For medieval readers, the term “romance” referred both to tales of love, and to historical accounts. In this class we will address the relationship between the genre of romance and aristocratic chivalric ideology and consider how “courtly love” shaped gender roles. We’ll consider the appropriation of aristocratic genre of romance by middle class interests in the later Middle Ages. We’ll study the ways that medieval crusading romances used ideas about “the East” to develop and construct a sense of “Englishness” or nationhood and was in turn informed by the use of ideas of Muslims as pagans and idolators to help define medieval Christianity. The course is divided into three sections: “Paradigms of Romance,” “Race and Romance” and “Appropriations of Romance.” This final section will end with a consideration of the appropriation of medieval paradigms of romance in the service of contemporary American discourses of race.