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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Leila K. Norako, "Monstrous Fantasies: England's Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300-1500" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Description: Monstrous Fantasies: England's Crusading Imaginary and the Romance of Recovery, 1300-1500Â (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Leila Norako asks why medieval romances reimagining the crusades ending in a Christian victory circulated in England with such abundance after the 1291 Muslim reconquest of Acre, the last of the Latin crusader states in the Holy Land, and what these texts reveal about the cultural anxieties of late medieval England. Dr. Norako highlights the impact that the Ottoman victory and subsequent massacre of Christian prisoners at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396 had on intensifying the popularity of what she calls recovery romance.