'Colonialism' has been both eschewed and embraced by scholarship on narratives of territorial conquest from the European Middle Ages. This course will explore the productiveness and the limitations of colonialism's anachronism as a lens for studying texts from a range of medieval Francophone genres: from twelfth-century verse chansons de geste to fifteenth-century prose travel narratives, early medieval lyric poetry to late medieval historiography. For varied religious, political, economic, and cultural exercises of power, these texts construct an imaginary of racialised human identity (intersecting with gender and social class), alien landscape, and indigenous society in relation to European expansionism across the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic. Texts were neither conceived nor transmitted in isolation; a rich tradition of manuscript illustration, cartographic representation, and archaeological site evidence maps out visually the ideologies of contemporary explorers.

We will also raise scholarly methodology as a question: how have methods for addressing medieval materials themselves had a limiting effect on their mapping? Which combinations of approaches are most effective for undoing such knots and enabling us both to situate these works most accurately in their contemporary context and to position them most precisely in the history of colonialism?