Religious conversion, history, and genre in Floire et Blancheflor, Aucassin et Nicolette, and Flamenca [diss.]

This dissertation analyzes the use of discourses of religious conversion in twelfth and thirteenth centuiy Old French and Old Provencal romance fiction. The discourses of religious conversion are here defined to include narrative conventions of Christian scripture, hagiography, and exemplary tales, as well as its iconongraphy. Also included in the scope of this study is conversion from both within and outside Christianity. In Old French and Old Provencal literature, the rhetoric of conversion was used to revise conceptions of the self, its relations to others, and the historical world to express secularized, cosmopolitan ideals. Christian discourses were therefore employed and manipulated to imagine an individual and communal identity unexpectedly grounded in ideals outside those provided by Christianity. This identity is characterized by a valuation of hybrid culture, a definition of the self in relation to, rather than in opposition to the Moslem other, a cosmopolitan sensibility, and a more fluid definition of gender roles. The rhetoric and iconography of religious conversion was also used to intervene in contemporary political debates by asserting cultural debt to Islam, criticizing the movements for Crusade and forced conversion, and constructing a cosmology valuing temporal actions and experiences in and of themselves. Thus, in twelfth and thirteenth century Old French and Old Provencal romance fiction, the discourses of conversion, central to their significations, provided powerful templates for dissenting imaginations of the self, community, culture, and history.