Models of Religious Peace in the Middle English Romance Sir Isumbras

Abstract

Sir Isumbras, like many other didactic Middle English romances, concerns the triumph of Christianity over "non-Christianity." That victory has two interrelated narrative manifestations – the redemption of the titular hero and the military defeat of "Saracens," who are painted as worshippers of "Mahmoud," but are, of course, not fully developed as Islamic. At different points in the plot's development, however, the main characters – Isumbras, his wife, who is stolen away from him by a heathen sultan, and the sultan and his cohorts – implicitly or explicitly propose models of religious "co-existence." These models apply in the first instance to the conflict between Christianity and Islam. But, because the presentation of the poem's Muslims is so reminiscent of medieval English renderings of Jews and apostate and heretical Christians, these models may be read more generally as concerning the difficulty of achieving Christian hegemony, a more relevant topic for the English in the age of Lollardy, when Islam was far away. Although these models are rejected in favor of the seeming religious homogeneity of the poem's ending, this paper reads the fact of the proposals as evidence of poets' and scribes' desire to find alternative models for achieving religious peace.