Borderwork: Floire & Blancheflor and its Persian Interlocutors

Abstract

In her seminal monograph Medieval Boundaries, Sharon Kinoshita devotes a chapter to the Old French romance of Florie & Blancheflor, exploring how the story blurs, subverts, and (re)constructs multiple kinds of categories, including religion, language, class, and gender. Drawing from her method and analysis, this paper proposes a general analytic, borderwork, that we might apply to adjacent and analogous texts that appear to engage in similar kinds of labor. For alongside Floire & Blancheflor — one of the most successful and widely circulated tales of its time, with instances produced in nearly all the literary languages of the Mediterranean and Western Europe — we can find nearly identical cases in Persian literature, with love stories like Vamiq & Azra and Varqa & Gulshah raising the same questions about Self and Other through similar strategies. It is worth noting that the latter text, like its European counterpart, also enjoyed a vibrant afterlife in southwest Asia, with multiple literary compositions in Turkish and Kurdish, and musical performance in Azeri, Georgian, and Armenian; there is thus much to compare. In this paper, Dr Cameron Cross will explore how these texts “work the border” in their own distinctive ways, and what that comparison with Floire & Blancheflor might tell us about shared practices and habits of borderwork beyond the Mediterranean zone and into southwest and central Asia. 

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