Saracen, Pagan, Turk: the Place and Role of the Muslim Other in 15th-century Burgundian Romances and Prose Settings
(2023) Annual Medieval Middle East Meeting — Location: Nijmegen (6.October.2023)
Files
MMEM_NSghaier.pptx
Closed Access - Microsoft Powerpoint XML
- 1.56 MB
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- La Belle Hélène de Constantinople, Gillion de Trazegnies, Saladin or Gerart de Roussignon: they were, among others, romances and prose settings that circulated in the Burgundian Court and took their protagonists to the Orient.By the 15th century, the Burgundian state had become a political entity in full expansion and consolidation, and the dukes Valois of Burgundy, Philip the Good in particular, had plans for military expeditions to the Middle East. This focus on the eastern Mediterraneanpart was reflected in the ducal library: travel accounts, chronicles, romances, and prose settings, all dealt with the Orient.Among these, the romances and prose settings seem to use the figure of Muslim otherness (the Saracen, sometimes called pagan or Turk) as a narrative tool. Enemy on the battlefield, religious dissident, young and beautiful Saracen, converted Saracen: these are just some of the roles assigned to the Saracenin these novels. We will see that these roles can sometimes lead to a clear duality between Christian and Muslim space, and sometimes to an intermediate and fluctuating space, where the passage between Christian and Muslim space seems to be allowed, to a certain extent.Between History and literature, this paper aims to identify these narrative roles and the characteristics that are thus attributed to the literary figure of the Saracen. These discourses will of course be linked to their socio-political context of production and transmission. This analysis will draw on the work of Edward Saïd (Orientalism) and Homi Bhabha (notions of fixity and hybridity). This paper is based on my current doctoral research in History. I’m studying the construction and the diffusion of the representations of Muslim otherness in Burgundian narrative sources.
- Affiliations
Citations
Sghaïer, N. (2023). Saracen, Pagan, Turk: the Place and Role of the Muslim Other in 15th-century Burgundian Romances and Prose Settings. Annual Medieval Middle East Meeting, Nijmegen. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/244590