The Legend of Charlemagne in Medieval England: The Matter of France in Middle English and Anglo-Norman Literature by Phillipa Hardman and Marianne Ailes (review)

The third volume of the Charlemagne: A European Icon project, The Legend of Charlemagne in Medieval England: The Matter of France in Middle English and Anglo-Norman Literature, by Phillippa Hardman and Marianne Ailes, is the first book-length scholarly critique on the Matter of France in Britain. (Despite its titular emphasis on Medieval England, the book also touches upon modern historical eras and Scotland.) This excellent study, long overdue, serves as a thorough introduction to the English Charlemagne texts and as a corrective to the common assumption that these works lack merit. The book contains useful introductory material—plot summaries, provenance descriptions, and reviews of scholarship from nineteenth-century Early English Text Society editors to contemporary theorists on race, postcolonialism, and gender. The critical approach is comparative and contextual: the Anglo-Norman and Middle English works are compared to their sources, to other texts in their manuscript compilations, to other Charlemagne literature, and to other Insular pieces of the same genre, date, and/or topic. Previous scholarship often dismissed the Anglo-Norman and Middle English Charlemagne texts as derivative when they follow sources and as poorly translated when they depart from their sources. In contrast, the research by Hardman and Ailes elucidates how the Insular manuscripts’ departures from literary antecedents reflect the historical and literary moment in which they were produced.

In the Introduction, Hardman and Ailes explain their focus: “In this book we aim to trace the relation of the insular Matter of France texts, with their focus on the battles between Charlemagne’s Christian knights and enemy Saracen forces, and their oblique reflection of the history of the crusades to the East, to the cultural and political concerns of their own times, and to ask what and how legends of an imagined Charlemagne past contributed to the self-image of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century readers in England (while we are, of course, conscious of our own inescapable situatedness in a world newly sensitized to the representations of conflict between Muslims and Christians, East and West)” (pp. 8–9). Although numerous manuscripts attest to the popularity in Medieval England of the Matter of France, its popularity declined in the modern era with the rise of nationalism, which led Charlemagne to be identified with France and Arthur to be aligned with England.

The first half of the book provides an overview of the tradition in medieval England: Chapter 1 discusses the Insular literary context, Chapter 2 introduces Anglo-Norman translations, and Chapter 3 highlights Middle English appropriations. Whereas the Continental French corpus has over fifty chansons de geste, medieval England has primarily three: the matter of Roncevaux (La Chanson de Roland and Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle), Fierabras (Fierabras and La Destruction de Rome), and Otinel. Hardman and Ailes argue that the narrowing of the Matter of France tradition results more from Insular literary tastes than from ignorance of Continental French literature. A major focus of the book concentrates upon how these three narratives demonstrate that medieval Insular audiences enjoyed tales of individual combat between a Christian hero and a Saracen opponent, as Saracen forces invade Christian lands (as opposed to Crusaders waging war in foreign lands) (p. 31). A fictionalized account of an ambush on Charlemagne’s army in 778, La Chanson de Roland concerns Charlemagne’s avenging the death of Roland by destroying the Saracen army in Spain, and it is the primary chanson de geste. Fierabras and Otinel feature eponymous Saracens, whose forces attack Rome, but who convert to Christianity after individual combats with Oliver and Roland, respectively, and who then join forces with Charlemagne. The reason the abundant number of French storylines gets reduced to these particular three, the authors argue, is...