Representing Righteous Heathens In Late Medieval England

The virtuous pagans who appear in medieval English texts have often been analyzed for their theological significance, but Representing Righteous Heathens argues that such figures also functioned as an innovative resource for framing and thinking about questions of history, difference, and the uses of antiquity, as well as a flexible formal device for structuring a diverse array of vernacular literary fictions. In travel writing, dream visions, hagiographic narrative, chronicle-romances, and sermons, English writers explored the boundaries that divided them from the non-Christian world by making pagan figures speak for themselves in experiments that often strikingly anticipate our own modern critical and pedagogical uses of the Middle Ages.

Frank Grady is Associate Professor of English, University of Missouri-St. Louis.