Ginsberg, WarrenNarver, Annie2019-09-182019-09-182019-09-18https://hdl.handle.net/1794/24858Building on the assumption that society constructs ideology through, according to Louis Althusser, “apparatuses,” this dissertation explores how medieval romances written from the twelfth through fourteenth century exploit alterity by repurposing the Chanson de Roland’s portrayals of Eastern others and women to negotiate the exigencies contemporary to them. The proof texts, in addition to the Oxford Roland, include martial romances, deemed martial because the hero serves a liege lord rather than a lady: Guy of Warwick and The Sowdone of Babylone. In these texts, knights prove themselves men by vanquishing a sensationalized Eastern foe. This project also examines amorous romances, in which affections for a lady initiate the hero’s achievements. These texts likewise employ depictions latent in the Roland; they distinguish women as separate from men and as objects partly constitutive of male identity. The Middle English Floris and Blancheflour and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde both exhibit such ideological representations. By selecting ludic elements from each poem, including depictions of and references to games, laughter, play, and humor, this project draws on the theories of Johan Huizinga, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Henri Bergson to explore hermeneutics of the ludic(rous). These textual elements reveal how the medieval texts in question sought to produce new and revised definitions of masculinity that defined man against what he is not, in these instances, non-Christians and females. The masculinities espoused in each text relate to the historical moment that produced them, which is evident in reviewing historical sources and by comparing insular texts to the continental sources from which they were translated and adapted. In this project, ludic(rous) elements, which, from alternative perspectives are at once ludic and ludicrous, hence, “ludic(rous),” are ambiguously gameful, ridiculous, as well as earnest and consequential. They expose mechanisms by which medieval romance produces ideologies constitutive of male identity. As much as the ludic(rous) elements’ ambiguity burdens characters in each text with interpreting their meaning, they invite medieval audiences to make calls as would today’s umpires as to how one might behave as a Christian in the Latin West.en-USAll Rights Reserved.BlancheflourFlorisludicmasculinityromanceTroilus and CriseydeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation