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As Edward Said, Norman Daniel, and Dorothee Metlitzki have pointed out, the purportedly Muslim figures who appear in medieval western literature usually bear little or no resemblance to historical Muslims of the period. Said states, "we need not look for correspondence between the language used to depict the Orient and the Orient itself, not so much because the language is inaccurate but because it is not even trying to be accurate" (71). Similarly, Daniel and Metlitzki identify repeated stereotypical misrepresentations of Islam in medieval literary texts, such as the depiction of Islam as a polytheistic religion or the depiction of alcohol-drinking Muslims (Daniel 3-4, 49-51, 72-73, 81, 133-54; Metlitzki 209-10). It is certainly true that there is little or no mimetic relationship between literary Saracens and historical Muslims, but it should be noted that literary Saracens, despite their inaccuracies, did connote for the West an extremely powerful, technologically advanced Muslim civilization, which both impressed medieval Christians with its scientific knowledge and immense wealth, and menaced them militarily with its many victories over crusaders and its capacity for territorial expansion. Thus, while the Saracens of western literature may not offer us a historically accurate vision of medieval Islam, they can occasionally offer us some insight into the anxieties historical Islam posed for the West. This essay examines moments in the fourteenth-century Middle English romance Sir Beves of Hamtoun when the text’s depiction of one knight’s assimilation into a Saracen world communicates historical anxieties about how life in a Saracen enclave might compromise the Christian heroism of an English knight. The essay argues that Beves of Hamtoun both conveys a fear of Christian assimilation into a non-Christian world, and defines a model of heroic action to counteract such assimilation and re-establish the borders between Christianity and Saracenness. However, the text also indicates the ways in which heroic efforts to reconstruct such borders might ultimately fail.

Created in London <I>c</I>. 1340, the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 19.2.1) is of crucial importance as the first book designed to convey in the English language an ambitious range of secular romance and chronicle. Evidently made in London by professional scribes for a secular patron, this tantalizing volume embodies a massive amount of material evidence as to London commercial book production and the demand for vernacular texts in the early fourteenth century. But its origins are mysterious: who were its makers? its users? how was it made? what end did it serve? <BR> The essays in this collection define the parameters of present-day Auchinleck studies. They scrutinize the manuscript's rich and varied contents; reopen theories and controversies regarding the book's making; trace the operations and interworkings of the scribes, compiler, and illuminators; tease out matters of patron and audience; interpret the contested signs of linguisticand national identity; and assess Auchinleck's implied literary values beside those of Chaucer. Geography, politics, international relations and multilingualism become pressing subjects, too, alongside critical analyses of literary substance.<BR><BR> Susanna Fein is Professor of English at Kent State University (Kent, Ohio) and editor of <I>The Chaucer Review</I>. <BR><BR> Contributors: Venetia Bridges, Patrick Butler, Siobhain Bly Calkin, A. S. G. Edwards, Ralph Hanna, Ann Higgins, Cathy Hume, Marisa Libbon, Derek Pearsall, Helen Phillips, Emily Runde, Timothy A. Shonk, M-l F. Vaughan.

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This essay examines the visions of Arthur and England advanced by Saracen-Christian violence in Of Arthour and of Merlin , and considers their pertinence to a fourteenth-century audience.