Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Romance and the Orient
- 2 Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean: Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, Boccaccio's Decameron 5, 2, and Gower's Tale of Constance
- 3 Two Oriental Queens from Chaucer's Legend of Good Women: Cleopatra and Dido
- 4 Chaucer's Squire's Tale: Content and Structure
- 5 A Question of Incest, the Double, and the Theme of East and West: The Middle English Romance of Floris and Blauncheflur
- 6 Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East
- Conclusion
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - A Question of Incest, the Double, and the Theme of East and West: The Middle English Romance of Floris and Blauncheflur
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Romance and the Orient
- 2 Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean: Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, Boccaccio's Decameron 5, 2, and Gower's Tale of Constance
- 3 Two Oriental Queens from Chaucer's Legend of Good Women: Cleopatra and Dido
- 4 Chaucer's Squire's Tale: Content and Structure
- 5 A Question of Incest, the Double, and the Theme of East and West: The Middle English Romance of Floris and Blauncheflur
- 6 Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East
- Conclusion
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
ACCORDING to Haldeen Braddy, Chaucer left the Squire's Tale incomplete because he discovered that the Arabic analogue, Taj al-Muluk and the Princess Dunya, belonged to a cycle of romances that included an incest motif. Chaucer, he argued, “as a man… would not tolerate the idea of incest, because as a poet he certainly speaks against it in the Pardoner's Tale: ‘Lo, how that dronken Looth, unkyndely,/ Lay by his doghtres two, unwityngly;/ So dronke he was he nyste what he wroghte’ (485–87)” (Braddy, “Genre,” 289). The Middle English romance of Floris and Blauncheflur is an obvious place to study the oriental theme in medieval romance but a surprising place in which to discover a question of incest, particularly in the light of the long history of viewing this romance as a portrait of idyllic young love. What prompts the question is the absence in all of the extant English manuscripts of that part of the tale relevant to the birth of the heroine, Blauncheflur, for a reader of the English romance is immediately introduced to the romantic relationship which arises between a Spanish Saracen prince and the daughter of a Christian slave, raised as if brother and sister, while at the same time the mother of the young girl is presented without a husband or a past. In the absence of any explanation of Blauncheflur's parentage, it is natural enough for the reader to wonder if Blauncheflur might have been fathered by her mother's master, the Saracen King of Spain.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance , pp. 83 - 107Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2003