Sir Isumbras and the Fantasy of Crusade

Born of increasing concerns over the spread of Islam, crusades-inspired literature flourished in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. Though many sociopolitical developments precluded the launching of another passagium generale, Christopher Tyerman observes that

The clerical and lay elites of western Europe found it almost impossible to let go of the Holy Land as a political ambition or vision of perfection…. Governments, moralists, preachers and lobbyists returned again and again to a subject in which practical and moral objectives were fused together.¹

Tyerman notes that “one of the most characteristic literary genres” of the later Middle Ages developed as a result of these concerns and desires for the Holy Land. This “recovery literature,” he argues, consisted of “books, pamphlets and memoranda concerned with the crusade, the restoration of Jerusalem and the advance of the Turks.”² While Tyerman omits fictional works from his list, many scholars of Middle English literature have successfully argued for the existence of a subgenre of romance focused on the matter of crusading, one that fits seamlessly into the category of “recovery literature.” Dorothee Metlitzki’s The Matter of Araby in Medieval England was tremendously influential in endorsing arguments for the significance of crusades romances,³ and, more recently, scholars such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Geraldine Heng have likewise argued for the popularity of eastward-gazing romances in the literatures of late medieval England. Cohen, for instance, observes that England returned repeatedly to “thoughts of both Africa and Islam” In the context of crusading during the fourteenth century, and Heng’s Empire of Magic hinges, in no small part, on the cultural currency of crusades-inspired narratives.⁴ Suzanne Yeager has also argued for the widespread appeal and significance of crusade literature in late medieval England, observing that “In the uses of crusade rhetoric and Jerusalem’s image recast, we see how religious desire and political discourse are brought together in the context of the sacred.”⁵

Within the genre of crusades romance, I argue for a subcategory of “recovery romance” whose texts revolve around desires to reclaim the Holy Land and recover from historical trauma. Such texts confront contemporary fears and anxieties by projecting an idealized and universal version of Christianity that can, by means of its cohesion, permanently defeat Islam. In this way, their gazes become both “nostalgic and anticipatory,” gazing back at the history of loss associated with the crusades and forward to a time in which successful crusades might be waged.⁶ The romance of Sir Isumbras deserves special mention in this context. While other romances like Bevis of Hampton, The King of Tars, and Guy of Warwick contain episodes that reflect aspirations of recovery, Isumbras speaks to such desires through the constant iteration of crusader imagery. It creates an atemporal world wherein the lines between Self and Other are starkly drawn, and the fractiousness of Christian Europe is replaced by a unified family capable of expanding the borders of Christendom.

Isumbras was arguably one of the most popular romances in late medieval England. Surviving in nine manuscripts, it circulated widely and is found in both secular and devotional miscellanies.⁷ Despite variations across versions, Isumbras remains indelibly linked to the fantasy of crusade even as it moves between devotional and romance contexts. The romance’s textual adaptability likely stems from its simultaneous deployment of themes and typologies from hagiography and chivalric romance—a combination that has made the romance difficult to place generically but that ultimately facilitates its treatment of crusading.

Isumbras has attracted critical interest of late because of its generic hybridity⁸ and its charged representations of Saracens.⁹ Its appropriation and recirculation of crusading motifs have also begun to receive treatment in scholarship.¹⁰ I will argue here that Isumbras’s deployment of crusading themes helps to explain not only the romance’s popularity and cohesion, but also how it could, despite its descriptive bareness, captivate the literary imagination of late medieval England. The romance reveals, in vital ways, how crusading activity was at once a concept, an ideal, and a hoped-for reality.

Isumbras’s brevity (approximately eight hundred...