MiddleEnglishCharlemagne Romances

Abstract

The ten English Charlemagne Romances, produced in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, focus on a small group of subjects from the Matter of France that were already popular in insular French chansons de geste : the stories of Charlemagne's nephew, Roland, and of two Saracens who challenge Charlemagne and subsequently become Christian knights, Fierabras and Otinel. Each romance retells the original story in a new way, or creates a new narrative in response to the tradition, reflecting contemporary anxieties about the threat posed to Christendom by the rise of the Ottoman Turks. Unlike the medieval tales of Arthurian knights or of Guy of Warwick, the Charlemagne romances did not survive into postmedieval popular culture; however, modern critical concerns with their characteristic topics of religious warfare and encounters between East and West have helped to revive interest in them.