The Anxieties of Encounter and Exchange: Saracens and Christian Heroism in Sir Beves of Hamtoun

Abstract

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.