THIS study focuses on a genre and a place – “romance” and the “Orient” – as they are exemplified in late medieval English literature, especially in Chaucer.

Nineteenth-century scholars, pointing to Arabic and Middle Eastern sources and analogues for many medieval romances, virtually suggested that the romance form emerged from the meeting of Saracen and crusader. With all of medieval reality to draw on, romance writers were fascinated enough by the Orient, which crusaders, pilgrims, and traders had opened up to them, to turn it into literature. It is a fact of literary history that the evolution of the romance genre in Europe followed these East-West contacts. Within the last decade, there has been an upswing in publication by Postcolonial theorists on the intersection of West and East and the depiction of the Orient in the western imagination. Inspired by such work are several recent and challenging articles by medievalists who have looked for the presence of something like modern instances of Orientalism which they have found in portrayals of the Orient in medieval texts. This study does not press anything like a continuous argument for medieval orientalism of a Postcolonial stamp, though a connecting purpose of the six chapters of this book is to show how the Orient and the people in it are represented in late medieval romance. The study does, however, discuss distinct instances of orientalism, as, for example, in chapter 3, concerning Chaucer's depictions of Cleopatra and Dido.