title: Spaces, Wormholes and Lenses: The Use of Space, Time and Perspective in Representations of the Saracen-Crusader Interface in Le Roman de Gillion de Trazegnies and the Jehan d’Avennes Cycle
Creators: name: Buras-Stubbs, Michele
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2024

description: This thesis explores representations of the interface between Saracens and crusaders in the narratives of manuscript versions of two crusading prose romances: Le Roman de Gillion de Trazegnies and the tripartite Jehan d’Avennes cycle, comprising L’histoire de tres vaillans princez monseigneur Jehan d’Avennes, La Fille du Comte de Pontieu and Saladin. The manuscript versions were produced in the court of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, at a time close to the preparation for, and launch in 1464 of, an ultimately to be abandoned crusade to the Levant by an alliance of Philip, Pope Pius II, Hungary and Venice in response to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II in 1453.
 
My research explores representations of the Saracen-crusader interface through the prisms of Space, Time and Perspective. Close textual analysis is supported by aspects of the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and Gérard Genette: firstly in Bakhtin’s consideration of the impact of the combined spatial and temporal determinants of a narrative, and their infusion with values and emotions from the substantive world, on the creation of a narrative’s essential meaning, as reflected in his notion of the chronotope; and secondly in Genette’s theory of Narrative Discourse, with specific reference to the temporal and spatial relationship between the Voice that speaks the narrative and the story that it tells. Concepts of spatio-temporality explore the interfaces and symbiotic interrelationships between representations of Saracens and crusaders, between fantasy and reality, and between intra- and extra-textual worlds.
 
Configurations of spatio-temporality within the narratives comprise: (i) reflections and distortions, asynchronous chains of events, and progressions of perspective from binarism to permeation at and across the Saracen-crusader mirror plane; (ii) the use of geopolitical spaces as abstracted locations of conflated events, and their related resonances from differing time periods in both fictional and substantive worlds; (iii) the use of matrices of intra-textual time and space as mechanisms to define ascendancy; and (iv) the use of intra-textual time beyond the confines of the narrative to explore perceptions of the self within eternity.
 
Within the context of the production of the manuscripts at a time of preparation for crusade, there is an intentional symbiosis between fictional and substantive worlds. In this dynamic the narratorial space creates a hiatus, for the author and his audience, in which the exploration of three concepts can occur: firstly, the consideration of the nature of the relationship between differing and interrelated aspects of Islamdom and Christendom; secondly, the determination of the Latin Christian’s role and place within eternity; and thirdly, the intellectual and emotional rationalisation of contemporaneous engagement in crusade. This employment of a spatio-temporal lens through which to disaggregate the interwoven strands of the represented Saracen-crusader relationship within the narrative offers a fresh and additional perspective to existing research based on approaches of pre-colonial orientalism and productive interactionism.