Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38:2, Spring 2008 DOI 10.1215/10829636-2007-024 © 2008 by Duke University Press

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Shades of the East: Orientalism, Religion, and Nation in Late Medieval Scottish Literature

Iain Macleod HigginsUniversity of VictoriaVictoria, British Columbia

A wide range of evidence reveals that medieval and early modern Western Christians found the East endlessly fascinating, and that this fascination persisted even after the encounter with the Americas radically transformed the European image of the world. This Western Christian fascination, more-over, was not limited to the familiar biblical East visited by pilgrims and cru-saders, but extended to the more vaguely understood, marvelous East visited only intermittently by missionaries, merchants, and itinerant artisans.1 The most obvious witnesses to this long-lived enthrallment are the many guide and travel books, biographies, and histories: first, the pilgrimage writings that began to circulate in the fourth century, starting with those of the Bor-deaux pilgrim and Egeria; then after about 1100 the crusade writings, such as Fulcher of Chartres’s Historia Hierosolymitana, or Joinville’s Vie de Saint Louis;2 and finally, from the thirteenth century, the memoirs of such real and imaginary far-travelers as William of Rubruck, Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone, and “Sir John Mandeville.”3

As one might expect, this fascination was almost entirely bound up with the universalizing narrative of Christian history, and for a simple reason: namely, that that history’s unfolding, at once circular and linear, was understood to be punctuated by two world-changing and precisely localized Eastern events — an originary loss in Eden and a redemptive sacrifice in Jeru-salem. Beyond the horizon of the present, moreover, this narrative projected a sublimated return to the Eastern paradise in the form of the Heavenly Jeru-salem.4 The distant East, in other words, not medieval Europe, was the stage on which the most vital world-historical events had been played out. No wonder it compelled such intense fascination. Given this all-encompassing, ideologically charged context, western Christian attitudes toward the ever-expanding East — whose exotic elements also had to be accounted for in the Christian story — would necessarily have been influenced by various consid-

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erations besides the religious: artistic, cultural, political, and psychosocial. One can see the complex interplay of these diverse considerations not only in such common practices as the devout reimaginings of the Passion (Margery Kempe’s in Jerusalem, for example), but in something more unusual like the Mandeville author’s placing Cathay geohistorically and genealogically by linking Noah’s son “Cham” to the Great “Chan” of Cathay.5 Relations with the East, in other words, whether real or imagined, could have as much to do with cultural self-definition as with anything else, the East playing the role of speculum Christianorum. Indeed, so pervasive and enduring was this variously pious, curious, and even narcissistic fascination with the East that its names and images virtually colonized the later medieval imagination, becoming an integral part of western Christian consciousness.6 “If the past is not the present,” as Louise Fradenburg writes, “it is in the present, haunt-ing,” and the same is true of this eastern Elsewhere; it may not be Here, but its presence can be felt Here, “even if only through our uncertain knowl-edges of it, our attempts to design ourselves and our futures.”7

As the surviving evidence shows, the haunting presence of this at once originary and exotic East colored the mental world not only of pil-grims, missionaries, theologians, historians, encyclopedists, and cartogra-phers, but also of writers, artists, craftspeople, and even literary characters. When the Wife of Bath, for example, claims to have been “as kynde” to her fifth husband “As any wyf from Denmark unto Ynde,” Chaucer expects her listeners to accept as commonplace this definition of the world’s geographi-cal reach.8 This passing remark, as it happens, is the only such Eastern shade in the Wife’s prologue, and it is utterly colorless compared to the rich hues painted by the Squire in his tale, but the presence of these two quite different evocations of the East — along with still others — in the Canterbury Tales confirms how saturated the later medieval Christian consciousness could be with Orientalia.9 Clearly, the imaginative world of these fictional English pilgrims making their short way east to the local shrine of a national saint was not limited to the parochial, but reached out geographically, historically, and culturally toward the uttermost boundaries of the Christianized orbis terrarum.

The degree of imaginative saturation itself varied widely, of course, as the two Chaucerian examples just cited show, and that is why I use the term shades to describe it. Given its semantic range, the word allows for nuance as well as a spectrum of difference. It allows one to recognize, for example, a figure of speech (“from Denmark unto Ynde”) as dependent on a specific image of the world and yet not give it the same hermeneutical

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weight as the equally brief reference to “Asye” at the start of the Prioress’s Tale (VII.488). The ideologically charged hues in the Prioress’s mention of “Asye,” for example, disperse boldly throughout her entire tale, discoloring everything in a way that the Wife of Bath’s “Ynde” does not, especially given how the Eastern martyr’s tale ends unexpectedly with a Western shade: “yonge Hugh of Lyncoln” (VII.684). A mere word is used to evoke the East in both texts, but, as the Prioress’s Tale is designed to show, a little thing can do a lot in the right context.

Another reason for using the term shades reveals itself in the Pri-oress’s invocation of the murdered Hugh: namely, that “shades” can also mean “ghosts,” or what might be called “after-images” (visual or verbal echoes). This additional meaning conjures up the possibility of the imagina-tion’s being haunted by the images that color it — and in many cases, being haunted by the darkness that can also be part of the word’s semantic field. The word shades thus allows for passive saturation as well as active occupa-tion; it places illumination in dynamic relation to darkness, and in its evoca-tion of “shadows” grants the possibility of obscured understandings, chiar-oscuro representations, hazy rememberings, or occulted constructions — in which, for instance, a fictive murder in “Asye” conjures up a real one in Lincoln, or in which the spelling of “Cham” and “Chan” links unrelated worlds. If one sense of the phrase “shades of the East” can call up the bril-liance of the courts described by Marco Polo and Chaucer’s Squire, another sense should conjure up the impertinent persistence of the past or the dead, their unheimlich nature being brought imaginatively home: in the violent anti-Jewish piety of the Prioress’s Tale, for instance, or in the sexual violence faced by Constance in her passive Christian peregrinations through the Man of Law’s Tale. The advantage of the subtly polysemous term shades, then, is that it allows for differing attitudes toward the multifaceted East, for both illumination and darkness, even within the same source.

In certain respects, shades functions like the Derridean term specters as used by Stephen Kruger in The Spectral Jew, which examines cultural relations between the actually embodied and the imagined or projected to show how the latter have material consequences.10 The common ground between the two terms is that both define imaginative representation as a kind of conjuring trick, partly willed, partly unconscious, in which presence paradoxically depends on absence, realization on derealization, graspability on ungraspability. In the case of both Kruger’s study and the present one, such representation typically involves an attempt to accommodate a past, an Elsewhere, or an Other that — sometimes even despite its absence — will not

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go away, that is variously reiterated, that variously remanifests itself. Such persistent specters are either out of time or out of place, or sometimes both, and they thus disturb the seemingly self-contained nature of the here and now.11 Useful as the term specter is, though, shades seems a better choice here, not only because it evokes both imaginative coloring and ghostliness, but also because “the East” is neither a human figure nor a figure of speech in anything like the way “the Jew” is (even when associated with Jews or Judaism), and its manifestations and their consequences were obviously very different. Contemplating images of the blind Synagoga, for example, must have affected medieval Latin-Christian sensibilities differently from view-ing the crammed Asian semicircle of marvels, monstrosities, and biblical memoranda on such historico-geographical pictograms as the Ebstorf and Hereford mappaemundi.

The main goal of the present study is to show how thoroughly such Eastern images permeated Latin-Christian consciousness and how readily available they therefore were for local artistic and ideological uses, especially of cultural self-definition. To that end, this study examines the ghostly after-images and imaginative after-effects of events, ideas, and attitudes related to the East in the narrow sense: that is, the biblical and the crusaders’ East. The evidence, though, will come not from travel writings or Chaucer’s works, but from two lesser-known, late medieval Scottish literary texts.12 Within Latin Christendom, only Iceland was geographically farther from the East than Scotland, but this geographical distance in itself is not the reason for looking at these particular Scottish texts. For present purposes what is sig-nificant about the poems in question is that they do not belong to the large corpus of medieval works overtly concerned with the East; rather, both are almost wholly embroiled in internal Scottish affairs, concerned to sort Scot from Sassenach or Lowlander from Highlander.

As I hope to show, texts like these — which contain mere shades of earlier or more fully developed depictions of the East — can reveal as clearly as works like Polo’s or crusading romances some of the ways in which Ori-entalia colored the later medieval Latin-Christian imagination and were put to local uses: to religiously shaped ethnic or nationalist uses in this case. The texts in question are Richard Holland’s mid-fifteenth-century Buke of the Howlat (or owl), an extended political beast fable, and the late-fifteenth- century “Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy,” a virtuoso verbal exchange of abuse between two poets (here a Lowlander and a Highlander). Created by poet-clerics worlds away from Columbus’s expansive dreams, the two Scot-tish works demonstrate that the multivalent East was as imaginatively potent

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a place for stay-at-home writers as it was for far-traveling explorers and that it could be invoked for the purposes of settling scores apparently unrelated to extraterritorial Christian expansion.

Briefly, my argument will be that these two works use their East-ern images as tropes both positive and negative (mostly negative), deploying them to consolidate one particular (imagined) national or ethnic commu-nity through the denigration of another by casting it as Eastern and infi-del.13 In the case of the Howlat, the crusaders’ East erupts unexpectedly into an allegorical beast fable where it is used as propaganda to show that the House of Douglas is the Scottish king’s truest servant in both religious and political affairs. Suddenly, and entirely unpredictably, the Holwat presents its audience with a short, central chanson de geste in which the Christian hero’s prowess against the infidel Saracens also represents his bravery against the faithless “Saxonis,” or English. In the case of “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy,” in contrast, the eruption of the biblical East into the poem has nothing to do with chivalric ideology, and it occupies even less textual space. Nevertheless, it too emerges in a privileged rhetorical position and has a cru-cial ideological role to play, manifesting itself in Kennedy’s climactic barrage of insults against Dunbar. In the “Flyting,” both poets stigmatize difference, and in his final assault Kennedy represents Dunbar’s difference in mostly religious terms as animal, diabolical, sexual, and Oriental. In both works, then, the East as such is not the author’s concern; rather, the Eastern shades serve as vehicles carrying the visceral emotional associations and ideological claims at stake in local quarrels. Their Orientalism, in other words, is also a form of religious regional nationalism, wherein the local gains significance by being reimagined through the “universal.”

The question of medieval Orientalism(s)

Before I turn to my examples, though, it is necessary to ask a large, two-pronged question that will be answered here provisionally, since that answer bears on the discussion of the Scottish poems.

Was there such a thing as medieval Orientalism, and if so, what did it look like? Edward Said’s foundational Orientalism (1978) is concerned with the medieval manifestations of his subject only insofar as they fit into his genealogy of an imperialist, post-Renaissance scholarship. The debate generated by Said’s important, if flawed study has yet to exhaust itself, but in general scholars have been critical of his account of the Middle Ages, even while using his insights to investigate the postmedieval relationship between

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Orientalism and medievalism. Thus, for example, Kathleen Biddick and John Ganim have built on Said and critiques of his work to argue that Ori-entalist medievalism played a vital role in the emergence of both modern medieval scholarship and popular medievalism, while John V. Tolan has offered a detailed corrective to Said’s account of medieval representations of “Saracens,” and Lucy K. Pick has shown how Said misunderstood Dante’s references in the Inferno to Muhammad, Saladin, Avicenna, and Averroes.14 The strongest scholarly claim that there was no such thing as medieval Ori-entalism (in the Saidian sense of a discursive formation used to create an ontological and epistemological distinction between Orient and Occident or to dominate, restructure, and exercise authority over the East) has been made by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, and her case strikes me as persuasive.15 Her claim that the discourse of nation is more salient in the later Middle Ages rests on solid, if somewhat limited, evidence and receives further sup-port, as it happens, from the two Scottish examples discussed below.

Still, given the limits of Akbari’s (mainly English) evidence and the fact that both Scottish works draw on Eastern imagery to reinforce their nationalist goals, I think it is worth revisiting the question of medieval Ori-entalism, recognizing that it need not be opposed to nationalism. The mean-ings of medieval and Orientalism cannot be taken for granted, of course, but before attempting to define them for present purposes, I want to offer a short, somewhat paradoxical answer to the question of medieval Orientalism. In my view — even granting that like any other “ism” it is also partly a retro-spective scholarly construct designed to shape disparate evidence into grasp-able configurations — medieval Orientalism did exist. It was never, however, one wholly coherent thing, least of all a discursive formation deployed in the service of an expansionist ideology in which Orient inevitably gave way to Occident. Understood rather as the complex ensemble of stances toward and relations with the East, its appearance across the centuries was multiform and sometimes contradictory, involving open-minded as well closed-fisted attitudes, all of them variously colored by time, place, and genre.

This multiplicity, moreover, eventually overlapped, Venn-diagram like, with the sometimes narrowing attitudes of early modern Orientalism — which in its own (retrospectively seen) variability was partly shaped by later medieval developments: the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century rise of the Ottoman Empire, in particular, but also Christian humanism, and the European collision with the Americas, not to mention the “rediscovery” of Greek. Nancy Bisaha, for instance, has shown how later-fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian humanist authors added their own twists to the

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standard tropes of medieval Orientalism. In particular, many of them resur-rected the classical concept of the “barbarian” in their writings on the Otto-man Turks, somewhat hardening the distinction between East and West and doing so in increasingly racialized terms — although as James G. Harper has shown, in fifteenth-century visual art Turks could also be characterized as Trojans, and vice versa.16 Farther north, as Nabil Matar has argued, early modern English writers looked not to classical Rome for tropes but to the newly encountered indigenous peoples of the Americas, such that “by the end of the seventeenth century the Muslim ‘savage’ and the Indian ‘savage’ became completely superimposable.”17 Clearly, despite John Tolan’s claim that after the thirteenth century there was “little innovation in approaches to . . . Islam,” important changes in attitudes toward the East did occur between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries.18

Yet even granting such discontinuities between these early Oriental-isms,19 one has to notice their fundamental common ground: Christianiza-tion, first of Europe, then of the wider world, and the resulting religious as well as “local” relations that Latin Christians accordingly had to their (imagined, lost) origins. One can see this common ground in various places, such as in the continued circulation of certain medieval books in the early modern era, even though the world they described had effectively ceased to exist. Martin Luther, for example, made his mid-sixteenth-century case against the “Turk” partly by defending the publication of twelfth-century Latin texts, including Robert of Ketton’s translation of the Qur9an, and by himself translating Riccoldo da Montecroce’s thirteenth-century writings into German.20 Another medieval work that continued to circulate widely was the mid-fourteenth-century Book of John Mandeville, which was read, edited, annotated, and taken on journeys by such figures as Martin Behaim, Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Ralegh, Richard Hakluyt, John Dee, and Mar-tin Frobisher.21 Even Petrarch, one of the first humanists to draw on clas-sical models for representing the East, could be as “medieval” a Christian polemicist as Luther, invoking Charlemagne as a model Christian ruler and looking to restore what he understood to be the wide geographical influence of the early church.22 The very disparity of the figures just mentioned, then, should serve as a reminder that neither medieval nor early modern Oriental-ism was a monological discourse, and so neither can be simply set against the other for the sake of a valorizing contrast. More local analysis of the sort provided by Bisaha and Matar — and also somewhat differently by David Wallace in Premodern Places — is needed to understand both continuities and discontinuities alike.23

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To return now to the question of medieval Orientalism, it is tempt-ing to try defining the two terms separately, taking medieval first, but it will be more productive, I think, to consider them together. The reason why is simple: namely, that considered historically, medieval Europe — which in the present study is taken to mean Latin Christendom, or the European territories converted into the Roman Catholic Church — can be regarded as Orientalizing from the very outset, that is, as defining itself, typically in religious terms, through its relations with and attitudes toward an originary East.24 This Orientalizing was complex and ceaseless, if also discontinuously continuous, and it involved a number of major historical events and pro-cesses, many of them entangled with one another. For reasons of space, one can only sketch the main ones in barest outline here, but even such a cursory account will show why it is necessary to conceive of medieval Orientalism (which grew out of the Christianization of Europe) as plural rather than singular.

The first several of these processes antedated the medieval era, but deeply influenced its georeligious and geopolitical shapes: namely, the trans-formation and ultimately the disintegration of the Roman Empire and its mutation into an eastern Byzantium and various western Germanic succes-sor “states.” One can find evidence of this cultural-geographical split between East and West already in the fourth century in the Catholic struggle against Arianism among the converted “barbarians” and Romans (a passing remark in Augustine’s Confessions IX.vii.15, for example, shows Bishop Ambrose and the emperor Valentinian’s mother Justina on opposite sides of the struggle). The causes of this centuries-long geocultural “Roman” metamorphosis were many and have been much debated, but they include internal economic and political struggles, waves of “immigration” from the East, and widen-ing Christianization. Under Diocletian and Constantine in particular, the increasingly Christianized Roman world effectively reconstituted itself along East-West lines in ways that had long-lasting consequences, especially after the seventh-century expansion of Islam reduced the five principal centers of Christianity to two: a Hellenized Constantinople and a Latinate Rome (the patriarchates of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria having fallen politically under Muslim rule). Byzantine Christianity has its own history, of course, some of it entangled with that of Latin Christianity, but for present pur-poses, the independent history of Eastern Christianity can be ignored.

More to the point here is the long, slow expansion of Latin Chris-tianity. This process — the conversion of the entire westernmost portion of the Eurasian continent — took roughly a millennium (from the fourth

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to the fourteenth century, with some “newcomers” like the Magyars being converted well before earlier inhabitants like the Lithuanians), and slowly became more standardized and centralized. To a large extent, the business of conversion and consolidation was a struggle against religious difference, a centuries-long attempt to create “universal” unity out of local diversity, most notably under Charlemagne and again from the eleventh century on, as Rome took upon itself greater powers as (in its view) the Christian center. It involved, for example, the displacement of Celtic by Roman Christianity in Anglo-Saxon England; Charlemagne’s standardizing ecclesiastical reforms and his protracted missionary Drang nach Osten where the heathen Saxons dwelt; the schism between Western and Eastern Christianity occasioned by the papal legate Cardinal Humbert’s excommunication in 1054 of Michael Cerularius, the patriarch of Constantinople (who answered in kind by excommunicating the pope); the standardizing (indeed “purifying”) decrees issued in 1215 by the Fourth Lateran Council confirming the supremacy of Rome, opposing heresy, and endorsing the “liberat[ion of] the Holy Land from infidel hands”; and the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula with its expulsion of both Muslims and Jews.25

This list of events and documents also serves to recall that, again especially from the eleventh century on, Latin Christianity came to define and know itself above all through its vexed relations with religious “others”: not only pagans and heretics, but Jews, Muslims, and the various Chris-tians belonging to churches that can be called Eastern, including especially the Byzantine. As John Van Engen notes, the common ground of medieval Western Christian culture was essentially staked out by “about the year 1000,” after which time “[Latin] Christendom, rooted in practice and profession and given shape by liturgical, ecclesiastical, and creedal structures, included every person in medieval Europe [excluding Spain] except the Jews.”26 Even so, as the thirteenth-century struggle against heresy suggests, the common ground was not universally accepted. In the domain of Orientalism, one can see the orthodox assumption that there should be Christian universality in the attitudes of the Franciscan monk William of Rubruck. His record of his mid-thirteenth-century mission to the Great Khan in central Asia reveals him to be just as vexed by the presence there of Nestorian Christians as by the Mongols’ tolerance of all religions. Pagans as such were not the prob-lem for William — religious variation was, and the expanded East was an especially fertile ground for its growth. In this context, it is worth noting that William’s report was written as a letter to Louis IX of France, whose life as recorded by Joinville includes not only his adventures as an armed

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pilgrim in the Holy Land but also descriptions of the marvels of the (farther) East. From the crusading period onwards this linking of the biblical with the marvelous East became an important feature of its representation, reach-ing its data-crammed apogee on the Ebstorf and Hereford world maps and in The Book of John Mandeville. Interest in both the one true faith and the many made religious otherness the object not just of missionary designs but also of curiosity and wonder.27

Intertwined with the various politico-religious processes mentioned above were several important cultural and intellectual ones. Two in particu-lar stand out as critical for medieval Orientalism. First, there was the Chris-tianized reception and reworking of classical Latin materials (geographical, historical, and literary), including the tripartite division of the earth and the legends of Alexander and the Trojan War. The writings of Augustine and Orosius come to mind as influential examples, as do the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville and the many redactions of the Alexander romance (in contrast to Orosius, Isidore, and others, William of Rubruck was a skeptic about legendary Eastern wonders and took it upon himself to correct geo-graphical and other errors, usually rightly). Related to this first intellectual process was the similarly Christianized reception and reworking, especially from the eleventh century on, of the Arab-mediated Greek heritage as well as the Arab and Muslim heritage itself. Important here were translations of the Qur’an and the intellectual crisis provoked by the rediscovery of Aristo-tle. In both processes, as in the world maps, the goal was to accommodate the cultural and intellectual world’s apparently endless variety by fitting it into the larger framework of Christian history.

Out of these diverse and ceaseless developments — sketched here in their broadest outlines only — there arose what one can call medieval Orien-talism: not a discourse, but the retrospectively grasped ensemble of formally expressed attitudes toward and representations of the East. Defined thus, medieval Orientalism becomes in effect a set of medieval Orientalisms, since its manifestations would necessarily take quite different forms according to the context. Papal correspondence with the Eastern Church, for instance, would involve different attitudes from those of Friar Odoric’s breathless account of religious practices in India and China, just as a romance-writer’s Saracens might differ considerably from the depiction of Muslim Mongols in illustrated copies of Marco Polo’s Divisament dou monde. It is, I think, hard to overstress this point about the importance of contexts, genres, loca-tions, and the like, for only recently has scholarly discussion in the wake of Said’s work considered Orientalism in anything other than monological and

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negative terms.28 Even after Latin Christendom emerged as what historians consider a coherent civilization — that is, from about the eleventh century, which coincidentally is also when the crusading era begins — its relations with the East remained multifaceted. “Discursive control” through (mis)rep-resentation is hardly the whole story, even though it has until recently been the most prominent story for literary scholars.

If one accepts this capacious definition of medieval Orientalism, then it is possible to reconceive the corpus of Orientalist evidence, look-ing beyond the obvious. The famous late-fourteenth-century Livre des merveilles (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr. 2810) owned by Jean, Duc de Berry — an illustrated collection of travel writings (including Polo and Mandeville, amongst others) — obviously belongs to that corpus. But so too might the roughly coeval Pearl manuscript (London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x), with its three biblically inspired poems (Pearl, Clean-ness, and Patience) joined to an account of the Christianized chivalric legacy of Troy (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). This is not the place to read the Pearl manuscript as potentially Orientalist — “Oute of oryent, I hardyly saye”29 — but one line of enquiry might consider the relations between his-tory, geography, and religious purity, while another would ask about the consequences of placing an Arthurian romance in such a complex religious context with its many-sided exploration of both origins and ends; even the romance’s “Celticized” marvels, for instance, might be seen in a different light, particularly when one recalls that writers as different as Mandeville, Gerald of Wales, and Chaucer brought wonders both Eastern and West-ern together. In Mandeville, for example, a tree-grown Indian bird recalls the English barnacle goose, linking the ends of the earth through mutual marvels, while in Gerald’s Topographiae Hiberniae a comparison of marvels shows how the East has nothing on the West — indeed is inferior by vir-tue of its pestiferous climate.30 Chaucer’s juxtaposition is characteristically more complex, since it depends on the interplay of two Canterbury tales (the young Squire’s account of the courtly marvels of Tartary and the older Franklin’s Breton lay with its far-western wonders), but the principle at work remains the same.

It is a linguistic accident that the words orient and origin are cog-nate, both deriving from the Latin deponent verb, orior, “to rise,” but that accident reveals a truth about the Christian Middle Ages: its Orientalism must be conceived of as formalizing a relation to origins, to the rising of the sun/Son, a relation mediated into the vernaculars through Christian Latin. Examples of Orientalism as a relation to origins abound, including some

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as unexpected as the prologue to Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, which recounts the Trojan-Asian colonization of the European north.31 Probably the clear-est illustration of Orientalism as a relation to origins lies in two thirteenth- century cartographic masterpieces, the encyclopedic Ebstorf and Hereford mappaemundi. In accordance with their Roman inheritance, each literally orients the tripartite earth, locating East at the top, but then Christianizes this geography by placing the Earthly Paradise there, directly above the now-central Jerusalem.32 Imaging and writing world history as Christian his-tory — the Hereford map shows the earth under a depiction of the Last Judg-ment, while the Ebstorf map depicts the earth as the Body of Christ — these maps also incorporate into their pictorial quasi-narrative arrangement even such non-Christian material as episodes from the Alexander legends and various marvels and monsters of the East, becoming in effect anthologies of Orientalist shades.

Less noticeable under the imagistic weight of such Orientalia is the bottom lefthand corner where thirteenth-century Europe lies. As these geohistorical pictograms show, this small part of the world cannot compete visually with the remaining three-quarters made up of Asia and Africa — the dominance of the latter two continents being reinforced by the fact that the boundary between them is somewhat indistinct. What such maps thus reveal — and they were highly influential until the magnetic compass reoriented the world-picture north to south and the immoveable fact of the Americas exploded the old tripartite geography — is that the world-remaking geography of medieval Orientalism is not based on a simple binary of East versus West, or the East versus “Europe,” as a Saidian definition would sug-gest.33 Rather, this view of the world as originally Eastern and unfolding historically through the center (site of the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Res-urrection) derives from ideas elaborated in the far northwestern corner of the earth, partly in response to the crusades.34 The partial blurring of the boundary between Asia and Africa, moreover, suggests that the East could extend to whatever was not Christian Europe, as can be seen, for example, in the eventual migration of Prester John from “India” to Abyssinia, or in one of many shades of later medieval Christian geography: Lachine (“China”), Quebec. East and West, in other words, existed in shifting, not merely binary relations — a point Christine Chism confirms when, in her discus-sion of two alliterative poems that Christianize classical subjects (The Wars of Alexander and The Siege of Jerusalem), she remarks on “the sheer diversity of responses” to the Matter of Araby and “its different embodiments” in the extant witnesses.35

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It is to two small, late medieval examples from one of the literatures of the bottom lefthand corner of the mappaemundi that I now turn so as to discuss their Orientalist after-images. Having outlined the larger context of Latin-Christian relations to the multiform East, I want to examine two texts that have nothing to do with medieval Orientalism in the sense of being explicitly and extensively concerned with the East. My aim, as noted already, is thus to show how available images of the East were in the later medieval period, especially of the biblical and the crusaders’ East, and how easily such images could be put to local uses, particularly concerning the touchy matter of origins and (ethnic or national) self-identity. My concern, in other words, is with the local (largely ideological) work that these at once foreign and familiar images do in their new literary contexts.

A Scottish Christian at heart, or crusading against the “Anglo-Saracens” in Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat

Anyone looking for evidence of medieval Orientalism in its different forms is unlikely to think first of Scottish texts, even the Scottish Alexander romances, and certainly not of anything so little known as the poet-priest Richard Hol-land’s Buke of the Howlat, a hymn to the House of Douglas embedded in a beast fable. What makes this initially unlikely work of value for the question of Orientalism is not so much the allusions revealing a contemporary aware-ness of the East — one can find these almost anywhere — but the embedded Orientalist narrative that unexpectedly wrenches the work out of its allegori-cal pageant and into (idealized) history and political propaganda. The point of this Orientalist turn, though, is not so much to establish or confirm a relation of Latin Christian dominance over the East as to press an account of such prior (wished-for) dominance into service in the political struggles between the Douglas family and James II (1437– 60). A tendentious account of specific events in the East, that is, is used in praise of “the Dowglas . . . / As lelest [most loyal]” to the king — as someone therefore whose high task is “all Scotland fra scaith to reskewe” [to rescue all Scotland from harm] (432 – 33) through a heroic death on foreign soil.36

Composed, probably between 1445 and 1452, for Elizabeth Dunbar, Countess of Moray and wife of the poet-priest’s patron Archibald Douglas, Earl of Moray, The Buke of the Howlat uses its seventy-seven, thirteen-line rhymed alliterative stanzas to offer a brilliantly complex — almost too com-plex — elaboration of a simple moral fable. Expanded from its source(s) as thoroughly as Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, if in a radically different manner,

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the fable at the heart of the Howlat serves as a vehicle for various histori-cal, political, philosophical, devotional, and homiletic concerns, not just for nationalist propaganda. In addition to mixing diverse matter and genres, the poem mixes tones and styles, ranging from the serious to the satirical and the slapstick, from the high to the low (it includes a hymn to Mary, for example [718– 54], as well as mockery of “A bard owt of Irland” [794 – 832, quoting 795], the latter working implicitly to exalt Holland as an Anglophone Scot-tish poet). The structuring fable, though — an analogue of the story of the crow in Odo of Cheriton’s early-thirteenth-century collection — is simple enough. It tells of an owl that, having complained about his ugly, unnatu-ral appearance, receives from Dame Nature a new, more beautiful plumage borrowed from other birds; since the nocturnal owl in medieval allegory is by definition a villain, one is not surprised to learn that this borrowed plum-age instantly makes him proud and imperious, an attitude that requires his being returned forcefully to his original lowly state.

The poem containing this fable opens and closes as a chanson d’aventure in which a nameless narrator overhears the owl’s complaint one fine May morning, but this poetic frame merely provides a well-trodden way to establish the idea of a natural order, someone’s dissatisfaction with it, and the negative consequences of the dissatisfaction. All the poet’s imagina-tive energies have instead gone into elaborating the basic fable, which both frames and incorporates into its narrative a lengthy allegorical bird assembly of a kind familiar nowadays from Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls. This incor-porated, framed gathering itself then incorporates and frames a didactic heraldic sequence which, in its explanatory account of the patron Douglas’s coat of arms, frames the poem’s structural and ideological center. Surpris-ingly, given its context, the poem’s center turns out to be a quasi-historical narrative concerned not with the symbolic behavior of exemplary beasts but with the idealized deeds of real human beings. Not only that, but this cen-tral narrative develops at a complete tangent to the poem’s direction so far, telling the story of Sir James Douglas’s early-fourteenth-century armed pil-grimage to Jerusalem with the royal heart of Robert the Bruce. As the story reminds its readers, this was a journey undertaken to fulfill a promise made by Douglas to the deceased Scottish king (although, as we shall see, the story neglects to say that the actual journey took quite a different course from its literary recreation). In short, the story works to place the Douglas clan at the center of Scottish power as the king’s and therefore the country’s truest servants by virtue of their devotion to both God and the Holy Land and king and country.37

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Until recently, the Howlat’s few modern readers regarded the pro-pagandistic historical narrative at the center of this intricate nest of Chinese boxes as a good example of bad medieval literature. Several recent studies, however, have convincingly argued for the work’s overall artistic and the-matic coherence, whatever one might think of its overt (and conventional) moral designs.38 Put simply, The Buke of the Howlat is a highly artificial poem elaborately but coherently built up around a straightforward nega-tive exemplum that aims to show the consequences of violating the divinely ordained natural order of things, using not only its fictional and historical materials to do so, but its carefully wrought structure as well. In the poem, the faithful noble heart, naturally as well as sacrificially true to God, king, clan, homeland, and Holy Land, is flamboyantly displayed at the heart of a kind of verbal reliquary, where it is set narratively and ideologically against the trappings of worldly ambition represented by the borrowed feathers. Unlike the unnatural owl, the Douglas clan has earned the right to bear the “bludy hart” (436) on their arms and thus to serve at the locus of power.

This conservative fable is set in motion when the dissatisfied owl goes to the pope, a peacock, to plead his case against Dame Nature; he cannot go to Nature herself, he says, for fear of being put to death, but the pope’s prayers may serve (66 – 78). No less concerned about the dangers of complaining to Nature, the pope summons representatives of the spiritual estate from “all landis” (131) to hear the owl’s plea. Recognizing that Nature governs all creation, the assembled clerical birds decide that representa-tives of the temporal estate must also be summoned, starting with the Holy Roman emperor (represented as an eagle, of course [313 –15]), and it is the latter estate’s arrival that sets the heraldic sequence going and with it the historical narrative. For this slow and stately unfolding serves to place the later pro-Douglas propaganda under the sign of both the highest sacred and secular powers, shown here joined in common purpose and seen to be con-sulting their advisors and each other so as to act appropriately: “So that the spirituale staite, / And the secular consait [opinion] / Mycht all gang in a gait [can all go the same way], / Tender and trewe” (283 – 86).

What one might call Orientalist shades (the poetic colorings that implicitly or explicitly set the text’s concerns in relation to the East) begin to show themselves in the poem’s first part as the birds assemble. One of these shades appears only by implication, when in stanza 7 the owl wonders which pope he should complain to, alluding to the schism of the 1440s and its implications for East-West Christian relations. The poem’s pope, as the display of his arms in the heraldic pageant eventually reveals, was in fact the

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antipope of the day, Felix V, and his cause, it so happened, was supported by the poem’s patrons, the Douglases, against that of the deposed Eugenius, who sought to strengthen his displaced hand by attempting to negotiate a reunion with the Eastern Church.39 Latin Christian relations with the East-ern Church during this period are also alluded to in the poem’s reference to the pheasant patriarchs, although (as is appropriate for allegorical shades) there is some debate over their identity: in one reading, they are the East-ern patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, while in another, they stand for their Latin counterparts, whose privileges were renewed in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council.40 Whatever the case, the point here is that the Scottish politics still to come in the poem are being reached by way of papal politics, which are themselves caught up in the old struggle of the Latin Church’s relation to the East. Sorting out the local, in other words, seems to have required thinking about Eastern origins, and the poem is thus haunted by the shades of an East that it has incorporated only imaginatively, not actually. As so often in the crusading era and its aftermath, the East represents a distant difficulty as well as a utopian hori-zon — making it a place that is good to think with, as Claude Lévi-Strauss might have said.

The East’s actual incorporation into this part of the poem can be found in the fieldfare, a bird here characterized as “ane hospitular” (229). The fieldfare, that is, represents the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, an organization originally set up to help crusaders; this “foreign” order, in a kind of reverse colonization, arrived in Scotland in the twelfth century, linking the central East with the marginal Northwest. Nothing significant is done with this allusion, however, in partial contrast to another allusion that also depends on the audience’s knowledge of the biblical and crusaders’ East: the reference to the emperor being summoned from his seat “in Babilonis towr” (293). The precise significance of this location is unclear. It may be satirical, linking secular political ambitions with the punishing confusions of Babel, but that seems unlikely given that the emperor and pope cooperate in this poem. In any case, like the papal references men-tioned above, it shows how Latin Christendom preferred to define itself in relation to the East, especially the biblical East. As Holland notes, the emperor actually comes geographically from the South — he “[s]eikis our the salt se fro the south fellis, / Enteris in Ewrope” [travels over the salt sea from the south hills, / enters Europe] (303 – 4) — but what is at issue here is imagi-native geography. The East in this poem, that is, lies not so much in actual as in imagined complementarity to Latin Christendom, and its earthly space,

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like that of the encyclopedic mappaemundi, is being used for cultural and ideological navigation rather than practical. By themselves, though, these several nonpractical landmarks are not especially significant, and tell us little that we do not already know about medieval Orientalism. Their importance is retrospective, enhanced by the way in which the poem develops once the emperor arrives and the question of earthly power can be broached directly, in nationalist terms.

The nationalistic political element of the poem’s imaginative geog-raphy — the element in which paradoxically the Orientalist shades manifest themselves explicitly and extensively — becomes clear when the secular birds arrive to meet the pope and the woodpecker begins the heraldic procession. First come the papal arms, then the imperial, then the Scottish king’s, a sequence which locates the poem in much the same way that the young Catholic Stephen Dedalus orients himself near the outset of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist: through a set of concentric and therefore inter dependent circles, in this case surrounding the “central” Douglases. For the display of the king’s arms — the king destined to be “lord and ledar,” not just of Scotland, but “Our [over] braid Brettane all quhar [everywhere]” (374 – 75) — leads immediately to “the armes of the Dowglas . . . / Knawin [known] throw all Cristindome” (380– 81).

Having arrived at its patrons’ arms, the poem suddenly turns from heraldry to history. What sets this inner story in motion is the reference to the “bludy hart” (436) on the arms, a heart that will link thematically central but geographically marginal Scotland with the geographically and culturally central Holy Land. This is the heart with which Robert the Bruce vowed to make a pilgrimage “to the haly graif” (444), desiring to carry it there in his own body. His body failed him before he could fulfill the vow, though, and his heart had to be taken to the East not in its owner’s body, but by itself, as a kind of relic. The relic heart thus made its Eastern pilgrimage in the pos-session of James Douglas, the king’s truest servant, who thereby fulfilled a promise to the dying monarch. Elaborated from its source in John Barbour’s Bruce (and possibly Jean Froissart’s Chroniques), the story of this heroic jour-ney is clearly designed to hymn the House of Douglas, and it stretches the truth considerably to do so. As the Howlat’s editors note, Douglas got no further than Spain, where in 1330 he died fighting for King Alfonso XI of Castile and Leon against the Moors of Granada, and no writer before Hol-land even remotely suggests that Douglas reached the Holy Land, let alone asserts it as true.41 This geographical sleight-of-hand is clearly necessary to the poem’s ideological aims, though, shifting the central episode away from

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the partly “local” politics of Iberian Christian-Muslim conflict in order to bring it into line with the mainstream of Christian and crusading history. Christ’s blessing, not Alfonso’s, is what Holland requires for Douglas since otherwise the troubling question of Douglas’s national loyalties might arise.

In Holland’s telling, Douglas encloses the heart in a valuable reli-quary (469) and takes it to the “salvatouris sepultur” (473). There the Scot-tish pilgrim has the heart elaborately hallowed and then hangs it around his neck, over his own heart, as a kind of sacred plumage, the outer sign iconically (rather than allegorically) reflecting the inner state, in contrast to the owl’s borrowed garb. Whether or not Holland knew the romance of Richard Coeur de Lion, this scene recalls, even with its significant differences, the famous scene in which, after his nationalist Eastern exploits, the English crusader-king earns his epithet, ripping out a lion’s heart and devouring it.42 Unlike Richard’s literalizing romancier, though, Holland can only suggest that Douglas embodies the coeur du roi in his deeds, since the king must not be displaced. And the pendant relic carries still more meaning, since it also evokes the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Appropriately, then, Douglas’s affection-ate gesture here provokes a pang of chivalric grief that he has not yet fully earned his icon: “O flour of all chevalry, / Quhy leif I, allace, quhy, / And thow deid art?” [O flower of all chivalry, why do I live, alas, why, and you are dead?] (479– 81). The initial identification, in other words, provokes a disidentification — the overlapping shades of difference (Robert, Douglas, Jesus) evoked by the iconic heart — and this paradoxically unifying splitting now leads Douglas to honor his dead king in a properly Christian chivalric way that conflates the poem’s nationalist and Orientalist agendas, just as one might superimpose two transparencies to create a (nonexistent) third:

“My deir,” quod the Douglas, “art thow deid dicht,My singuler souerane, of Saxonis the wand?Now bot I semble for thi saull with Sarazenis mycht,Sall I never sene be into Scotland.” (482 – 85)

[“My dear,” said the Douglas, “are you properly dead, my singular sovereign, the scourge of Saxons (i.e., the English)? Now unless I battle for your soul against the Saracen force, I can never show my face in Scotland.”]

Particularly striking in this sequence of events is the way in which across a single pair of lines the old Anglo-Scottish conflict suddenly metamorphoses into the old Christian-Saracen one, as if the two were analogous; this is

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Christian Scotland against the infidel, and fighting Saracens in the Holy Land is depicted as in effect identical to being the scourge of “Saxons” and fighting Englishmen at home.43 This unprovoked attack on local Muslim forces, that is, occurs in order to remind readers that Douglas is an armed pilgrim, that his chivalric prowess serves both the national and the religious cause — indeed that religious and national identity alike are forged in the travails of war on foreign soil. For war has the great virtue of reducing all relations to a simple “us” versus “them,” a reduction often emphasized, as here, by a “shady” conflating of old conflicts with current ones.44 The ideo-logical necessity of this conflation in its precisely historicized setting may explain why, somewhat unusually, especially in such a late medieval text, Holland’s Saracens receive no racial or ethnic characterization.45 Siding of course with his patron, Holland calls the attack a “defence of the faith” (486), representing it in standard crusading fashion, and stating that Doug-las leads his “knychtis of Cristindome” (487; not of Scotland) into fierce battle against “the hethin men” (490) by throwing the king’s heart into the enemy’s troops as a kind of challenge, both to himself and the enemy:

Amang the hethin men the hert hardely he slang, Said: “Wend on as thou was wont, . . . . . . . . . . . .Ay formast in the front, Thy fays amang [amongst your enemy]!

And I sall followe the in faith or feye to be fellit [or be fated to fall].” (490– 95)

Eager to win back the “Saxon-scourge’s” heart from “Mahownis men” (497), who are also called “the fals folk” (501) and “Sathanas syde” (509), Douglas conquers field after field, doing deeds that become known “[t]hrowout Cris-tendome” (504).

The last of Douglas’s great deeds in the poem implicitly invokes the fatalistic heroism of the chansons de geste, since it involves the leader’s com-ing to the rescue of a lone knight “[c]irculit with Sarazenis” and dying with him “in defence of the faith” (512 – 25) — another difference from Richard Coeur de Lion, whose hero returns from the East. But then Douglas has to die, since otherwise he would overshadow his king rather than iconically embody him. Douglas’s death, which actually occurred in Tebas de Ardales, Spain, leads to the poem’s great symbolic exchange: the heart-bearer Doug-las’s burial in the Holy Land and the return of the king’s heart itself to Scot-

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land (529– 33), where, having already been hallowed and “recaptured” in the Holy Land, it then takes its iconic place in the Douglas arms. The retainer, in other words, has been substituted for his lord so that his lord — in the symbolic form of his triumphant, heroic heart — can return home to reener-gize the faithful, leaving his mark (the heart) on theirs (the arms).46 This, as Fradenburg might say, is the spectacular art of chivalric sacrifice in which the group’s cultural identity is cemented through the pleasures of watching a “nobleman . . . re-create himself as a rescuer and defender of the faith, the Eucharist [here depicted as the Sacred Heart], his patria, [and] his lord.”47 The marginal Scotland and the central Holy Land are now blood brothers, as it were, sources of the true faith, at once local and universal, joined as they have just been in this narrative by the much-traveled heroic heart — a heart resurrected for Scotland by Douglas’s death in the Holy Land. This elective blood kinship, moreover, recalls some of the other East-West pair-ings noticed above — the Mandeville author’s, Gerald of Wales’s, and Chau-cer’s — but it goes well beyond them, preferring the paradox of identification in disidentification to the parallel of analogy.

There can be no clearer sign of the extent to which Eastern shades have permeated the imagination of at least some late medieval Latin Chris-tians than this anachronistic eruption of an Orientalizing chanson de geste into a courtly beast fable. Unlike the borrowed bird feathers, the “bludy hart” of the Douglas arms is sanctioned by hard-earned contact with the Holy Land itself, giving the Scottish symbol a proper Eastern origin in defense of the faith. Of particular note here is how well the chanson enshrined at the center of a radically different genre, the beast fable, fulfills its traditional propagandistic role, its idealized, nationalizing religious history simplifying the potential complexities of the bejewelled allegory: it divides the world into good and bad, right and wrong, even (or especially) when the good die, like Douglas, Charlemagne, or Christ. “Paien unt tort e chretïens unt dreit” [pagans are wrong, Christians are right], as the Chanson de Roland bluntly puts it, a sentiment echoed in the Howlat’s attempt to justify Scotland’s greatness through making the English implicit Saracens.48 A citation in the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue from an early-sixteenth-century mis-cellany known as the Asloan Manuscript (National Library of Scotland, MS 16500) shows that Holland was not alone in equating “Saxon” with “infidel,” if not in such an overtly Orientalist manner: “The quhilk fals Saxonis blud ware evire Wit aganis the Christin faith” [the which false Saxons’ blood has always been against the Christian faith].49 The difference, though, is that Holland’s poem actually elaborates the logic of that equation, and in the

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process confirms what Chism concludes about The Siege of Jerusalem and The Wars of Alexander: that such poems testify to “the increasingly wide-spread consciousness that whatever the outcome, the fates and identities of Christian Europe and the lands to the East were irrevocably linked” — or rather the fates and identities of individual Christian European nations and the mutable, contradictory East.50 The idea of Christian Europe, to be sure, began to emerge in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but it did so, like the Orientalism(s) of the period, in relation to nationalism, the transnational religion paradoxically helping consolidate national identities as well as reli-gious ones.51

Monstrous Lowlander out of Egypt: “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy”

It is not Scotland versus England, but Highlander versus Lowlander that provides the second example of the after-effects of medieval Orientalism, as shades of the East make their haunting presence felt in another unlikely text, “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy” (ca. 1500?).52 The stylized exchange of insults by two figures divided by familial, ethnic, or national affiliations can be found in both classical and medieval literature — the verbal alterca-tion between Beowulf and Unferth is a famous example — where it is often used to prove that the hero is worthy of the fight.53 In later medieval Scot-land, these exchanges can be found in a (largely comic) genre of their own known as “flyting,” wherein the interlocutors speak abusively of each other.54 The masterpiece of this curious Scottish genre is undoubtedly “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy,” a 552-line poem recording a poetic contest (actual or virtual) in which the two title figures engage in a virtuoso performance of mutual invective. As in Holland’s Howlat, the measure of success is proxim-ity to the king, in this case the privilege of sitting by the royal hearth, and the competition turns especially on the ethnic origins of the contestants. For Dunbar, the clinching “argument” against Kennedy is that to be a High-lander is to be a country bumpkin, whereas for the more overtly theologi-cally minded Kennedy, the coup de grâce against the Lowlander takes the form of largely Orientalizing insults. Significantly, his crowning blow serves the same functions as the embedded chanson de geste in Holland’s Howlat: that of raising the stakes of a local dispute by elevating it to the “univer-sal” and that of enhancing the threat of one’s enemy by associating them/him with shades of the East. The difference in this case, though, is that the Eastern shades are conjured in Scotland in order to be banished; they

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participate in scapegoating rather than sacrifice. Whereas Holland invokes the hardy Saracens to help put Scotland in touch with the beneficial powers of the East — even though some of the shades in the Howlat are negative, the power that arises from encountering them in the right circumstances (of both place and genre) can still be tapped — Kennedy summons Eastern shades to Scotland only out of a desire to exorcise them, for only by conjur-ing the distant Other can he show how threatening the local Other is.

As we have it, “The Flyting” falls into four symmetrical parts arranged Dunbar, Kennedy, Dunbar, Kennedy. The first two parts are short, each twenty-four lines in three rhymed stanzas, the latter two parts much longer: 200 lines (Dunbar) in twenty-five rhymed stanzas, and 304 lines (Kennedy) in thirty-eight. To prevent their invective from degenerating into tedium, both poets shape their tirades through inventories of each other’s defects as well as through implied and actual narrative. Dunbar, for instance, caps his prolonged assault with a memorable comic tale (mentioned above) of the Highlander Kennedy’s ill-fated visit to Edinburgh (209– 32). In it, the scruffy country bumpkin is run out of town by stray dogs, children, ruffians, and fishwives, a boisterous scene that echoes the xenophobic moment in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (VII.3375 – 401) when the barnyard chase is likened to the London massacre of Flemings.55 Here class distinctions do the work of signifying ethnic difference, making Kennedy doubly unsuitable for a seat at the royal hearth. Working toward similar ends, Kennedy not only answers Dunbar’s catalogue of derogatory charges against him, reversing or inverting them, but also invents a disparaging genealogy that makes the Lowlander a pint-sized petty traitor, setting the stage for scapegoating Dunbar through religious rather than class differences. The archtraitor in Christianity is of course Judas, and Kennedy, raising the ideological stakes at a rhetorically strategic moment, invokes his memory toward the end of his long assault, asserting that the only benefice which the poet-priest Dunbar will receive is that of “gyngill[ing] Iudas bellis” (506), the rattles or clappers used during the Silencing of the Bells in the three days before Easter.

With this reference to Judas, just six stanzas (some fifty lines) before the end, the Orientalist shades explicitly enter the poem. They do so, that is, precisely as Kennedy is bringing the flyting to a close in the usual verbally intensified manner. In his books, then — and he is a very bookish combat-ant — there is no better way to abuse your local opponent than to “Oriental-ize” him. Considered both rhetorically and structurally, the placement of this material suggests that Kennedy counted on his audience understand-ing it not as a last desperate gasp, but as the most powerful set possible of

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disparaging images. He tells Dunbar the Judas-bell-jingler to “get lost” in medieval fashion, banishing him to France as a pilgrim accompanied by the devil (509–12), and calls him a cankered Cain and a Titivillus, the demon associated with malicious speech (513). But the Highlander is only warming up here, and after straying for a few lines into purely physical insults, he lets go with a vicious barrage that summons a series of Eastern shades and shows how thoroughly the matter of medieval Orientalism has tainted his and his audience’s imaginations:

Conspiratour, cursit cocatrice, hell caa,Turk trumpour, traitour, tyran intemperate,Thou irefull attircop, Pilate apostata,Iudas, Iow, iuglour, Lollard laureate,SaraWene, symonyte provit, pagane pronunciate,Machomete manesuorne, bugrist abhominabile,Deuill, dampnit dog, sodomyte insatiable,With Gog and Magog grete glorificate. (521 – 28)

[Conspirator, cursed cockatrice, hell(’s) jackdaw, trickster Turk, traitor, intemperate tyrant, you irate spider, apostate Pilate, Judas, Jew, juggler (or Goliard), laureate Lollard, Saracen, proven simoniac, declared pagan, perjured Muhammad, abominable bugger, devil damned dog, insatiable sodomite, greatly glorified with Gog and Magog.]

A skeptic might argue that purely formal constraints — the demands of the insistent alliteration, for example — have shaped the collocation of such words as Turk and traitor, but even allowing for such a possibility, the quoted barrage proves on closer examination to be as carefully constructed ideologi-cally as it is formally. Indeed, all the elements of Kennedy’s attack on Dun-bar come together here — the Lowlander as monstrous traitor — but they are now mixed with a salmagundi of negative Eastern imagery both con-temporary and historical (Turks, Saracens, Jews, etc.) designed to intensify their visceral emotional effect. The bulk of this imagery is religious in nature and consists of anachronistic variations on a theme going back to the emer-gence of official orthodoxy in Christianity and to the Latin Christian habit of self-definition against religious (often Eastern) Others. In Kennedy’s view, what sets Dunbar apart, what discredits him absolutely, is that he belongs among the false, a highly mixed group that includes the despotic, the infidel, the heterodox, the heretical, the unconverted, the apostate, and — as if to

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underscore the unnaturalness of all these contrarian figures — the sexually deviant. The references to sodomy and sexual excess are no doubt designed to suggest that religious variance is as “beastly,” as “monstrous,” as “for-eign” as sexual difference — in short, that both are equally “perverse” and “unnatural,” a trope that Holland uses rather more delicately in contrasting the “bludy hart” with the borrowed feathers. Capping the vicious list are the apocalyptic figures (or tribes) of Gog and Magog, well known not only from the Bible, but from their mythic association with Antichrist; they appear as cannibals — an image of absolute perversion — on the great encyclopedic mappaemundi, for example, and as collaborators with “the Jews” in The Book of John Mandeville, where their evil, world-ending work is prophesied.56 It is hard to imagine that Kennedy’s listeners would have been any more unaware of the horrors associated with the cannibalistic Gog and Magog than they would have been of those linked to the contemporary “Turk.” Like Holland in The Buke of the Howlat, then, Kennedy here marks ethnic or national dif-ference and demonizes the local Other with overtly Orientalist imagery, the implication apparently being that this Lowlander “Saracen” (etc.) must be treated in the same fashion as the distant ones: by expulsion, or by conquest and death, or just possibly by conversion.

In case the audience fails to comprehend the force of the quoted stanza, Kennedy makes the anti-Christian Orientalist genealogy explicit in the next: “Pharao thy fader, Egiptia thy dame” (530). Pharoah is of course the persecutor of the Israelites, God’s chosen people, making Dunbar a descendent of the great enemy in the Judeo-Christian master narrative, but Egypt here has at least two possible meanings, one broad, one narrow, plus a peculiarly Scottish resonance. The broad meaning is that of the non- and the anti-Christian East generally, making Dunbar an Oriental antagonist of the one true faith, possibly even a poeticizing Babylonian “seductress” in the king’s court. The narrow meaning is that of Potiphar’s wife, the sexu-ally voracious spouse of one of Pharoah’s employees, for as Priscilla Baw-cutt has pointed out, Egiptia is a name for Potiphar’s wife in The Testament of Joseph, one of the apocryphal Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.57 For those who would have recognized the narrower meaning, Dunbar would here be clearly stigmatized as the bastard son of a shameless Eastern woman, making him, symbolically at least, an outsider, an Oriental colonizer, in his own Scotland.58 The particular irony of Kennedy’s accusation is that it takes for granted the myth of Scotland’s Egyptian foundation — a late medieval countermyth to the more widely known one of England’s Trojan founda-tion — but transvalues it, turning it here from a potential boast to a forceful

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insult.59 It makes of the Lowlander an interloper, the bringer of bad (irreli-gious, sexually deviant) blood, thus leaving the Highlander to become the legitimate inhabitant of Scotland.

Nor is this all. Kennedy also takes care to name some of Dunbar’s many Eastern and devilish relations, including Golias, Beelzebub, Baal, Pluto, Caiaphas, Herod, Nero, Muhammad, Antenor and Aeneas, and “Put-tidew,” the Wandering Jew who was thought to have shoved Jesus (529– 41). The whole Eastern Mediterranean inheritance of Latin Christendom is invoked here, although only in its negative associations, and Dunbar is said to descend from it. In fact, in each of the last three stanzas he is hailed as “Deulbere” (that is, devil-bear; 531, 544, 545), a name justified earlier in the poem as deriving from Dunbar’s treacherous “forbear” (257) who was “[g]enerit betuix ane scho beir and a deill” [begotten between a she-bear and a devil] (259). The point could not be clearer: difference of any sort is mon-strous, at once animal, Oriental, and diabolical. The three sets of images and associations powerfully, indeed viscerally, reinforce one another, as the negative shades of the East share the stage with those of other troublesome, troubling avatars or (im)personifications of the human being, whatever one’s ethic or national affiliation.

More so even than Holland’s poem, then, Kennedy’s flyting dem-onstrates how discursive forms of (negative) distinction can overlap and even be used as if interchangeably, one category or trope collapsing into another. When they manifest themselves spectrally, as in these two poems, the dis-tinctive shades can also be superimposed on one another, creating ideologi-cally charged composite figures (of speech), the distant Other being used to signal the appropriate emotional response to the local Other. Much as Douglas “becomes” kingly by wearing the royal heart, and much as the English “become” Saracens through religiously justified territorial claims, so through a barrage of insults Dunbar “becomes” a “familiar compound ghost” of Eastern Others, “[b]oth intimate and unidentifiable” — to borrow the words of a (converted) mid-twentieth-century, American-born English nationalist who idealized the Middle Ages and reforged his own Christian cultural identity during wartime.60 Neither one thing nor another — except perhaps a traitor, a figure on both sides of the fence — Dunbar becomes all things vile, especially those that can be conjured from the East.

Even in late medieval Scotland, then, forms of medieval Orientalism were alive and well, its mostly negative ghosts haunting the imagination where religious, political, and national or ethnic conflicts spilled over into liter-

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ary texts. That both Holland and Kennedy use their Orientalist material at central or climactic moments in their works — and that they do so as tropes invoked especially for self-definition in relation to the imagined and actual East — shows how potent these Eastern shades were. When large effects were needed, the local was not enough, and local claims had to be made on the “universal” stage where the grand pageant of Christian history was unfold-ing. Like the paternal specter that Hamlet meets in Shakespeare’s play, these Orientalist after-images provoke strong feelings and are explicitly associ-ated with the violence of political legitimation, of proper patrilineal descent, but even more than those of the Shakespearean specter their associations are religious as well. The East in these two Scottish texts is thus both a source of fertile poetic imagery that has powerful extrapoetic resonance and a problematic origin used to define who or what one is in the present. The actual East may have been elsewhere, reached only by arduous travel, but the invented East could be summoned in a flash, since it already inhabited the late medieval imagination, where its distant shades remained paradoxi-cally present. Indeed, the East dwelt there to such an extent that we can find its chiaroscuro traces doing ideological work not only in such obvious sites as the widely circulated Orientalist books of Polo and Mandeville or on the great thirteenth-century mappaemundi, but even in obscure texts composed in the remotest corners of Latin-Christian Europe.

a

Notes

An early version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America in 2005. My thanks to John Bowers, John Ganim, Kathleen Davis, Lisa Lampert, and the audience for their challenging questions. My thanks also to JMEMS’s two anonymous readers for their generous criticism and suggestions.

1 The literature on this topic is extensive. The following are useful introductions: Wil-helm Baum, “Die Erweiterung des europäischen Weltbildes durch Kontakte mit dem Orient, Indien und China vom 12. bis zum 15. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbuch der Oswald von Wolkenstein Gesellschaft 12 (2000): 423 – 37; Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-versity Press, 1988); Christiane Deluz, Le livre de Jehan de Mandeville: Une “géogra-phie” au XIVe siècle (Louvain-La Neuve: Institut d’Études Médiévales de l’Université Catholique de Louvain, 1988); Benjamin Z. Kedar, Crusade and Mission: European Approaches toward the Muslims (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger, eds., Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Stud-ies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations (Kalamazoo, Mich: Medieval Insti-

Higgins / Shades of the East 223

tute Publications, 2002); J. R. S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Jean-Paul Roux, Les explorateurs au Moyen Age (Paris: Fayard, 1985); Scott D. Westrem, Broader Horizons: A Study of Johannes Witte de Hese’s “Itinerarius” and Medieval Travel Narratives (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 2001).

2 On pilgrimage and crusade writings, see, besides the works cited in the previous note, Jean Richard, Les récits de voyages et de pèlerinages (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981); and Donald R. Howard, Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Though dated, the thirteen volumes of the Library of the Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society (London, 1887– 97; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1971) contain many pilgrimage writings. No conve-niently accessible collection of crusade writings exists, but their range is suggested in The Crusades: A Reader, ed. S. J. Allen and Emilie Amt (Peterborough, Ont.: Broad-view Press, 2003); and revealed in Recueil des historiens des croisades: Historiens occiden-taux, 5 vols. (Paris, 1844 – 95). Other series in the Receuil contain the works of Eastern (5 vols.), Armenian (2 vols.), and Greek (2 vols.) historians.

3 On William of Rubruck, see the introduction to The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck, trans. Peter Jackson (London: Hakluyt Society, 1990); on Polo, see John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univer-sity Press, 1999). There is still no useful study of Odoric, so one must consult Cathay and the Way Thither, 2 vols., trans. and ed. Henry Yule (London, 1886); but see also Paolo Chiesa, “Per un riordino della tradizione manoscritta della Relatio di Odorico da Pordenone,” Filologia Mediolatina 6 – 7 (2000): 311 – 50. On Mandeville, see Iain Macleod Higgins, Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); and Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medi-eval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371 –1550) (Ashgate, Hampshire: Aldershot, 2003).

4 A more accurate spatial analogue would be a spiral (a purgatorial narrative), in which the saved returned to their origins at a higher level.

5 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech, Early English Text Society o.s. 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), chaps. 28– 29. Margery re-experiences these events elsewhere, too, of course. Jean de Mandeville, Le livre des merveilles du monde, ed. Christiane Deluz (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2000), 378– 79; Mandeville’s Travels, ed. P. Hamelius, 2 vols., Early English Text Society o.s., vols. 153 and 154 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1919, 1923), 1:145 – 46. Such genealogical “specu-lation” long outlived the medieval and early modern periods, of course; see, for example, Tudor Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002), chaps. 4 – 5; and Richard W. Cogley, “ ‘Some Other Kinde of Being and Condition’: The Controversy in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England over the Peopling of Ancient America,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68 (2007): 35 – 56.

6 One might compare this medieval fascination with the East to the modern fascina-tion with the medieval in that they share a mythologized longing for an imagined past/future and a passion for collecting and (re)inventing that past/future’s at once familiar and exotic “souvenirs” and lore.

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7 Louise Fradenburg, “ ‘So That We May Speak of Them’: Enjoying the Middle Ages,” New Literary History 28 (1997): 205 – 30, at 215 — an essay adapted as the epilogue to Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Her Lacanian argument that engagements with otherness or the past necessarily involve psychosocial, subject-forming modes of enjoyment pro-voked by desire makes possible a somewhat different reading of medieval Christian relations with the East than mine.

8 Wife of Bath’s Prologue, Canterbury Tales, III.823 – 24, The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Shakespeare was still playing with this commonplace, albeit in updated form, when Rosalind (as Gany-mede) proclaims “From the east to western Ind, / No jewel is like Rosalind” (As You Like It 3.2.77– 78, The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt [New York: Norton, 1997]).

9 Other evocations of the East occur in, notably, the Knight’s portrait in the General Prologue, the Man of Law’s Tale, and the Prioress’s Tale.

10 Steven F. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xx – xxii, xxvii, 8– 22.

11 Peter Buse and Andrew Stott insist on ghosts as anachronisms, but neglect the way they also trouble spatial relations. See “Introduction: A Future for Haunting,” in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, ed. Buse and Stott (Houndmills, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1999), 14 –15.

12 On the Chaucerian East, see Chaucer’s Cultural Geography, ed. Kathryn L. Lynch (New York: Routledge, 2002).

13 “Imagined community” is Benedict Anderson’s term; for him, all communities are imagined, except perhaps the very smallest in which everyone knows everyone else face-to-face. See Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread and Origins of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).

14 The best succinct critique of Said remains James Clifford’s “On Orientalism,” in his The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 255 – 76. On Orientalist medi-evalism, see John Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture, and Cultural Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 91 – 96; and the essays by Kathleen Davis, “Time behind the Veil: The Media, the Middle Ages, and Orientalism Now,” and John M. Ganim, “Native Studies: Orien-talism and Medievalism,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 105 – 22 and 123 – 34, respectively. See also John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press, 2002). Lucy K. Pick’s critique of Said, “Edward Said, Orientalism, and the Middle Ages,” 265 – 71, can be found alongside that of others in Medieval Encounters 5 (1999).

15 Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “Orientation and Nation in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” in Chaucer’s Cultural Geography, 102 – 34, at 102 – 3, 134. Said’s phrasing in Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), 2 – 3, is echoed in my own definition of Oriental-ism.

Higgins / Shades of the East 225

16 Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 43 – 93; and James G. Harper, “Turks as Trojans, Trojans as Turks: Visual Imagery of the Trojan War and the Poli-tics of Cultural Identity in Fifteenth-Century Europe,” in Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 151 – 79. For fur-ther discussion of the fluid representation of religious difference in early modern cul-ture, see Jonathan Burton, “Anglo-Ottoman Relations and the Image of the Turk in Tamburlaine,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000): 125 – 56.

17 Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Colum-bia University Press, 1999), 170. See also his Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005).

18 Tolan, Saracens, xviii.19 Any persisting historical phenomenon will have emergent, dominant, and residual

elements that themselves shift diachronically in proportion and relation. See Ray-mond Williams, Marxism and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). For a quite different but in this context equally pertinent meditation on temporality, see David Lawton, “1453 and the Stream of Time,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37 (2007): 469– 91.

20 Tolan, Saracens, xix, 275.21 C. W. R. D. Moseley, “Behaim’s Globe and ‘Mandeville’s Travels,’ ” Imago Mundi 33

(1981): 89– 91; on Leonardo, Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 32 and 46; Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, ed. Robert H. Schomburgk (London, 1848), 85 – 86; Richard Hakluyt, ed., Liber Ioannis Mandevil, in The Principall Naviga-tions, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1589): A Photo-Lithographic Facsimile, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1965), 1:23 – 79; Dee’s annotations are transcribed in Deluz, ed., Livre des merveilles. See also Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences.

22 Nancy Bisaha, “Petrarch’s Vision of the Muslim and Byzantine East,” Speculum 76 (2001): 284 – 314, at 296 – 97. In Creating East and West, Bisaha notes continuities, especially of religious attitudes (see in particular chaps. 1 and 4).

23 David Wallace, Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). See also David R. Blanks, “Western Views of Islam in the Premod-ern Period: A Brief History of Past Approaches,” in Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. David R. Blanks and Michael Frassetto (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 11 – 53.

24 John Van Engen, in “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 519– 52, argues cogently for taking the central-izing Christianization of medieval Europe seriously, especially after the year 1000.

25 Charlemagne had interests in the biblical East too, and eventually became the subject of all sorts of legendary accounts celebrating his heroic Christian gestae. On the Lat-eran Council, see canons 4, 5, and 71, respectively, of which I quote 71 from Patrick J.

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Geary, ed., Readings in Medieval History, 3rd ed. (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2003), 443 – 69.

26 Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 546.27 On this vast subject, see for example, Caroline Walker Bynum, “Wonder,” Ameri-

can Historical Review 102 (1997): 1 – 26; Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Edward Peters, “The Desire to Know the Secrets of the World,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 593 – 610; and Christian Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

28 One early example, Susan Schibanoff’s “Worlds Apart: Orientalism, Antifeminism, and Heresy in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,” Exemplaria 8 (1996): 59– 96, invokes the conventional “discourse of orientalism” as (quoting Said) “a Western style for domi-nating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”

29 Pearl, ed. E. V. Gordon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), line 3.30 Jean de Mandeville, Livre des merveilles, 427– 28. The English version in British Library,

Egerton MS 1982 does something similar by interpolating an account of the Chris-tian conversion of Ultima Thule after the description of Taprobane in the Far East. See Malcolm Letts, ed. and trans., Mandeville’s Travels: Texts and Translations, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), 1:212 –15. Gerald of Wales, The History and Topogra-phy of Ireland, trans. John J. O’Meara (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982), 31, 54 – 57 (dedicatory letter to Henry II and I.37– 42).

31 Prose Edda, trans. Jean I. Young (1954; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, n.d.), 25 – 28.

32 Jerusalem was not always thus placed in texts and maps. See Iain Macleod Higgins, “Defining the Earth’s Center in a Medieval ‘Multi-Text’: Jerusalem in The Book of Sir John Mandeville,” in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Penn-sylvania Press, 1997), 29– 53.

33 Suzanne Conklin Akbari makes this point in “From Due East to True North: Orien-talism and Orientation,” Postcolonial Middle Ages, 19– 34. On the influence of tripar-tite maps, see the relevant chapters in J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, Volume 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Briefer but well illustrated is P. D. A. Harvey, Medieval Maps (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).

34 Suzanne Conklin Akbari has recently argued that later medieval writers in England were making the northwest corner “the region of normality,” creating a new south-eastern Orient: “The Diversity of Mankind in The Book of John Mandeville,” in East-ward Bound: Travel and Travellers, 1050–1550, ed. Rosamund Allen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 156 – 76, at 171.

35 Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 188.

36 All references, cited by line numbers, are from the best available edition in Priscilla Bawcutt and Felicity Riddy, eds., Longer Scottish Poems: Volume 1, 1375 –1650 (Edin-burgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1987), 43 – 84. Translations are my own.

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37 In placing its fictionalized investigation of sovereignty at its structural center, The Buke of the Howlat resembles several otherwise unrelated works. See A. C. Spearing, “Central and Displaced Sovereignty in Three Medieval Poems,” Review of English Studies n.s. 33 (1982): 247– 61.

38 The analogy of Chinese boxes comes from Margaret A. Mackay, “Structure and Style in Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Scottish Language and Literature (Medieval and Renaissance), ed. Rod-erick J. Lyall and Felicity Riddy (Stirling/Glasgow: Culross, 1981), 191 – 206, at 194, a fine analysis of the poem’s shape. See also Flora Alexander, “Richard Holland’s ‘Buke of the Howlat,’ ” in Literature of the North, ed. David Hewitt and Michael Spiller (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1983), 14 – 25; Matthew P. McDiarmid, “Rich-ard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat: An Interpretation,” Medium Aevum 38 (1969): 277– 90; David Parkinson, “Mobbing Scenes in Middle Scots Verse: Holland, Dun-bar, Douglas,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 83 (1986): 494 – 509; Felicity Riddy, “Dating The Buke of the Howlat,” Review of English Studies n.s. 37 (1986): 1 –10; and Marion Stewart, “Holland’s ‘Howlat’ and the Fall of the Livingstones,” Innes Review 26 (1975): 67– 79.

39 McDiarmid, “Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat,” 278– 79.40 Riddy, “Dating The Buke of the Howlat,” 5 – 6, who argues for the Western patriarchs

against McDiarmid, “Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat,” 285.41 Howlat, editors’ note to lines 471 – 74.42 My reading of the Howlat here has been sharpened by several fine studies of Rich-

ard Coeur de Lion: Geraldine Heng, “The Romance of England: Richard Coer de Lion, Saracens, Jews, and the Politics of Race and Nation,” Postcolonial Middle Ages, 135 – 71; Nicola McDonald, “Eating People and the Alimentary Logic of Richard Coeur de Lion,” in Pulp Fictions of Medieval Romance: Essays in Popular Romance, ed. Nicola McDonald (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 124 – 50; and Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “The Hunger for National Identity in Richard Coer de Lion,” in Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honour of Robert W. Hanning, ed. Rob-ert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 198– 227.

43 Later in the poem Douglas receives praise for having won some of his territorial hold-ings “Fra sonnis of the Saxonis” (577), from the local infidel.

44 A contemporary analogy (superficially anti-Orientalist) would be Tony Blair’s and George W. Bush’s equating of Saddam Hussein with Hitler, in, e.g., “Blair Likens Saddam to Hitler,” CNN.com, 1 Mar. 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/01/sprj.irq.blair/index.html (10 Dec. 2007).

45 This makes Holland’s Saracens different from, say, those in King Horn. See Diane Speed, “The Saracens of King Horn,” Speculum 65 (1990): 564 – 95. Even though they are sometimes identified as Vikings, a conflation Horn seems to encourage, the Sara-cens are clearly defined as ugly and black.

46 In the structural(ist) logic of McDonald’s reading of Richard Coeur de Lion (“Eating People”), this incorporation of the heart into the arms might be seen as a symbolic ingestion of the king by the courtier — which would offer another way of explaining why Douglas must die and the heart alone return.

47 Fradenburg, Sacrifice, 29, and see 28– 41 more generally.

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48 Le Chanson de Roland, ed. F. Whitehead (1942; repr. Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), line 1015.

49 Dictionary of the Scots Language, s.v. “Saxon,” citing Asloan MS, I 199/1, http://www .dsl.ac.uk/dsl/index.html (10 Dec. 2007).

50 Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 187. Further confirmation of this crucial point can be found in Suzanne M. Yeager, “The Siege of Jerusalem and Biblical Exegesis: Writing about Romans in Fourteenth-Century England,” Chaucer Review 39 (2004): 70–102.

51 For more on this important point, see Akbari, “The Hunger for National Identity,” 219– 20. See also Speed, “Saracens,” 586 – 90, who notes that religious and national identities are typically coupled in the chansons de geste.

52 The precise dating of “The Flyting” is uncertain; scholars have argued for dates between 1490 and 1505. See The Poems of William Dunbar, 2 vols., ed. Priscilla Baw-cutt (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1997– 98), 2:429. All cita-tions from the poem will be given by line number.

53 See Ward Parks, Verbal Dueling in Heroic Narrative: The Homeric and Old English Traditions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).

54 On Scottish flyting, see Priscilla Bawcutt, “The Art of Flyting,” Scottish Literary Jour-nal 10.2 (1983): 5 – 24; Douglas Gray, “Rough Music: Some Early Invectives and Fly-tings,” Yearbook of English Studies 14 (1984): 21 – 43; and R. J. Lyall, “Complaint, Satire, and Invective in Middle Scots Literature,” in Church, Politics, and Society: Scot-land, 1408–1929, ed. Norman Macdougall (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1983), 44 – 63.

55 On this scene, whose Chaucerian echoes have gone unnoticed, see Iain Macleod Hig-gins, “Tit for Tat: The Canterbury Tales and ‘The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy,’ ” Exemplaria (2004): 165 – 202, at 181.

56 Jean de Mandeville, Livre des merveilles, 428– 30 (chap. 29).57 Dunbar, Poems, 2:445, note to line 530. See “The Testament of Joseph concerning

Sobriety,” par. 2 – 3, at Christian Classics Ethereal Library, no. ANF08, The Twelve Patriarchs . . . , ed. Philip Schaff, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf08.iii.xiii.html (10 Dec. 2005). For a similar use of Egypt as a transgressive woman’s name, see Antony’s address to Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: “I am dying, Egypt, dying” (Norton Shakespeare, 4.16.19).

58 In “A Ballat of the Abbot of Tungland,” Dunbar himself does something similar to Friar John Damian, a Franco-Italian favorite of King James IV, demonizing him as “a Turk of Tartary” (line 5) whose line stems from Satan: “Off sonis of Sathanis seid” (line 4). See Dunbar, Poems, poem 4.

59 On the myth of Scotland’s Egyptian origins, see William Matthews, “The Egyptians in Scotland: The Political History of a Myth,” Viator 1 (1970): 289– 306. And on England’s Trojan origins, see most recently Sylvia Frederico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Later Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Alan Shepherd and Stephen D. Powell, eds., Fantasies of Troy: Classical Tales and the Social Imaginary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Toronto: Centre for Medi-eval and Renaissance Studies, 2004).

60 “Little Gidding,” part 2, in T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1944; repr. London: Faber, 1959), 44.