4 ‘What wonder is it thogh she wepte’? Hierarchies of Desire, Race, and Empathy

I draw particularly upon Kim F. Hall’s work on ‘the ideology of white beauty [as] a “racial formation”’.8 Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Hall, ‘“These bastard signs of fair”: Literary whiteness in Shakespeare’s sonnets’, in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. by Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 64–83 (quotation at p. 80). Hall’s foundational studies of the representation of black people in early modern literature and the construction of whiteness as beauty resonate with the one-sided portrayal of interracial desire in the romances discussed in this chapter: white people can be desirable to people of colour in English romances, but while there was a counter-discourse that described black women as desirable, it does not seem to have influenced Middle English romance.9 See Heng, The Invention of Race, pp. 211–12. Like Hall, I attend to the intersections between the personal and the political when desire is imbricated in racialisation. Hall argues powerfully that ‘the desirability and over-valuation of a seemingly abstract whiteness […] has material effects’, tracing the relation between the whiteness of beauty in Renaissance lyrics and the violence of the slave trade and colonialism but also attending to how ‘the opposition of dark and light has materially affected black women’s lives, destroying our self-image and disfiguring our bodies’, including through ‘a Eurocentric beauty culture that privileges one skin color over another’.10 Hall, ‘Literary whiteness’, p. 66; Hall, Things of Darkness, p. 264. The consequences of what Hall calls ‘the ideology of fairness’ vary according to their historical contexts, but these consequences remain real, political, and material; as Dorothy Kim argues, ‘race is not an intellectual debate. Race has a body count. Race is political’ – and it still is when considered in relation to desire.11 Hall, Things of Darkness, pp. 86, 264; Kim, ‘Introduction: Critical race and the Middle Ages’, p. 13. In tracing the ‘ideology of fairness’ through a series of crusading romances written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, I attend to the real and harmful consequences of this ideology in that historical moment and indicate how this is reflected in modern white supremacist violence.

Hall’s work on the ideology of white beauty situates race primarily (though not exclusively) in relation to the body, indicating the importance of embodied race. As Dorothy Kim and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argue, ‘we cannot discuss race without discussing it as embodied’ – although race is socially constructed, ‘the body is the battleground where identities are perpetually sought, forced, expressed’.12 Kim, ‘Introduction: Critical race and the Middle Ages’, p. 7; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Race’, in A Handbook of Middle English Studies, ed. by Marion Turner (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 109–22 (p. 115). The embodied performance of race, however, is not reducible to an ‘ocularcentric fixation’ on the epidermal and ‘visual’: as Cord Whitaker observes, ‘color lacks the overwhelming primacy in medieval race that it lays claim to in modern racial ideology’, enabling medieval race to be ‘characterized by religious and political differences in addition to and often instead of phenotypic differences’.13 Kim, ‘Introduction: Critical race and the Middle Ages’, p. 4; Cord J. Whitaker, ‘Race and Racism in the Man of Law’s Tale’, in The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Candace Barrington et al. (2017) <https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu/mlt1/> [accessed 26 August 2022], n.p. Heng has explored ‘how religion, the state, economic interests, colonization, war, and international contests for hegemony, among other determinants, have materialized race’, while Cohen lists ‘religion, descent, custom, law, language, monstrosity, geographical origin, and species’ as ‘essential to the construction of medieval race’ and its embodied performance.14 Heng, The Invention of Race, pp. 181–2; Cohen, ‘Race’, p. 111. This chapter focuses particularly on the construction of religious race, which functions ‘both socioculturally and biopolitically’, and its imbrication with ‘epidermal race’, cultural customs, and geographical provenance.15 Heng, The Invention of Race, pp. 3, 6. All of the relationships I discuss involve a white Christian and a Muslim, religious categories of identity that were racialised in the Middle Ages (as they sometimes are today): Heng notes that ‘the streaming of diverse Muslims […] into a corporate entity by virtue of religion alone suggests an extraordinary ability on the part of the Latin West to grant an essence-­imparting power to Islam’.16 Ibid., p. 111. See Heng’s discussion of the racialisation of Muslim identity today, p. 20. Because different kinds of race-making intersect, I refer to both interracial and interfaith relationships in this chapter, using these terms flexibly to reflect how religion can be racialised or religious conversion can occur while other forms of difference maintain a particular racialised identity.

The romances discussed in this chapter – The King of Tars, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, Sir Bevis of Hampton, Sir Ferumbras, and The Sowdone of Babylone – present relationships between a Christian and Muslim as undesirable. In some cases, these relationships are portrayed as undesirable even after the non-Christian partner has offered to convert or actually has converted, implying that even a relationship with a convert is viewed negatively – either because of their status as a convert or because conversion does not surmount other racialised differences. This positions white Christians at the top of their own constructed hierarchy of desire and relegates people identified as of a different race and/or faith to the bottom of that hierarchy; that many of the Muslim characters who do form relationships with Christians in these works are described as white or white-passing supports this by permitting them, but not other Muslim figures, to be desirable. There are also gendered differences in these portrayals: Christian men marrying Muslim women seems to provoke less anxiety than Christian women marrying Muslim men, which I argue reflects long-embedded patterns of weaponised white female vulnerability and racist stereotypes of ‘the encroachments of foreign others’.17 Hall, Things of Darkness, p. 52. These romances therefore offer insights into the intersections of gender and race as well as the political construction of desire – the latter a subject to which contemporary feminist thought has only recently returned. As Amia Srinivasan writes, the dominance of sex-positive feminism over the past few decades threatens to treat sexual preferences and prejudices as pre-political, which ‘risks covering not only for misogyny, but for racism, ableism, transphobia and every other oppressive system that makes its way into the bedroom through the seemingly innocuous mechanism of “personal preference”’.18 Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 84. The use of un/desirability to effect race-making offers a clear example of how ‘who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question often answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion’.19 Ibid., p. 90. In drawing attention to this dynamic, this chapter seeks also to prompt consideration of less obvious sexual prejudices today.

These patterns of domination and exclusion within romance reflect historical practices of division along the lines of religious race. Most significantly, Canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 required Jews and Muslims in Christian lands to dress differently from Christians so that they ‘shall be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples’, avoiding the possibility ‘that through error Christians have relations with the women of Jews or Saracens, and Jews and Saracens with Christian women’.20 ‘Medieval Sourcebook: Twelfth Ecumenical Council: Lateran IV 1215’, Medieval Sourcebook, ed. by Paul Halsall (1996) <https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/lateran4.asp> [accessed 28 September 2022]. This decree aimed to prevent sexual contact between Christians and Muslims or Jews but betrays anxiety about the recognisability of these racial-religious categories, suggesting that they required enforcing because they were not self-evident. Attempts to enforce racial-religious difference by legislating against interfaith marriages and sexual encounters recur: James Brundage records that Gratian prohibited marriages between Christians and non-Christians; the Council of Nablus in 1120 forbade sex and marriage between Muslims and Christians; and the thirteenth-century Italian lawyer Benencasa of Arezzo warned Christians against marrying non-Christians even when conversion to Christianity had been agreed.21 James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 238, 207, 361. For further discussion of these and similar prohibitions, see David M. Freidenreich, ‘Muslims in Eastern canon law, 1000–1500’, in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, Volume 4 (1200–1350), ed. by David Thomas et al., 7 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2012), iv, 45–57; Freidenreich, ‘Muslims in Western canon law, 1000–1500’, in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, Volume 3 (1050–1200), ed. by David Thomas and Alexander Mallett, 7 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2009), iii, 41–68; Siobhain Bly Calkin, Saracens and the Making of English Identity: The Auchinleck Manuscript (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 80–2; Steven F. Kruger, ‘Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories’, in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. by Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 158–79 (pp. 167–9, 178 n. 32). Benencasa was not alone in advocating the avoidance of intermarriage even after conversion: ‘Pope Clement IV in 1268 rebuked Alfonso III of Portugal for allowing marriages of Christian men to women of Saracen and Jewish origin’, while in late fourteenth-century Aragon (a context associated with particularly extreme persecution), King John I ‘restated in 1393 the death penalty for all sex relations between Jews and Christians, including new converts’.22 Kruger, ‘Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories’, p. 169; Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 20 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), xi, 79. Romance sometimes treats conversion as an absolute and immediate phenomenon, but the works I discuss are more cautious, expressing concern about the desirability of marriage between a Christian and a (former) Muslim even after conversion. This reflects contemporary anxieties about how and to what extent converts should be assimilated into the Christian church. Converts from Judaism to Christianity were often treated as a separate group, conversos or New Christians, not fully assimilated into Christian society but not considered Jewish either.23 Kruger, ‘Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories’, pp. 173, 172; see further the discussion of conversion anxieties in Daisy Black, Play time: Gender, anti-Semitism and temporality in medieval biblical drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 59–64; Heng, The Invention of Race, pp. 75–80. As Steven Kruger notes, ‘converts clearly occupied an uncomfortable position in relation to both their old and their new religions’, and ‘what remains unassimilated or unassimilable to the dominant is often involved in the sexual realm’.24 Kruger, ‘Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories’, p. 171. This is borne out in some of the romances discussed in this chapter, where a gendered pattern emerges, in which Muslim men are less easily assimilated than Muslim women.

This gendered pattern is also reflected in historical perspectives on interfaith marriage, where

While all of the romances I discuss considerably postdate most of these historical examples, historical resonances remind us that romances draw upon and perpetuate real-life racism and violence rather than existing in a neatly sealed-off fictional space. It is in part for this reason that I refer to characters of Islamic faith as Muslim rather than ‘Saracen’,28 There are some cases in which ‘Saracen’ is used to mean ‘pagan’ more generally, or where the term is more ambiguous, but all of the cases I explore involve characters who are clearly supposed to be Muslim. For discussion, see Kathy Cawsey, ‘Disorienting Orientalism: Finding Saracens in Strange Places in Late Medieval English Manuscripts’, Exemplaria, 21.4 (2009), 380–97. following Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh’s argument that

The romances discussed in this chapter occupy a distinct space between historical violence and the Christian fantasies of other romances. The trope of the Christian man marrying a beautiful Muslim woman is reasonably common in romance and chansons de geste: in addition to the works discussed in this chapter, Muslim princesses who convert to Christianity for love appear in La Chanson de Roland, Fierabras (the source for several of the works discussed here), the Guillaume d’Orange cycle, Aiol, Anseis de Cartage, Elie de Saint Gille, Floovant, and Gaufrey.32 See Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), pp. 173–89; Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), pp. 35–73; Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 186; Mohja Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), pp. 21–33; Jacqueline de Weever, Sheba’s Daughters: Whitening and Demonizing the Saracen Woman in Medieval French Epic (New York: Garland, 1998); Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 160–77. In a romance context, interfaith or interracial relationships occur in Parzival and Octavian, while religious conversion is a widespread theme from the Otuel narratives to Henry Lovelich’s History of the Holy Grail, Sir Isumbras to Amoryus and Cleopes.33 On Parzival, see Heng, The Invention of Race, p. 196; Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman, pp. 40–3. In these works, conversion is the assumed goal and is generally endorsed even when motivated by love. However, these are recognisably fantastic tropes: the idea of crusaders converting Muslim women ‘ha[s] little historical basis’ and can be seen as a compensatory fantasy for the failures of the crusading era.34 Heng, The Invention of Race, p. 141. In the works discussed in this chapter, these fantasy tropes are avoided, subverted, or become the subject of doubt, as resistance to loving a convert disrupts the easy fantasies of other romances, problematising straightforward acceptance of conversion in a manner perhaps similar to the trope of unsuccessful conversion.35 See Ailes and Hardman, The Legend of Charlemagne in Medieval England, p. 162. While most of these romances ultimately reimpose essentialised racial differences, including in and through hierarchies of desire, they can also open up a space in which to question these ideological formations through their divergence from the patterns set by other romances.