).
- 101.
The historical record lends credence to this supposition. Mark Omrod, Bart Lambert, and Jonathan Mackman in Immigrant England observe that while first-generation immigrants in medieval England faced chronic problems with acceptance (see especially pp. 207–209), in contrast “there is comparatively little evidence, even in those places that had relatively high numbers of immigrants from particular countries or linguistic groupings, that the children and grandchildren of incomers to England in the later Middle Ages preserved a coherent sense of foreignness—or indeed had one imposed upon them” (pp. 9–10).
- 102.
For another historical example of mixed parentage resulting in a full, but locational, identity, Omrod, Lambert, and Mackman observe in Immigrant England on p. 17, that in 1512 Henry VIII’s government ordained “that the children of English-born men and women who were married to native Calesians would be considered fully English. This, however, held only as long as they continued to reside under the king’s allegiance: leaving Calais for other parts of France would result in automatic loss of rights and property”.
- 103.
In Sir Gowther, the absence of children is explicitly mentioned by the narrator. In Sir Degare and Lybeaus Desconus, the strategy of textual silence is employed and so it is left uncertain whether any children resulted from either marriage. Richard the Lionhearted, of course, also had no children. Perhaps tellingly, no children result from the marriage of Orfeo and Heurodis in Sir Orfeo, either before or after their sojourn in the Faery otherworld.
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Gasse, R.P. (2023). Mixed Ethnicity in the Romances of Medieval England: The Hybridity of Ethnic Identity. In: Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England . The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31465-0_2
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