Romance Baptisms and Theological Contexts in The King of Tars and Sir Ferumbras

Abstract

While romances may be secular narratives, they make frequent use of religion to entertain their audiences. Characters often engage in prayer or pilgrimage, and masses, marriages and baptisms regularly appear. Although it is not particularly helpful to sift romance depictions of religious ceremonies for evidence about liturgical practices, it is intriguing to reverse the process and consider the ways in which romances engage the cultural ideas of their day. This essay examines how late medieval theological understandings of baptism are taken up in two fourteenth-century English romances, The King of Tars and Sir Ferumbras . Theological and romance depictions of baptism both use the sacrament to reflect upon what makes a body Christian, or what establishes Christian identity in a body. Baptism, according to Thomas Aquinas, ‘is called the sacrament of faith because it involves a profession of faith and joins those who receive it to the congregation of believers’. It is the rite through which both newborns and adult converts become Christian and manifest publicly their beliefs and allegiances. As such, baptism is a moment in which to study the question of what makes a Christian. Medieval thinkers, both theological and literary, used this moment to contemplate what effects change in a person, how that change can be perceived by others, and the respective roles of language and the body in determining identity and belief.