Scholars agree that the Prophecies were composed by a Venetian writer in the period 1272–79, although the work claims to have been translated for the emperor Frederick II by one ‘Maistre Richart d’Irlande’. The Prophecies de Merlin is an Old French prose work written in the final third of the thirteenth century, and combines factual, ‘prophetic’ material relating to recent history with fictional material relating to Arthurian legend. The analysis of the language of violence can both invoke the maintenance of broader chivalric norms and revise associations of genre-specific vocabulary. If a romance invokes the Passion of Christ in the wounds of secular battle, what is the nature of its chivalric protagonists? Can a romance be said to express “national” interests in its depiction of warfare? How does violence reaffirm and discuss the behaviour of chivalric “individuals”? My research looks specifically at how Arthurian romances such as the alliterative "Morte Arthure" and "Lancelot of the Laik" are shaped by the culture of chivalry and an awareness of the ways in which religious, historical and romance texts express pain and injuring. In particular, I study the borrowing of violent language between literatures, and its impact on the meaning and generic tone of the texts. This thesis explores the language of these representations in Middle English literature, from British chronicles to affective Passion narratives, in order to analyse the combat and warfare of Arthurian romances in their literary and social context. Understanding the representations of violence in Middle English romance is key to understanding the texts themselves the authors were aware of the cultural and spiritual resonances of violent language, and they often utilised their potential to direct their own meaning. Finally, the author suggests that romance locates England and Europe within an empire of magic and knowledge that surveys the world and makes it intelligible-usable-for the future. Romance also engaged with the threat of modernity in the late medieval period, as economic, social, and technological transformations occurred and awareness grew of a vastly enlarged world beyond Europe, one encompassing India, China, and Africa. Discussing Jews, women, children, and sexuality in works like the romance of Richard Lionheart, stories of the saintly Constance, Arthurian chivralic literature, the legend of Prester John, and travel narratives, the book shows how fantasy enabled audiences to work through issues of communal identity, race, color, class and alternative sexualities in socially sanctioned and safe modes of cultural discussion in which pleasure, not anxiety, was paramount. After locating the rise of romance and Arthurian legend in the contact zones of East and West, Empire of Magic demonstrates the adaptability of romance and its key role in the genesis of an English national identity. From such encounters with the East sprang the fantastical episodes featuring King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicle, The History of the Kings of England, a work where history and fantasy collide and merge, each into the other, inventing crucial new examples and models for romances to come. The book argues that romance arose in the 12th century as a cultural response to the trauma and horror of taboo acts-in particular the cannibalism committed by crusaders on the bodies of Muslim enemies in Syria during the First Crusade. Empire of Magic offers a genesis and genealogy for medieval romance and the King Arthur legend through the history of Europe's encounters with the East in crusades, travel, missionizing, and empire formation.
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