Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Geographies of Fantasy: Exploring the Romance East

  • Chapter
Representing Difference in the Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance

Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages ((TNMA))

  • 352 Accesses

Abstract

The romance East is a fantasy. It works as exotic synesthesia, blending sensations of sound, sight, and smell and persistently deploying stock Orientalist motifs. Consider, for example, the following passage from The Sultan’s Bought Bride:

With the stringed instruments plucking, drums and tambourines beating, Nic stepped onto the gangway and halfway across, colourful confetti streamed down. It wasn’t paper confetti, the bits of orange and red and pink were flower petals and the sweet scented petals drifted onto her covered head and shoulders.

It was like entering a dream world—the music, the colours, the hint of spice in the air. Nic had the strongest sensation that this new world would soon dazzle her with its exotic secrets.1

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 69.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 89.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. Jane Porter, The Sultan’s Bought Bride (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2004), 11–12. Hereafter referred to in the text as Bought.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Sabrina Philips, The Desert King’s Bejewelled Bride (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2009). Hereafter referred to in the text as Bejewelled.

    Google Scholar 

  3. See Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), especially 45–105; Heng, Empire of Magic, especially 239–305; Metlitzki, Matter

    Book  Google Scholar 

  4. Robert Rouse, “Walking (between) the Lines: Romance as Itinerary/Map,” Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts, ed. Rhiannon Purdie and Michael Cichon (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), 135–147

    Google Scholar 

  5. Jennifer R. Goodman, Chivalry and Exploration, 1298–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Patricia Price, “Integrating Time and Space: The Literary Geography of Patience, Cleanness, The Siege of Jerusalem, and St. Erkenwald,” Medieval Perspectives 11 (1996): 234–250.

    Google Scholar 

  7. See Metlitzki, Matter; Carolyn Collette and Vincent J. DiMarco, “The Matter of Armenia in the Age of Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001): 317–358; and Calkin, Saracens.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London: The British Library, 1997), 4–5.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Judith Weiss, “The Major Interpolations in Sir Beues of Hamtoun,” Medium Aevum 48 (1979): 71–76.

    Google Scholar 

  10. “jeo ai esté a Nubie / e en Cartage e en Esclavie / e a l’Arbre Sek e en Barbarie / e a Macedoyne, par tut en Paenie” (1519–1522). All references to Boeve are from Albert Stimming, ed., Der Anglonormannische Boeve de Haumtone (Halle, 1899).

    Google Scholar 

  11. All modern English translations are from Judith Weiss, Boeve De Haumtone and Gui De Warewic: Two Anglo-Norman Romances (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), this citation, 54.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Herzman, Drake, and Salisbury note the Middle English Dictionary’s citation of Ledynhall as a specific place name, noting that it is also referred to as Laurence Hall (Four Romances). The earliest mention of “Leadenhall” was in 1296 ( Harben, “Leadenhall,” Dictionary of (the City of) London, 1910. May 18, 2015, http://www.motco.com/harben/3178.htm).

    Google Scholar 

  13. Weiss, “Interpolations,” 73. For a brief examination of the specific English locations in Bevis and their potential association with real locations, see Ralph Hanna, London Literature, 1300–1380 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 133–135.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Robert Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2005), 10.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language. trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 141, 148.

    Google Scholar 

  16. Margaret Wade Labarge, Medieval Travellers: The Rich and the Restless (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982), 2.

    Google Scholar 

  17. That Gervase was the creator of the Ebstorf map is an argument that has been put forward by several scholars; see Peter Barber, “Medieval Maps of the World,” The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, ed. P. D. A. Harvey (London: The British Library, 2006), 23–24.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Gerald. E. Se Boyar, “Bartholomeus Anglicus and His Encyclopaedia,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 19.2 (1920): 177.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Juris G. Lidaka, “Bartholomeus Anglicus,” Friedman and Figg, 48; Gregory G. Guzman, “Vincent of Beauvais,” Friedman and Figg, 633; Gregory G. Guzman, “John of Plano Carpini,” Friedman and Figg, 307; Spurgeon Baldwin, “Brunetto Latini,” Friedman and Figg, 78; David Woodward, “Roger Bacon on Geography and Cartography,” Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed. Jeremiah Hackett (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 199–222.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Evelyn Edson, The World Map, 1300–1492: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 94.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Kathy Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community 1000–1534 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 46.

    Google Scholar 

  22. P. D. A. Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography in Medieval Europe,” The History of Cartography: Cartography in Pre-Historic, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 495; Rouse, “Walking (between) the Lines,” 139.

    Google Scholar 

  23. Suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1987), 321.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Edson, The World Map. 14–15; David B. Leshock, “Religious Geography: Designating Jews and Muslims as Foreigners in Medieval England,” Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 207

    Google Scholar 

  25. Catherine Delano-Smith and Roger J. P. Kain, English Maps: A History (London: The British Library, 1999), 31.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Diana Webb, Medieval European Pilgrimage, c.700–c.1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 17.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  27. Diana Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England (London: Hambledon & London, 2000), xii.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Christian K. Zacher, “Travel and Geographical Writings,” A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, ed. A. E. Hartung, vol. 7 (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1986), 2238–2239.

    Google Scholar 

  29. Colin Morris, “Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages,” Pilgrimage: The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan. ed. Colin Morris and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 143.

    Google Scholar 

  30. Webb, Medieval European Pilgrimage, 13; D. W. Lomax, “The First English Pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela,” Studies in Medieval History Presented to R. H. C. Davis, ed. Henry Mary-Harting and R. I. Moore (London: The Hambledon Press, 1985), 166–167.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, trans. Frank D. Halsey (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1956), 66.

    Google Scholar 

  32. Judith Weiss, “Emperors and Antichrists: Reflections of Empire in Insular Narrative, 1130–1250,” The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance, ed. Phillipa Hardman (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 100.

    Google Scholar 

  33. On the development of trade routes in the early fourteenth century, see Jean Favier, Gold & Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages, trans. Caroline Higgitt (London: Holmes & Meier, 1998), especially 8–52.

    Google Scholar 

  34. A. T. Luttrell, “The Hospitallers’ Interventions in Cilician Armenia: 1291–1375,” The Cilician Kingdom of Armenia. ed. T. S. R. Boase (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1978), 118

    Google Scholar 

  35. Boase, “The History of the Kingdom,” The Cilician Kingdom of Armenia, ed. Boase (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1978), 28.

    Google Scholar 

  36. E. M. Carus-Wilson and Olive Coleman, England’s Export Trade 1275– 1547 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 13.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Pamela Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers’ Company and the Politics and Trade of London, 1000–1485 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 81

    Google Scholar 

  38. Steven A. Epstein, An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 83.

    Google Scholar 

  39. Pamela Nightingale, “The Growth of London in the Medieval English Economy,” Progress and Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller, ed. John Hatcher, Edward Miller, and R. H. Britnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 94–96.

    Google Scholar 

  40. D. J. Keene, “A New Study of London before the Great Fire,” Urban History Year-Book (1984), 19–20, cited in Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community. 81.

    Google Scholar 

  41. Pearsall, “Strangers in Late-Fourteenth-Century London,” The Stranger in Medieval Society, ed. F. R. P. Akehurst and Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 53.

    Google Scholar 

  42. Laura Hibbard Loomis has influentially suggested that the manuscript was made in a London bookshop between 1330 and 1340: “The Auchinleck Manuscript and a Possible London Bookshop of 1330–1340,” PMLA 57 (1942), 595–627.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Eliyahu Ashtor, “L’Exportation des Textiles Occidentaux dans le Proche Orient Musulman au Bas Moyen Age (1370–1517),” East-West Trade in the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. Ashtor and Benjamin Z. Kedar (London: Variorum Reprints, 1986), 341–349

    Google Scholar 

  44. E. B. Fryde, Studies in Medieval Trade and Finance (London: Hambledon, 1983), 295.

    Google Scholar 

  45. See Eliyahu Ashtor, “Observations on Venetian Trade in the Levant in the XIVth Century,” East-West Trade in the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. Eliyahu Ashtor and Benjamin Z. Kedar (London: Variorum, 1986), 534.

    Google Scholar 

  46. Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 2, 171–172.

    Google Scholar 

  47. Thomas Asbridge, The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 657.

    Google Scholar 

  48. Evelyn Edson, “Reviving the Crusade: Saundi’s Schemes and Vesconte’s Maps,” Eastward Bound: Travel and Travellers, 1050–1550. ed. Rosamund Allen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 132.

    Google Scholar 

  49. Anthony Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land: The Crusade Proposals of the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 8.

    Google Scholar 

  50. Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades 1095–1588 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 229

    Google Scholar 

  51. Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 643–644.

    Google Scholar 

  52. Leopold, Recover, 46; Christopher Tyerman, “Marino Sanudo Torsello and the Lost Crusade: Lobbying in the Fourteenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 32 (1982): 65.

    Google Scholar 

  53. Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 121.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  54. Richard G. Hovannisian and Simon Payaslian, “Armenian Cilicia,” Armenian Cilicia, ed. Hovannisian and Payaslian (Costa Mesa, CA; Mazda, 2008), 2.

    Google Scholar 

  55. John H. Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649–1571 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  56. Pryor’s routes have since been reevaluated by Renard Gluzman in “Between Venice and the Levant: Re-evaluating Maritime Routes from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century,” Mariner’s Mirror 96.3 (2010): 264–294.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  57. Gluzman provides details of a commercial ship traveling eastward from Constantinople to Jaffa that stopped en route at Tarsus in 1370, just five years before the fall of Cilician Armenia (Joel Raba, “Arkhimandrit Agrefenīi,” Russian Travel Accounts of Palestine, ed. Raba (Jerusalem, 1986), 73–91, cited in Gluzman, 276).

    Google Scholar 

  58. Simon Payaslian, The History of Armenia: From the Origins to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 77.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  59. A. E. Redgate, The Armenians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 257; Hovannisian and Payaslian, “Armenian Cilicia,” 2.

    Google Scholar 

  60. David Marshall Lang, Armenia, Cradle of Civilization (London: Allen & Unwin, 1978), 202.

    Google Scholar 

  61. Christopher J. Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation (London: Croom Helm, 1980), 33; Lang, Armenia. 206–208.

    Google Scholar 

  62. Hovannisian and Payaslian, “Armenian Cilicia,” 2; Claude Mutafin, “The Brilliant Diplomacy of Cilician Armenia,” Cilician Armenia. ed. Richard G. Hovannisian and Simon Payaslian (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2008), 101–104.

    Google Scholar 

  63. Leo died in Paris in 1393; see Angus Donal Stewart, The Armenian Kingdom and the Mamluks: War and Diplomacy During the Reigns of Het’um II (1289–1307) (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 186.

    Google Scholar 

  64. Weiss argues that the interpolations in Bevis were made in the spirit of “patriotic sentiment,” and Kofi Campbell suggests that the romance is concerned with educating people to become better Englishmen: Weiss, “Interpolations,” 75; Campbell, “Nation-Building Colonialist-Style in Bevis of Hampton,” Exemplaria 18.1 (2006), 213.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  65. See Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). Teo also notes that romance novels are read “not only for entertainment but for education as well” (Desert Passions, 253).

    Google Scholar 

  66. Taylor, “Be My Sheikh,” 1038; Billie Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 97.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  67. Kim Lawrence, Desert Prince, Defiant Virgin (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2008).

    Google Scholar 

  68. Sharon Kendrick, The Desert King’s Virgin Bride (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2007)

    Google Scholar 

  69. Kendrick, Surrender to the Sheikh (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2001)

    Google Scholar 

  70. Jane Porter, The Sheikh’s Virgin (Richmond: Mills & Boon, 2005)

    Google Scholar 

  71. and Porter, The Sheikh’s Disobedient Bride (Richmond: Mills & Boon, 2006).

    Google Scholar 

  72. Evelyn Bach, “Sheik Fantasies: Orientalism and Feminine Desire in the Desert Romance,” Hecate 23.1 (1997), 14.

    Google Scholar 

  73. Anne Mather, Dark Enemy (London: Mills & Boon, 1971), 11

    Google Scholar 

  74. Anne Mather, Sandstorm (Richmond: Mills & Boon, 1980)

    Google Scholar 

  75. Margaret Rome, Son of Adam (London: Mills & Boon, 1978). It is worth noting that while Sandstorm is the first Mills & Boon sheikh romance to be set in an entirely fictitious location, some non–Mills & Boon sheikh novels had done this earlier, for example, Maggie Davis’s The Sheik (New York: Fawcett Crest Books, 1977) set in fictional Rahsmani.

    Google Scholar 

  76. Violet Winspear, Blue Jasmine (London: Mills & Boon, 1969).

    Google Scholar 

  77. Teo, Desert Passions. The permissiveness associated with historical romance novels has been observed: see Amy Burge, “Do Knights Still Rescue Damsels in Distress? Reimagining the Medieval in the Mills & Boon Historical Romance,” The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. Katherine Cooper and Emma Short (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 95–114.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  78. Waleed Hazburn, Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 218.

    Google Scholar 

  79. Mattias Jumeno, “‘Let’s Build a Palm Island!’: Playfulness in Complex Times,” Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play, ed. Mimi Sheller and John Urry (London: Routledge, 2004), 182–183.

    Google Scholar 

  80. Camel racing has been introduced as a “tradition” in the UAE: see Sulayman Khalaf, “Poetics and Politics of Newly Invented Traditions in the Gulf: Camel Racing in the United Arab Emirates,” Ethnology 39.3 (2000), 243–261.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  81. Ahmed Kanna, “The State Philosophical,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 16.2 (2005), 59–73; see also Hazburn, Beaches. 223.

    Google Scholar 

  82. Rosemarie Said Zahlan, The Making of the Modern Gulf States: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, 2nd ed. (Reading: Ithaca, 1998), 12.

    Google Scholar 

  83. Clive Bloom, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 17

    Book  Google Scholar 

  84. Trish Morey, The Sheikh’s Convenient Virgin (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2008), hereafter referred to in the text as Convenient Virgin.

    Google Scholar 

  85. President George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President upon Arrival: The South Lawn,” The White House: President George W. Bush, September 16, 2001, May 23, 2015, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010916–2.html.

    Google Scholar 

  86. Jonathan Steele, “No Easy Conquest,” Guardian.co.uk, September 14, 2001, May 23, 2015, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/14/afghanistan.jonathansteele; David Blunkett, “Integration with Diversity: Globalisation and the Renewal of Democracy and Civil Society,” Reclaiming Britishness, ed. Phoebe Griffith and Mark Leonard (London: The Foreign Policy Centre, 2002), 67, my emphasis.

    Google Scholar 

  87. Sean Coughlan, “Muslims ‘Dehumanised’ Warns Qatar’s Sheikha Moza,” BBC News, May 26, 2015, May 26, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-32887820.

    Google Scholar 

  88. Annie West, The Sheikh’s Ransomed Bride (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2007), 46

    Google Scholar 

  89. Susan Stephens, Bedded by the Desert King (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2006), 16; Hewitt, Love-Child, 20.

    Google Scholar 

  90. Lynne Graham, The Desert Sheikh’s Captive Wife (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2007), 131.

    Google Scholar 

  91. Lucy Monroe, The Sheikh’s Bartered Bride (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2004), 170.

    Google Scholar 

  92. Jane Porter, The Sheikh’s Wife (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2001), 58.

    Google Scholar 

  93. Sharon Kendrick, The Sheikh’s Unwilling Wife (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2007), 75; Lawrence, Desert Prince. 148.

    Google Scholar 

  94. The sheikh’s nation of Quamar was “founded… as a Christian dynasty” by their “honoured ancestor, Kareem I”: Lynne Graham, An Arabian Marriage (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2002), 7.

    Google Scholar 

  95. Donna Lee Bowen and Evelyn A. Early, “Glossary,” Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East, ed. Bower and Early, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 379.

    Google Scholar 

  96. Ixy Noever, “Women’s Choices: Norms, Legal Pluralism and Social Control among the Ayt Hdiddu of Central Morocco,” Shattering Tradition: Custom, Law and the Individual in the Muslim Mediterranean. ed. Walter Dostal and Wolfgang Kraus (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 191.

    Google Scholar 

  97. Carla Makhlouf Obermeyer, “Sexuality in Morocco: Changing Context and Contested Domain,” Culture, Health & Sexuality: An International Journal for Research, Intervention and Care 2.3 (2000), 243.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  98. Jane Porter, Duty, Desire and the Desert King (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2009).

    Google Scholar 

  99. Lynne Graham, The Arabian Mistress (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2001), 93.

    Google Scholar 

  100. Carolyn Collette, “Bevis of Hampton: Politics and Film,” Center for Medieval Studies, University of York, January 2010.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors
  1. Amy Burge
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2016 Amy Burge

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Burge, A. (2016). Geographies of Fantasy: Exploring the Romance East. In: Representing Difference in the Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-59356-6_3

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation