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Editor	Date	Base text	Version	Type of edition	Availability	URL
Karl Brunner	1913	C	A-version	Critical edition and translation into German	Internet Archive	[URL]
Bradford B. Broughton	1966		A-version	Modern English translation
Philida Schellekens	1989	A, D, E and L	B-version	Parallel edition	Durham University repository	[URL]
James Bazant	1995	C	A-version	Critical edition
David Burnley and Alison Wiggins	2003	L	B-version	Critical edition	NLS website	[URL]
Early English Books Online	2004	W	A-version	Facsimile and transcription	Transcription as epub or html	URL
Early English Books Online		W2	A-version	Facsimile	ProQuest (requires login)	URL
Maria Cristina Figueredo	2009	B	A-version	Critical edition (fills gaps, emends errors)	University of York repository	[URL]
Peter Larkin	2015	C	A-version	Critical edition (fills gaps, emends errors)	TEAMS	[url]

Genre

The only manuscript that itself describes the poem as a romance is the Thornton MS, which contains the A-version.[Liu, 341n23,352]

Chansons

Libbon - get into the chansons and the lost group preserved in Karlamagnus saga

Historical events

Richard I was born in 1157 to Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and spent much of his childhood and early adulthood in France.[cite] In 1187 he took the cross, promising to join what would eventually become the Third Crusade. He became King of England and ruler of the extensive Angevin holdings in France in 1189, at the age of thirty-two. He spent the first year of his reign raising money to fund his crusading expedition,[cite] and departed for the Holy Land in the summer of 1190.

In September 1190 he arrived in Sicily, where his sister Joan, the widow of William II of Sicily, had been imprisoned by William's cousin Tancred. Tancred released Joan at Richard's demand. The people of Messina revolted at the presence of thousands of foreign soldiers on the island, and Richard responded by attacking, capturing and then burning the city. He remained in Sicily over the winter of 1190, and set off again in April 1191, intending to land at Acre.

However, a storm separated the fleet, and the ship carrying Joan and Richard's fianceé Berengaria was forced to take refuge in Cyprus; a number of other ships were wrecked there, and the survivors taken prisoner by Isaac Komnenos. On arriving in Cyprus Richard demanded the release of the prisoners, and when this did not happen, took the port city of Lemesos. Various other crusader lords including Guy of Lusignan arrived, and the crusader force proceeded to conquer the entire island and sold it to the Knights Templar, after which Richard and his forces departed again on 5 June 1191. He also married Berengaria while on Cyprus.

On landing at Acre, Richard joined the Siege of Acre alongside his longtime rival Philip Augustus, the King of France; both men were heavily involved in forcing the surrender of the city, despite Richard's falling ill (possibly with scurvy). Richard quarrelled with Leopold of Austria after the siege, after which Leopold quit the crusade and returned to Europe. Philip Augustus also returned to France after the siege was over.

Richard's forces had taken several thousand prisoners when Acre surrendered, and Richard also forced Conrad of Montferrat to hand over prisoners entrusted to him by Philip of France. The terms of surrender stipulated that the Crusaders would release their prisoners in exchange for Saladin's forces releasing 1,600 Christian prisoners, a substantial payment in gold, and the return of a relic of the True Cross captured at the 1187 Battle of Hattin. Negotiations broke down; Richard appears to have become convinced that Saladin was stalling, and on 20 August 1191 had more than two thousand of his prisoners publicly executed in view of Saladin's army.

Richard then took his army south towards Jaffa.

Post-medieval reception

- idea that it was a historical epic "contaminated" [cite] by the fantastical bits - "Legendary Ancestors" has some good quotes on this

- revisited towards the end of the 20thC as a coherent text in its own right

- much more critical attention to the A-version as more is going on and that's also where the complete text is.

Themes

English identity and English nationalism

The historical Richard achieved semi-legendary fame for his crusade victories in his own lifetime and was already a folk hero by the mid-1200s,[Ambrisco 511] [Gillingham 7] but was "a prince of France through and through" and "in no way an English king" [Flori, 7-8]. The continent was the scene for "by far the greater part of his political life", he famously spent less than a year of a decade-long reign in England, and he spoke little or no English, preferring to write in French or Occitan. [Larkin 12] [Flori 7-8] [Gillingham 33] As well as being culturally French, his government of England was unpopular: he imposed heavy taxes to pay for his crusade (and later for the ransom demanded by Leopold of Austria), and sold government posts to the highest bidder, joking that he would have sold London if he could find a buyer.[Flori 97-101] [Larkin 12]

The romance erases Richard's French background, replacing Eleanor of Aquitaine with the fictional Cassodorien; minimises his role as lord of the Angevin empire, portraying his longstanding rivalry with Philip II of France as a personal grudge rather than a territorial dispute between neighbouring rulers;[Ambrisco 516] is written in English and uses very little French vocabulary;[Schellekens 73] and consistently presents the French, not only the Saracens, as enemies of England.

The Hundred Years' War lasted from 1337 until 1453, and the surviving manuscripts of Richard were all produced roughly during this period. [Ambrisco 520] Edward III and his successors, notably Henry V, used the threat of France as a means of bolstering English unity. Alongside this, the English court and parliament deliberately began to adopt English as the language of politics and law.

uses Richard as a vehicle for an English nationalist, anti-French point of view reflecting the time the poem was written, similarly to how the chanson de geste genre uses Charlemagne's reign as a setting for tales focused on issues of the Crusade period.

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8bj267nw <- Paper explicitly linking RCL to later nationalist and Islamophobic narratives

Lee Manion argues it's not nationalist https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-british-studies/article/lee-manion-narrating-the-crusades-loss-and-recovery-in-medieval-and-early-modern-english-literature-cambridge-studies-in-medieval-literature-90-cambridge-cambridge-university-press-2014-pp-320-9800-cloth/5117665E9638E2985369DB495F11DA2D

The Crusade

Hunger

Monstrosity

Historical context

Circa a century after Richard's death, well inside folk memory.

Richard was a folk hero as early as the mid 1200s [Gillingham 7]

Richard was popular; John was not

Other crusades - Seventh Crusade and mentions of William Longsword and co

Language change from French to English

TEXTS FROM THE LIBRARY

The Transmission of Medieval Romance: Metres, Manuscripts and Early Prints - Putter, Jefferson, 2018 - Meale and Jordi Sanchez chapters

A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance - Radulescu and Rushton 2009

Catalogue of Manuscripts - Guddat-Figge

The Postcolonial Middle Ages - Heng chapter

Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern English for Johan Gerritsen - Pearsall chapter

Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy - follow up references p110

Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature - Blurton

The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives - Libbon chapter

The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance - Mills chapter