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  • 8 - “Making Race” in Medieval Romance

  • Edited by Roberta L. Krueger, Hamilton College, New York
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance
    Published online:
    11 May 2023
    Print publication:
    25 May 2023, pp 119-134

  • Summary

    Medieval romance, from the perspective of critical race studies (CRS), justifies medieval imperial expansion. Medieval romances frame themselves as celebrating the culture of elite knights and ladies by imagining their borders as inhabited by dangerous people who must be defeated and eliminated, with the result that enemy territories are subsumed into the territories of the elite knight. From this viewpoint, medieval romance uses chivalry to define who is accepted within the boundaries and who is left out of that formation. By studying differing patters of dehumanization in medieval romance with a focus on Old French and Middle Welsh texts, the chapter shows some examples of the ways that the genre of romance makes race and of how the repercussions of making race further systems of oppression. The chapter’s aims, then, are to use CRS to show a possible form of analyzing race in medieval romance.