Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy

by Geraldine Heng, Columbia University Press

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. It also produces definitions of "race" and "nation" for the medieval period and posits that the Middle Ages and medieval fantasies of race and religion have recently returned.

Drawing on feminist and gender theory, as well as cultural analyses of race, class, and colonialism, this provocative book revises our understanding of the beginnings of the nine hundred-year-old cultural genre we call romance, as well as the King Arthur legend. Geraldine Heng argues that romance arose in the twelfth 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. From such encounters with the East, Heng suggests, 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.

After locating the rise of romance and Arthurian legend in the contact zones of East and West, Heng demonstrates the adaptability of romance and its key role in the genesis of an English national identity. 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, Heng 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. 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. Finally, Heng posits, romance locates England and Europe within an empire of magic and knowledge that surveys the world and makes it intelligible―usable―for the future.

Empire of Magic is expansive in scope, spanning the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, and detailed in coverage, examining various types of romance―historical, national, popular, chivalric, family, and travel romances, among others―to see how cultural fantasy responds to changing crises, pressures, and demands in a number of different ways. Boldly controversial, theoretically sophisticated, and historically rooted, Empire of Magic is a dramatic restaging of the role romance played in the culture of a period and world in ways that suggest how cultural fantasy still functions for us today.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Medieval, Race, Gender Studies

536 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2003

Reviews

[Christien · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great read! Through high and late medieval literature, Heng explores the concept of the empire in western Europe and the sense of identity that comes along with this. This exploration involves quite a lot of cannibalism, which is always interesting, but I was especially interested by the final two (and the longest) chapters in the book. The first of these focuses on the position of women and the family unit in the conception of the empire, showing how female figures are depicted as capable of solidifying bonds between christian and non-christian communities, but also how such bonds are conditional, and involve more than just religious conversion. The second one focuses on travel accounts, showing that medieval authors do not just distance non-christian cultures but also bring them closer, by representing a world-view in which the entire non-western world also, in one way or the other, believes in the Christian god, constructing an imagine of cultural dominance to western Christianity. I really enjoyed reading this, but my one comment would be that Heng's use of language can be a little unnecessarily scholarly - most of her sentences just don't need to be that long.

[ECH · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a well-argued interesting idea presented here. I hadn't considered the connections before, but now they seem obvious. I found the prose full of information and yet reasonably paced, but I think it could be dense for someone without a related background.

[Bobbi · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was an interesting take on medieval romance texts. I thought that some parts were written with complex language that, when you looked a bit closer, didn't really have a meaning. That was a bit disappointing. You don't need to pretend to sound like Bakhtin to be intelligent.

[Audrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only two chapters in but so impressed by Heng’s enormous brain, so delicious. The writing itself is beautiful as well

[Old-Barbarossa · Rating 1 out of 5]

The worst thing I’ve read in ages...well, when I say read I only got through the introduction and that was a chore.
So what went wrong? A subject I’m interested in, but when you come across “...it is the sedimented repository of what medieval culture has sought to retain across vast temporal divides, each romance that survives communicates the resultant aggregated will of a collective culture, and transmits the cumulative purposiveness of a diachronous endeavor in a way that is almost unimaginable to moderns habituated to the signed cultural works of mere individuals.” Arghhh! And every now and then words will be italicised, just a word here and there for emphasis...why not just write in a lucid and fluid manner?
It reads like a word count had to be reached, yet has 150 pages of notes and a 30 page bibliography. It is only (including index) 521 pages long.
I was reminded of the fake paper submitted by Sokal to that French journal that meant nothing but was received with awe until the hoax was pointed out.
I’m sure the author was trying to say something but life is too short to read pages of waffle to justify one point. But what of the point trying to be made?
Well the blurb appears to be misleading, it talks of the Arthur legend yet the book only looks in any detail at one text directly related to it. It talks of “romance” and then gives a nebulous definition that is worse than no definition and covers pretty much everything ever written. And then tries to get cannibalism and homosexuality into the mix, no idea what the author is trying to do.
OK, as I mentioned I only got as far as the introduction but that was enough. The impression I was left with was enough for this to be the 1st book in ages I’ve not finished and the praise heaped on the book by assorted Profs on it’s jacket I find bewildering unless this is the standard of clarity expected in modern universities...clear as mud that is.
I noticed that only a handful of folk have marked this as “to read" here, I would advise you to think again, unless you have to read this for a course then avoid.
On a final note I add my own waffle (some minor changes but mainly courtesy of: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/):

“In the works of De Troyes, a predominant concept is the distinction between destruction and creation. The term ‘romance’ could be seen to denote the failure, and subsequent economy, of neotextual sexual identity. It could be said that Malory implies that we have to choose between De Troyes romance as quest and the pre-romance paradigm of narrative.
The premise of textual discourse suggests that truth may be used to entrench hierarchy, given that reality is distinct from truth. But several narratives concerning not, in fact, romance, but neo-romance exist. In a sense, Von Strassburg implies that expression is created by the masses.
If the post-romance paradigm of consensus holds, we have to choose between De Troyes’ idea of romance as quest and pre-romance paradigm of narrative. But it could be said that Chaucer’s manuscript on Arthuriana holds the significance of the writer paramount.”

Yes...all meaningless waffle that sounds highbrow.

[Hayley]

It was really interesting but I had to return it to the library before I could finish it. Hope to come back to it someday.