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Widely lauded in popular culture as a lion-hearted crusader king, Richard I of England was not English at all, but a French duke with French cultural and political affiliations. Although his English holdings bestowed upon him the title of king, Richard was far more concerned during his lifetime with crusading in the Holy Land and defending his continental lands from the French King Philip II Augustus. History, however, has conferred on this French duke the status of an English national hero whose popularity is rivaled only by the legendary King Arthur. Like many popular representations of Richard, the fourteenth-century English romance Richard Coeur de Lion idealizes the twelfth-century king, but it does so by conveniently neglecting his French holdings and heritage.1 By effacing Richard's continental interests, the romance makes him solely a king of England and, more importantly, an unmistakably English king. Written during a period of incipient nationalism, the poem-which describes a joint crusade undertaken by Richard and Philip-retroactively constructs not only an identity for Richard, but a coherent identity for England as well. The text's attempts to deny cultural ties with France, however, conflict with its use of a crusade rhetoric encouraging Christians to unite against their Muslim foes. Faced with these competing rhetorics, the text employs a rather strange tactic for constructing an English national character. Paradoxically, "Englishness" in the poem becomes a function of Richard's barbarity, a trait most notably depicted in two scenes in which Richard eats human flesh. As I will show, certain manuscripts of Richard Coeur de Lion embrace cannibalism in an effort to promote an English identity and to set that identity apart from the "others"-both Muslim and French-against which the English forces of the poem find themselves aligned. But the effort to shore up such a barbarous identity makes manifest the very anxiety it was trying to conceal: a deep-rooted ambivalence toward France, England's long-time enemy and eve ally.
Richard as romance knight and cannibal king
First translated into Middle English in the early decades of the fourteenth century, Richard Coeur de Lion is reputedly based on an Anglo-Norman text no longer extant.2 The Middle English text exists in seven manuscripts and two early printings. These nine texts are traditionally divided into two basic versions,...