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
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Notes
Jane Porter, The Sultan’s Bought Bride (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2004), 11–12. Hereafter referred to in the text as Bought.
Sabrina Philips, The Desert King’s Bejewelled Bride (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2009). Hereafter referred to in the text as Bejewelled.
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
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
Jennifer R. Goodman, Chivalry and Exploration, 1298–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998)
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.
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.
Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London: The British Library, 1997), 4–5.
Judith Weiss, “The Major Interpolations in Sir Beues of Hamtoun,” Medium Aevum 48 (1979): 71–76.
“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).
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.
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).
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.
Robert Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2005), 10.
Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language. trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 141, 148.
Margaret Wade Labarge, Medieval Travellers: The Rich and the Restless (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982), 2.
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.
Gerald. E. Se Boyar, “Bartholomeus Anglicus and His Encyclopaedia,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 19.2 (1920): 177.
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.
Evelyn Edson, The World Map, 1300–1492: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 94.
Kathy Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community 1000–1534 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 46.
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.
Suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1987), 321.
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
Catherine Delano-Smith and Roger J. P. Kain, English Maps: A History (London: The British Library, 1999), 31.
Diana Webb, Medieval European Pilgrimage, c.700–c.1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 17.
Diana Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England (London: Hambledon & London, 2000), xii.
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.
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.
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.
Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, trans. Frank D. Halsey (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1956), 66.
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.
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.
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
Boase, “The History of the Kingdom,” The Cilician Kingdom of Armenia, ed. Boase (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1978), 28.
E. M. Carus-Wilson and Olive Coleman, England’s Export Trade 1275– 1547 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 13.
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
Steven A. Epstein, An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 83.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
E. B. Fryde, Studies in Medieval Trade and Finance (London: Hambledon, 1983), 295.
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.
Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 2, 171–172.
Thomas Asbridge, The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 657.
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.
Anthony Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land: The Crusade Proposals of the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 8.
Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades 1095–1588 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 229
Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 643–644.
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.
Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 121.
Richard G. Hovannisian and Simon Payaslian, “Armenian Cilicia,” Armenian Cilicia, ed. Hovannisian and Payaslian (Costa Mesa, CA; Mazda, 2008), 2.
John H. Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649–1571 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
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.
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).
Simon Payaslian, The History of Armenia: From the Origins to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 77.
A. E. Redgate, The Armenians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 257; Hovannisian and Payaslian, “Armenian Cilicia,” 2.
David Marshall Lang, Armenia, Cradle of Civilization (London: Allen & Unwin, 1978), 202.
Christopher J. Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation (London: Croom Helm, 1980), 33; Lang, Armenia. 206–208.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Taylor, “Be My Sheikh,” 1038; Billie Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 97.
Kim Lawrence, Desert Prince, Defiant Virgin (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2008).
Sharon Kendrick, The Desert King’s Virgin Bride (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2007)
Kendrick, Surrender to the Sheikh (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2001)
Jane Porter, The Sheikh’s Virgin (Richmond: Mills & Boon, 2005)
and Porter, The Sheikh’s Disobedient Bride (Richmond: Mills & Boon, 2006).
Evelyn Bach, “Sheik Fantasies: Orientalism and Feminine Desire in the Desert Romance,” Hecate 23.1 (1997), 14.
Anne Mather, Dark Enemy (London: Mills & Boon, 1971), 11
Anne Mather, Sandstorm (Richmond: Mills & Boon, 1980)
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.
Violet Winspear, Blue Jasmine (London: Mills & Boon, 1969).
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.
Waleed Hazburn, Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 218.
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.
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.
Ahmed Kanna, “The State Philosophical,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 16.2 (2005), 59–73; see also Hazburn, Beaches. 223.
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.
Clive Bloom, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 17
Trish Morey, The Sheikh’s Convenient Virgin (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2008), hereafter referred to in the text as Convenient Virgin.
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.
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.
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.
Annie West, The Sheikh’s Ransomed Bride (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2007), 46
Susan Stephens, Bedded by the Desert King (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2006), 16; Hewitt, Love-Child, 20.
Lynne Graham, The Desert Sheikh’s Captive Wife (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2007), 131.
Lucy Monroe, The Sheikh’s Bartered Bride (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2004), 170.
Jane Porter, The Sheikh’s Wife (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2001), 58.
Sharon Kendrick, The Sheikh’s Unwilling Wife (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2007), 75; Lawrence, Desert Prince. 148.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jane Porter, Duty, Desire and the Desert King (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2009).
Lynne Graham, The Arabian Mistress (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2001), 93.
Carolyn Collette, “Bevis of Hampton: Politics and Film,” Center for Medieval Studies, University of York, January 2010.
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© 2016 Amy Burge
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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
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