Haunted by Heresy: The Perlesvaus, Medieval Antisemitism, and the Trauma of the Albigensian Crusade

Image description: it’s of northern crusaders attacking heretic townspeople during the Albigensian Crusade, from a 14th-century manuscript of Les Grandes chroniques de France in the British Library. — Les Grandes chroniques de France in the British Library.

Adrian McClure

Solmsen Fellow (2021-2022)

The Old French High Book of the Grail, aka the Perlesvaus, stands out for its strangeness even in a genre—medieval romance—where strangeness is normative. This famously “deranged” thirteenth-century text is brimming over with reality-bending dreams and visionary experiences of near-hallucinatory intensity, along with hyperviolent adventures featuring demon-knights, serial dismemberments, charred and moldering bodies, and staggering accumulations of severed heads. Beyond these macabre excesses, it also stands out for its antisemitic internal commentary and odd structural focus on an Arthurian restaging of the battle between the Old and New Law. In this talk, I approach this anomalous Grail romance as a textbook example of trauma fiction linked to a particular thirteenth-century historical matrix (the first internal crusade against European heresy) and explore how its narrative perturbations can help shed light on the broader evolution of medieval antisemitism. Some thought-provoking takeaways: that deeply idiosyncratic texts sometimes have broad-ranging historical significance, and that societal persecution may carry searing collective costs for both demonized and demonizers, victims and perpetrators.

Adrian McClure graduated with a PhD in medieval literature from Purdue University in 2020 and is currently questing after post-fellowship academic employment. Their research generally combines literary and historical analysis and their areas of interest include religious identity, gender and racism studies, and modern medievalism. They published an interdisciplinary study on the Oxford version of the Song of Roland as a theologically inflected text addressed to both lay and learned audiences in Speculum in 2019, and recently submitted an article on the “doppelganger Jew” in the fourteenth-century Book of John Mandeville. After completing their book on the Perlesvaus, they plan to embark on a second book with the working title, The Nonbinary Middle Ages and the Christological Reenvisioning of Gender.