Monstrous Fantasies
eBook - ePub

Monstrous Fantasies

England's Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300-1500

  1. 300 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Monstrous Fantasies

England's Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300-1500

About this book

Monstrous Fantasies asks why medieval romances reimagining the crusades ending in a Christian victory circulated in England with such abundance after the 1291 Muslim reconquest of Acre, the last of the Latin crusader states in the Holy Land, and what these texts reveal about the cultural anxieties of late medieval England. Leila K. Norako highlights the impact that the Ottoman victory and subsequent massacre of Christian prisoners at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396 had on intensifying the popularity of what she calls recovery romance.

These two episodes inspired a sense of urgency over the fate of the Holy Land and of Latin Christendom itself, resulting in the proliferation of romances in which crusading English kings like Richard I and anachronistic legends like King Arthur not only reconquered Jerusalem but committed genocidal violence against the Muslims. These romances, which—as Norako argues—also influenced Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, conjure fantasies of an ascendant global Christendom by rehearsing acts of conquest and cultural annihilation that were impossible to realize in the late Middle Ages. Emphasizing the tension in these texts between nostalgia and anticipation that fuels their narrative momentum, Monstrous Fantasies also explores how the cultural desires for European and Christian hegemony that recovery romances versified were revived in the wake of the so-called wars on terror in the twenty-first century in such films as Kingdom of Heaven and American Sniper.

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Yes, you can access Monstrous Fantasies by Leila K. Norako in PDF and/or ePUB format. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Acknowledgments
  2. List of Abbreviations
  3. Introduction
  4. 1. Becoming Crusaders
  5. 2. Of Licit Monsters and Men
  6. 3. Precarious Desires
  7. 4. King of the Future-Past
  8. 5. The Romance of Recovery in the Canterbury Tales
  9. Coda
  10. Notes
  11. Bibliography
  12. Index