The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance

Heffernan's book focuses on romance and the Orient in Chaucer and in anonymous popular metrical romances. This study in textual-historical relations between Islamic East and Christian West made visible in a group of predominantly late romance texts suggests that contact with strangers can become a powerful motor for change in literature.Heffernan shows that the addition of a pattern of mercantile details in Chaucer's treatment of the legend of Constance, as told by the Man of Law, invites a consideration of this pious romance with particular attention to the commercial context of the eastern Mediterranean in which the heroine is placed. Chaucer's portraits of Cleopatra and Dido from the "Legend of Good Women", read against parallel texts, especially in Boccaccio, reveal them to be loci of medieval orientalism. Chaucer's handling of details taken from Eastern sources and analogues in the "Squire's Tale" is inventive in shaping them into a western form popular in medieval French romance: poetry of interlace. The study demonstrates that previously un-noticed overtones of sibling incest in the Middle English "Floris and Blauncheflur" are legitimized by their transformation into a quest for the beloved and that "Le Bone Florence of Rome" is related to analogous oriental tales about heroic women who remain steadfast in virtue against persecution and adversity.Professor CAROL F. HEFFERNAN teaches in the Department of English, Rutgers University.