The Boundaries of Love: Romance as a Method of Joining and Parting (in) the Global Middle Ages

Annual Riddy Lecture

In the anglophone imaginary, the romance is famous as having emerged in the Middle Ages; indeed, it is often (romantically) associated with the medieval period itself. This accounts for only part of the picture, however. In this talk, I will first show how the rise of romance is a more widespread phenomenon than in just Western Europe, one that gradually unfolds across much of Afro-Eurasia; I will then then explore how we might use this phenomenon to both draw connections and make distinctions across the disparate literary cultures that participate in this system. Much of this exploration is founded on the mechanics of the romance itself, which I understand as a narrative fundamentally concerned with love: If love is the process of “getting to know” someone Other than oneself, the proliferation of romance narratives across this wide space in the medieval period might have something to do with the management of social and cultural difference. I will illustrate this idea with a couple of Persian romances, showing how they compare with similar works in French, Greek, and Arabic to produce a constant dynamic of affinity and distinctio — what we might call ‘borderwork’ — through which storytellers and their audiences sought to situate themselves in the increasingly connected world of the Global Middle Ages.

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