Empire of Magic:Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy by Geraldine Heng (review)

Empire of Magic is a book of excesses. It is about excess-in particular the excesses of cannibalism as a trope for other kinds of excesses-and it approaches its subject matter by providing erudition in excess (the endnotes are almost as long as the book itself). Sometimes the excess is exhilarating, revealing the author’s exuberance for her subject; other times it can be overwhelming and at times monological. In Empire of Magic, Geraldine Heng examines the vexed relationship between history and romance in the Middle Ages. While many medievalists are content to see medieval romances as the antithesis of history, Heng wants to explore the ways in which romances take over at what she refers to as ‘history’s vanishing point,’ transforming its raw materials. In fact, Empire of Magic is most compelling when it explores the relationships between fantasy and history, when it suggests the ways m which the pleasures afforded by romance and the desires and anxieties it invokes are inextricably entwined with historical projects and political agendas that speak to the texts’ audiences. Far from encouraging escapism, Heng argues persuasively, the fantasies of the medieval romance, like all good fantasies, return us to the historical real, which, for Heng is most frequently the medieval West’s encounter with the exoticized other of the Islamic east. At its best, Heng’s method of reading romance allows for a nuanced understanding of the complexities of sometimes neglected medieval works; at its worst, the texts under scrutiny can devolve into thinly disguised romans a clef. Individual chapters focus on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Richard Cour de Lyon, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, and Mandevilles Travels. These texts provide stepping off points for arguments about an overwhelmingly large number of different topics. Sometimes it feels as if Heng is trying to cram too much into one volume (hence the excess). Besides the relationships between history and fantasy, the author unpacks in her readings of these romance texts a whole range of issues including class, race, gender, nationalism, imperialism, Jews, Arabs, colonization, sodomy and homoeroticism, cannibalism, the history of the crusades, and heresy, a testament no doubt to the authors astonishing erudition but at times a trial for her readers. At one point in chapter three, a section of roughly 15 pages begins with the Alliterative Morte Arthure’s account of Priam us and Fortunes wheel and veers from discussions of gender to Italians, to narrative patterning, to plague, to the relationships between wealth and cannibalism, leaving the reader a bit breathless and wishing for more help in connecting the dots.