Medieval Crusading in the Literary Contexts of England: Teaching Romance and Chronicle

Abstract

Past scholarship has proven the generic category of romance to be no simple classification scheme. 1 For the past fifteen years, a subset called "crusade romance" has added much complexity to this discussion, if only for the texts' epic scale, violence, vengeance, and cultural fantasies of the Other. Certainly, the creation of new generic subsets within romance represents an endless exercise whose current usefulness may have tapered; however, the applicability of the generic debate in the classroom retains its vitality simply because students often carry with them traditionally based preconceptions of romance. At the same time, more recent approaches to romance, such as those which reach across the disciplines, add new contexts to the discussion of romance. This article discusses a multi-disciplinary approach to teaching the romance and chronicle texts of medieval crusading that were produced mainly in England during the twelfth through early fifteenth centuries. While the title of the course, "The Crusade Romances: The Project of Empire" invokes only one literary genre and discipline, the course brought a sampling of romance genres, crusade chronicles, crusading art, and medieval philosophy to bear on the production of the so-called crusade romance.