This chapter discusses two Middle English Charlemagne romances, The Siege of Milan and The Sultan of Babylon, to illuminate post-1291 anxieties about royal politics, Christian infighting, and God’s will and support. It brings these romances into conversation with two main bodies of literary and historical material. The first consists of writings that polemically engage with the question of whether English and French kings should prioritize domestic affairs or crusading activity. The second consists of poems, letters, and chronicles that, written by Christians following crusading defeats, feature wrathful rebukes of God and threats of conversion to Islam. I draw on this latter corpus to offer a new interpretation of the literary motif of the “afflicted Muslim” who vents his military frustration on his “gods,” arguing that such depictions should be understood as projections of Latin Christian anxieties about God’s lack of support to the crusading enterprise.

This chapter examines elements of French-language culture in Britain between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries which reveal the cross-Channel ties fostered by a shared language. It focuses on the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut (ANPB), part of a medieval historiographical tradition charting British history from its origins to the contemporary era, considering it alongside related texts such as Wace’s Brut and the Roman des Franceis of André de Coutances. Surviving in over fifty manuscripts, along with more than 200 copies in English translation, the ANPB influenced the development of English historical consciousness up to and beyond the time of John Milton. The shifting of borders throughout the Middle Ages means that the terms ’England’ and ’France’ need to be understood as more mobile than the modern nation states they designate. From the Norman Conquest in particular, the Channel became as much a conduit as a barrier to cultural and political cohesion. Through the French-language Brut tradition, the chapter considers how Britain’s history was contextualized for literate English society within the wider cross-Channel environment of Anglo-French cultural and political entanglements.

Joan was the first woman to lead the armies of a major nation to victory. Often compared to the biblical warrior-prophet, Deborah, Joan fought a holy war to expel foreigners from the promised land of her ancestors. Joan’s battle-standard carried the name of Jesus, but Joan’s claim to hear a private divine voice reminds one of Socrates. However, if Socrates’s voice told him only what not to do, Joan’s voice also told her what to do. Joan’s insistence that France be ruled by the French laid the foundation for modern patriotism just as her military exploits laid the foundation for modern France. Her faith in her divine voice led Joan boldly, even recklessly, to confront the kings and priests of her day, leading her to condemnation and execution by both an English king and a French bishop. King Henry killed her as a traitor; Bishop Couchon killed her as a heretic.