An artful expression of Sufi teachings through the lens of a medieval Grail romance. Queen Belacane is dying. As a last act, she inscribes a book of counsels, or prince's mirror, to guide her newborn son on his life's path. The queen's counsels illuminate the way of futuwwa, a tradition of mystical chivalry traced to the Prophet Abraham. If the prince would unite the chivalries of Christendom and Islam and attain the Cup Mixed with Camphor, he must fulfill the pillars of his faith, and uphold the universal virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance, and generosity.

An artful expression of Sufi teachings through the lens of a medieval Grail romance. Queen Belacane is dying. As a last act, she inscribes a book of counsels, or prince's mirror, to guide her newborn son on his life's path. The queen's counsels illuminate the way of futuwwa, a tradition of mystical chivalry traced to the Prophet Abraham. If the prince would unite the chivalries of Christendom and Islam and attain the Cup Mixed with Camphor, he must fulfill the pillars of his faith, and uphold the universal virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance, and generosity.

This volume is populated with reproductions of paintings and frescos from the period and illustrations from the surveyed texts. A fascinating read, belonging in any serious rider's library.

A ubiquitous presence in European chivalric literature, the multifaceted figure of the Saracen Other plays a vital role in shaping the knightly values and ideologies underpinning some of the most influential narrative poems of the Italian Renaissance. By combining historical research and close reading and bringing to bear a wealth of literary and documentary sources, some of which have never before been published, this book analyses portrayals of Saracens and their world in Boiardo's Inamoramento de Orlando and Ariosto's Orlando furioso. Pavlova assesses for the first time the degree of realism in Boiardo's and Ariosto's representations of Islam and Islamic culture(s) and discusses the ideological implications of the two poets' innovative treatment of their Saracen characters. She locates these and other fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century chivalric works within the rich, vibrant history of interactions between Italian rulers and their Islamic counterparts as well as within the centuries-long literary tradition, going back to such archetypal texts as the Chanson de Roland and the Chanson d'Aspremont. Maria Pavlova is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick.

North and South is a multi-dimensional look at a prevailing theme in current discourse on the concept of borders. This collection of essays invites us to cross historical, regional, and disciplinary boundaries. The contributors consider a range of primary texts, use a number of critical approaches, and make some surprising connections. The borders created by the concepts of “north” and “south” provoke us to ask if the terms continue to represent real divisions, or if usage and habit have drained them of any real meaning. And how have literary texts sought to represent and elucidate the divisions and to complicate and undermine such rigid categories? This collection of essays considers such questions and offers some tentative and original answers. The essays in North and South treat a wide variety of topics, generically and geographically, chronologically and creatively. They interrogate the elusive topic of boundaries symbolic and literal; boundaries as means of communication rather than division; boundaries that create borderlands; boundaries that invite transgression; boundaries that resist erasure. Across and within these boundaries, the theme of identity emerges: international, national, regional, gendered, racial, ethnic.