The Demon Mother and Communities of Wonder in Richard Coer de Lion
This paper discusses the construction of ‘communities of wonder’ in the a-version of the Middle English crusading romance Richard Coer de Lyon. Revisiting a legend of a reputedly demonic ancestor of Eleanor of Aquitaine, first found in the thirteenth-century chronicle of Philippe Mousket, Richard a reimagines the king’s mother herself as a mass evading demon and a princess of Antioch, renaming her Cassodorien. This paper explores the wider cultural-political contexts of this substitution, read in relation to the text’s construction of a Christian community of appropriate wonder, defined and bounded by meditation on the mysteries of the eucharist, juxtaposed with the unthinking credulity and perceptual error of the pejoratively constructed Muslim communities whose lands are conquered by the king. Although an overtly fictionalised account of the Third Crusade (overstating Richard’s successes), I suggest that the romance participates in a longstanding historical discourse engaged with a distinction between true and false wonder, which we can trace back to chronicles of the First Crusade, most notably to Guibert of Nogent.
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