Chapter 1 - Anxieties of Conversion in High and Late Medieval Literature

Summary

Before turning to the Becket legend and Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, some literary contextualization is necessary. What does conversion look like in other High and late medieval texts and how are converts from Islam to Christianity dealt with in these narratives? In order to understand where the Becket legend and The Man of Law's Tale stand in relationship to contemporary and near-contemporary works, this first chapter is dedicated to examining the place of conversion in four medieval poems and the concerns and questions raised in these pieces.

The chapter is divided in two main parts. In the first, I begin with that most ubiquitous of medieval texts, the Chanson de Roland, before exploring a later twelfth-century French narrative, the Prise d’Orange, both of which—to varying degrees—associate the Saracen Other with blackness and display unease about Saracens claiming to seek baptism. In the second half of the chapter, I turn to two late Middle English poems, The King of Tars and Bevis of Hampton, works produced by the same culture and society as that which engendered the Becket legend. These two pieces also arguably place more emphasis than the two twelfth-century French chansons de geste on the risks inherent to conversion. While The King of Tars suggests that conversion can pose a threat to the Christian community by allowing Christians to convert to other faiths, Bevis of Hampton further investigates this dangerous possibility. Perhaps even more importantly, Bevis of Hampton reveals that assimilation does not necessarily follow upon conversion and that baptism is only one of many necessary changes that herald a new beginning for the convert and his or her new community. In choosing these four texts, I provide both a general view of the treatment of conversion—and attendant anxieties—and a more specific overview of the subject in late medieval English works.

Several scholars have remarked on the anxieties associated with conversion in High and late medieval texts focusing on interactions with non-Christians. Sharon Kinoshita, for example, has noted that the Chanson de Roland underscores Christian suspicions of Saracens claiming to seek baptism. Meanwhile, in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Geraldine Heng shows that converted Jews were essentialized and set apart from other Christians in thirteenth-century England, providing an interesting historical counterpart to Kinoshita's discussion of the subject.