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“Jeo ai esté a Nubie”: Boeve de Haumtone in the Medieval Mediterranean

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Abstract

This article considers the Anglo-Norman romance Boeve de Haumtone through a Mediterranean lens, arguing that being attentive to the setting to the romance offers a more nuanced understanding of its investments than readings that focus on the representation of proto-nationalisms in the romance.

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Notes

  1. On the popularity of the Bevis of Hampton tradition see, inter alia, Djordjević and Fellows (2008). Whether Boeve de Haumtone is a romance or a chanson de geste is a question of some debate (Crane 1986; Ailes 2008) I follow Melissa Furrow’s insight that chanson de geste is romance in England (Furrow 2009).

  2. Although it is fair to say that the Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone is only rarely discussed in its own right and instead is more commonly treated in contrast with the Middle English versions of the Bevis legend. A dissenting voice from this general approach is Djordjević and Fellows, who observe that Boeve’s “Englishness is more tenuous than subsequent English recastings would indicate… Bevis… did not acquire the status of a national hero until he was translated into English. The Anglo-Norman narrative was largely free of nationalist baggage, a feature that greatly facilitated its protean transformations in Europe” (Djordjević and Fellows 2008, 3).

  3. These arguments have not been without nuance. Robert Rouse, for example, has written compellingly on the articulation of Englishness in the Middle English Beues of Hamtoun, and how, over time we see a growth in a national sensibility alongside a continually asserted importance of regional identity (Rouse 2008). See also Calkin (2005).

  4. Smith is here referring to the Middle English Beues of Hamtoun.

  5. Judith Weiss has more recently pointed toward this reading: “if the Anglo-Saxon past offered the initial audiences of these romances heroes with whom they could identify, they would have been equally interested in more contemporary matters: the relation of northwest Europe to its eastern neighbors. The protagonists of these narratives have prolonged careers in eastern and southern Europe, or in North Africa, fighting ‘Saracens’” (Weiss 2008a, b, 2).

  6. It is worth remembering also that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Normans expanded not only into England, but also into the Mediterranean, via Sicily and North Africa.

  7. All quotations are from Stimming (1974) and translations from Weiss (2008a, b).

  8. Metlitzki suggests that “the manner in which the hero leaves his native England, goes back to an early medieval period when the British Isles provided a supply of slaves who were sold to Saracens in Marseilles and in Danish trading centers as well” (Metlitzki 1977, 127).

  9. War and trade are, of course, not mutually exclusive. As Janet Abu-Lughod points out, the Crusades opened new markets and created new consumer needs for western Europeans: “The renaissance of agriculture, mining, and finally manufacturing in northwestern Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries must be attributed at least in part to the expansion of its horizons and to the heightened opportunities for trade generated by the Crusades” (Abu-Lughod 1989, 47).

  10. I follow Stimming’s identification of “Civile” as Seville (Stimming 1974, 276). The romance was preserved in four fragments: two of these are truly fragmentary—some pieces from a binding of London, Lambeth Palace MS 1237 and a sixty-two line fragment discovered on a pastedown in the Hunterian Library, Glasgow. Stimming’s critical edition of the romance was produced from two longer fragments, that in Paris, BN, MS nouv. acq. fr. 4532, which contains the first 1248 lines of the Stimming’s edition, and that in MS Firmin Didot, sadly destroyed in the second World War, which contained lines 913–3850 (Weiss 2000; Dean and Boulton 1999, 89; Ailes 2008, 10 n5). Therefore, Stimming’s edition might represent two versions of the romance sutured together rather than the two halves of a single version. Whatever the case may be, the conflation of Egypt and Abreford suggests that territories are somewhat interchangeable, and what matters are the interpersonal relationships of love, power, and sovereignty.

  11. “For there was neither tower nor battlement in the town which was not covered with silver or pure gold. On top of the main tower King Bradmund had set—this is no lie—a golden eagle, holding between its claws a shining carbuncle which gave out such a radiant light that—I won’t hide it from you—however dark it was, one could walk along as if God was making the sun shine brightly” (40).

  12. As Michel Balard has noted: “The Slav population of the eastern shores of the Adriatic provided, until the tenth century, the human merchandise of the slave trade, to which were later added blacks from Africa, until the time when the Christian conquests in Spain offered a source of Muslim slaves” (Balard 2003, 187).

  13. As Fromherz notes: “By uniting diverse lands and ports, the Almoravid and Almohad Berber Islamic Empires, far from isolating North Africa from Europe, ultimately led to the revival of cosmopolitan commerce, and the “Mediterraneanization” of cities from Tunis to Seville to Marrakech” (Fromherz 2016, 219). For the role of Seville in the Mediterranean see also Abulafia (2010, 251–257) and Goitein (1999, 38–39).

  14. For the pivotal role of Cologne in Middle High German romance see Crooke (2013).

  15. On the textual and thematic relationship between the two romances, see Djordjević (2008). For the variations in the Middle English manuscript tradition see Fellows (2008). For the manuscripts of the Middle English Beues of Hamtoun see Seaman (2009). I follow the TEAMS edition and cite the version of the romance in the Auchinleck manuscript, which is the earliest of the Middle English versions.

  16. Collette and DiMarco follow Metlitski in suggesting that it “probably represents one of the Seljukid emirates of Anatolia” (Collette and DiMarco 2001, 325).

  17. See Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s critique of the east–west orientation of much scholarship on Christian–Muslim relations in the Middle Ages (Akbari 2000).

  18. In this romance, for example, the changes in the shade of Josian’s “rosy” complexion seem to track her conversion to Christianity; a representation that is subsequently complicated by her darkening her skin to evade her Saracen captors. See the discussion in Lawrence (2009). See also Heng (2018). One aspect of medieval identity politics that a Mediterranean lens might bring into focus is the relative absence of Jews in romance compared to their relative ubiquity in the medieval Mediterranean.

  19. Kinoshita 2009, 602.

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Correspondence to Heather Blurton.

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The inspiration for this article came from a 2015 NEH Summer Institute, “Negotiating Identities: Expression and Representation in the Christian–Jewish–Muslim Mediterranean,” lead by Sharon Kinoshita and Brian Catlos, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude.

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Blurton, H. “Jeo ai esté a Nubie”: Boeve de Haumtone in the Medieval Mediterranean. Neophilologus 103, 465–477 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-019-09608-7

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