9 Vittore Branca, “Giovanni Boccaccio” (1975), 185–244; Carlo Muscetta, “Giovanni Boccaccio e i novellieri” (1987), 325–569. For a very useful survey, along with helpful tables for the Decameron, see Giulio Ferroni, Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. I (1991), 267–99; Alberto Asor Rosa, Storia europea della letteratura italiana, vol. I (2009), 303–59. Although a little outdated by now, see Joseph P. Consoli, Giovanni Boccaccio (1992).
10 Approaches to Teaching Boccaccio’s Decameron, ed. James H. McGregor (2000); Marilyn Migiel, A Rhetoric of the Decameron (2003); The Decameron First Day in Perspective, ed. Elissa B. Weaver (Toronto, Ont.; Buffalo, NY; London: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Introduzione al Decameron, ed. Michelangelo Picone and Margherita Mesirca (2004); Giovanni Boccaccio: Italienisch-deutscher Kulturtransfer von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Ingrid Bennewitz (2015).
11 Richard Kuhns, Decameron and the Philosophy of Storytelling (2005).
12 Giovanni Boccaccio, Vernunft und Vergnügen: Liebesgeschichten aus dem Decameron, trans. Kurt Flasch (2013); see especially his profound epilogue.
13 anonymous, “Il Decamerone,” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon, vol. III, ed. Gert Woerner (Zürich: Kindler Verlag, 1964), 2383–85.
14 Victoria Kirkham, Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works (2014); Giuseppe Patota, La grande bellezza dell’italiano (20015); Paola Manni, La lingua di Boccaccio (2016).
15 Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca, 5th ed. (1998); for an English translation, see Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Richard Aldington (1930, 1970).
16 Albrecht Classen, “Anti-Clericalism in Late Medieval German Verse” (1993), 91–114; id., “Anticlericalism and Criticism of Clerics in Medieval and Early-Modern German Literature” (2014), 283–306.
17 See, for instance, Steven F. King, The Spectral Jew (2005); Simhā Gôldîn, Apostasy and Jewish Identity in High Middle Ages Northern Europe: ‘Are You Still My Brother?’, trans. Jonathan Chipman (2014); Petrus Alfonsi and His Dialogus: Background, Context, Reception, ed. Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann (2014); Intricate Interfaith Networks in the Middle Ages: Quotidian Jewish-Christian Contacts, ed. Efrayim Shoham-Shtainer (2016); Sabrina Späth, Konversionen auf der mittelalterlichen Iberischen Halbinsel (2016); Revealing the Secrets of the Jews: Johannes Pfefferkorn and Christian Writings about Jewish Life and Literature in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß (2017).
18 John Tolan, “‘Tra il diavolo di Rustico e il ninferno d’Alibech’: Muslims and Jews in Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’” (2012), 133–41; see also the contributions to Raccontare l’altro: l’Oriente islamico nella novella italiana da Boccaccio a Bandello, ed. Raffaele Girardi (2012).
19 For the relevance of myths in the literary discourse, both here and in many other contexts, see Albrecht Classen, “The Myth of Charlemagne” (2016) online article at http://www.charlemagne-icon.ac.uk/further-reading/articles/; or: www.charlemagne-icon.ac.uk/wp-content/blogs.dir/332/files/2016/01/Classen-2016-The-Myth-of-Charlemagne.pdf; see also Albrecht Classen, “Royal Figures as Nation Builders – King Kamehameha and Charlemagne” Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal 3.2 (2016): 112–15 (http://scholarpublishing.org/index.php/ASSRJ/article/view/1837/pdf).
20 Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Discourse, ed. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (2010).
21 Michael Sherberg, The Governance of Friendship: Law and Gender in the Decameron (2011).
22 Hannes Möhring, Saladin: Der Sultan und seine Zeit (2017); Anne-Marie Eddé, Saladin (2016); Haydar Isik, Sultan Saladin: der Mythos vom edlen islamischen Herrscher und Feldherrn (2013).
23 For the ideal of friendship, see the contributions to Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, ed. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (2010).
24 This was a major military event, which ended in a fiasco with Frederick’s death in 1190 through drowning in Cilicia, which is not reflected here, although in Boccaccio’s tale the Crusade also collapses quickly; see Ekkehard Eickhoff, Friedrich Barbarossa im Orient (1977). As to Saladin, see Hannes Möhring, Saladin und der Dritte Kreuzzug (1980); The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa: The History of the Expedition of the Emperor Frederick and Related Texts, trans. G. A. Loud (2013).
25 Ullrich Langer, Perfect Friendship (1994); Sherberg, The Governance of Friendship; Franco Masciandaro, The Stranger as Friend (2013).
26 Manni, La lingua di Boccaccio; see also the contributions to The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio, ed. Guyda Armstrong (2015); Multilingualism in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Communication and Miscommunication in the Premodern World, ed. Albrecht Classen (2016).
27 See, for instance, the contributions to Cultural Brokers at Mediterranean Courts in the Middle Ages, ed. Marc von der Höh, Nikolaus Jaspert, and Jenny Rahel Oesterle (2013); Intercultural Contacts in the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. Benjamin Arbel (1996). The best example of Cypriot merchants can be found in the literary text, the prose novel Fortunatus, first printed in Augsburg in 1509. Here quoted from Romane des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, ed. Jan-Dirk Müller (1990), 385–585; see also Albrecht Classen, The German Volksbuch (1995, reissued 1999), 163–83.
28 I have dealt with magic in this tale and elsewhere more in detail in the introduction to Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time, ed. Albrecht Classen (2017).
29 Sherberg, The Governance of Friendship (2011); for another example of friendship, see Victoria Kirkham, “The Classical Bond of Friendship in Boccaccio’s Tito and Gisippo (Decameron 10.8)” (1990), 223–35.
30 See my chapter on Boccaccio in Albrecht Classen, Water in Medieval Literature (2017); cf. also Eva R. Hoffman, “Ports of Call: Boccaccio’s Alatiel in the Medieval Mediterranean” (2007): 163–95; Sharon Kinoshita, “Locating the Medieval Mediterranean” (2012), 39–52; eadem, “Ports of Call” (2007):, 163–95; eadem, “‘Noi siamo mercatanti cipriani’: How to do Things in the Medieval Mediterranean” (2012), 41–60.
31 This issue would need to be examined at greater length, but it remains clear that she has no liberty in making any decision on her own. However, the narrator comments a number of times that she became bold and asked Pericone, for instance, to join her in love making. At other times, she is asleep and becomes involuntarily a sex victim, such as when the Duke of Athens forces himself upon her after he has murdered the Prince of Morea. For the broader issue, see Albrecht Classen, Sexual Violence and Rape in the Middle Ages (2011).
32 Migiel, A Rhetoric of the Decameron (2003), 163.
33 Aigues-Mortes is located in the Petite Camargue, southern Provence, not too far away from Arles or Marseille, and has always enjoyed a significant strategic position since the early Middle Ages, but the French King Louis IX transformed this town into a major harbor from which his fleet could embark for the Holy Land. His son, Philip III, extended and completed the town’s fortification. Louis IX himself departed from Aigues-Mortes twice on crusades, 1248 (Seventh Crusade) and 1270 (Eighth Crusade).
6 The Foreign World and the Foreign Religion in Medieval Literature: Experiments in and Strategies with Toleration
A Pan-European Perspective on the ‘Good Heathen’
The Freedom of the Literary Discourse: Playfulness, Utopia, Alternatives
If we leave behind us, for the time being, both terms, ‘toleration’ and ‘tolerance’, and naively investigate what medieval literature might be able to tell us about general attitudes about foreigners, foreign religion, and foreign culture, we face a rather interesting, at times rather ambivalent, situation.1 Writers of fictional texts, but also of chronicles, have commonly been free, or at least more at liberty, than those of factual texts to project their own ideals and values, to allow their fantasy to play out, and were not necessarily bound by authorial pressures, either by the Church or the secular governments, although most poets were certainly subject to their patrons and had to understand clearly what their audiences might
have expected from them.2
Of course, the situation seems to have changed considerably today, with writers commonly able to produce their own works as creatively as possible and, thus, make their own income on the literary market, if they are successful; but if they do not meet with public approval today, they are in danger of failing to reach an audience as well. Most importantly, poets or writers regularly publish works that meet common norms and reflect general expectations. But they are also predicated on individualism and utopian notions, pursuing ideals and values that the readers or listeners might not have necessarily agreed with or thought about.3 In other words, many times, the literary discourse proves to be not just a mirror of social, religious, or political conditions, but an experiment, or a laboratory, for new ideas, if not simply for fantasy, and this also in the pre-modern period. In other words, here we have a great opportunity to discover what medieval and early modern writers imagined, fictionalized, dreamed about, or simply created for the purpose of developing their literary accounts and to entertain their audiences. They became, in that process, both mirrors of the general mentality and value system, and also driving forces in further developing the general social concepts, ideals, and worldviews.
There are relatively few limitations to the internal development of a romance or a heroic epic, which also applies to other genres. Granted, medieval and early modern poets certainly lived by the norms and standards of their time, and they closely followed their sources, but we can also recognize considerable challenges and provocations contained in their texts, although it remains unclear to us how their audiences might have reacted to them. The issue at stake hence pertains to the question: How many literary documents contributed to the shaping of their societies and culture? We can immediately answer that didactic literature explicitly pursued that goal; and religious and political literature certainly followed suit. Courtly love poetry must have had a huge impact on courtly audiences, molding and shaping their emotional culture, value system, and understanding of the gender relationships.4
The number of manuscripts of an individual work might tell us a little about the true popularity of a work, and yet the survival rate of a romance or a heroic epic in manuscript form cannot be simply taken as a guaranteed measure.5 Despite genre requirements, thematic frameworks, topical concepts, and traditional ideals, a literary work represents, after all, an experimental projection of certain conditions, situations, or values. Many times, for instance, only modern scholarship has been able to unravel or reveal specific issues contained in an epic poem, in a romance, or in didactic poetry, which might well have been not fully understood or perceived by the contemporary audience in the Middle Ages, unless we are simply blind to the reactions that a certain character or a concept might have triggered then.6
Pursuing this perspective, we can approach a large number of texts produced in the pre-modern world as exemplary cases that invite the investigation as to what extent poets might have treated representatives of foreign worlds, religions, races, and cultures in a more relaxed, perhaps even tolerant, fashion and whether they harbored an open mind or not, that is, whether they were willing to embrace them as worthy figures within their own worldview or whether they characterized them categorically as alien, evil, and dangerous because of their foreignness, a question that continues to create huge waves among the contemporary medievalist community globally, stirring anxiety and discomfort, creating tensions and fractionalization of the profession.7
For our purposes, the literary discourse has the advantage over others insofar as it commonly allows us to examine much more closely what individual thinkers might have had in mind at their time, how they perceived their world, and how they suggested changes to their social conditions, and this compared to chronicles, theological treatises, or official or scientific documents, for instance. In this regard, we can take up the challenge once again and probe how far some medieval poets understood, accepted, or embraced the ideal of toleration, if not tolerance. Of course, and this applies to chronicles and similar narratives as well, each text mostly follows genre precepts, thematic, stylistic, and conceptual models and is often not at complete liberty to create a very new concept since the author wants to address an audience, both in the Middle Ages and today. Nevertheless, just as in the field of history of religion, deviance was at play both in the pre-modern world and today, so it is one of our critical tasks as scholars to probe our material (texts, images, sculptures, buildings, etc.) ever new as to their messages, intentions, or secret codes.8
It seems highly unlikely that anyone in the Middle Ages and the early modern time ever went further in this regard than Boccaccio, as I have discussed in the previous chapter. We have also already observed what potentials there might be to discover a certain willingness on the part of medieval poets to turn to people from a foreign world and accept them as part of the same universal family, as long as the ideals of Christianity were not challenged or directly attacked. Wolfram von Eschenbach provides a good number of truly intriguing examples for this kind of approach. And in the case of Rudolf von Ems, we come across an amazing case of friendship crossing the lines dividing Christianity from Islam, and this already in the middle of the thirteenth century.
Here, I want to pursue this perspective further and incorporate a range of other poets who also explored the issue of toleration, or who envisioned situations in which Christians, heathens, pagans, Jews, and others encountered each other. While in a majority of cases the image of the Muslim in pre-modern literature meets very negative perceptions, unless the individual is prepared to convert to Christianity, the purpose of the present study consists of investigating deviations from this schematic concept and subtle but significant experiments to break the deadlock of racial and religious stereotypes, and this also in the Middle Ages and the early modern era.9
Laxdaela Saga
At first, let us look at an intriguing example from the very northern parts of medieval Europe, where a certain degree of tolerance is observable and which lends itself well to the overall discussion in this chapter. I choose to discuss it first of all because it allows us to understand the wider context of how Christianity made its way into the pagan world and how this process was perceived by people affected by the missionary activities. Written around 1245 by an anonymous author, the Old Icelandic saga Laxdaela Saga describes, among many other historical events, the conversion of the Icelanders to Christianity.10 When Kjartan is visiting the King of Norway, Olaf Tryggvason, some conflicts erupt between them, but the king demonstrates amazing self-constraint and honors Kjartan. People, however, complain about the king’s new faith, Christianity, and blame the bad weather, an early winter with severe frost and cold, on the king.11 When temperatures warm up again, the king holds an assembly and appeals to the people of Trondheim to convert to the Christian faith. Many rumble about it and threaten him with military force, but he counters this by reminding them of his superior powers, so they quickly submit. But Olaf’s real goal is to convince Kjartan to accept the new religion. The latter, however, proves to be extremely self-contained, strong, and resisting all authorities, including the king (146). He even threatens publicly that he wants to burn the king in his house, which he later admits having stated so to Olaf’s own face. The latter, however, acknowledges him for his bravery and uprightness, and instead of punishing him, he gives him his own splendid coat as a gift. Moreover, he states openly that he would like him to convert, but that he would not use force at all:
I shall not force you to become Christians on this occasion, for God has said that he does not wish anyone to come to him under duress.
(147)
Kjartan responds in very respectful terms, acknowledging the king’s peacefulness, kindness, and honor, indicating that this friendly approach would work much better for him and everyone else to convince them to accept the Christian faith, after all. Moreover, Kjartan admits that he seems to have lost confidence in his pagan gods and would rather try following the Christian God:
“This is the most likely way of tempting us to accept your faith” (147). Subsequently, some of the courtiers fall back to previous approaches, urging the king to exert his power, relying on his authority after all, exerting all his power in forcing the Icelanders to accept Christianity as their own faith. But they only incite Olaf’s anger since he has more respect for Kjartan than for many other men who claim to be Christians.
Simultaneously, the Icelander observes increasingly the king’s charisma, listens to his sermon with admiration, and finally declares his readiness to take the long-awaited step toward baptism (148). We are not told what aspect of the Christian faith truly intrigued him and why the king’s argument would convince him to abandon his pagan gods, whereas he specifies concretely that he finds Olaf so impressive that there would not be any doubt that following him in his religion would be the right way (148). There is no mention of any detailed teachings, no comment on why Kjartan and then his Icelander companions really change their mind, except for their admittance that the king had proven to be such a role model that they could not resist him even in terms of their religion. They are, hence, baptized quickly, without having received any particular instructions, and then invited in to a huge feast, which all seems to substitute for full or true spiritual conversion.
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