This chapter discusses two Middle English Charlemagne romances, The Siege of Milan and The Sultan of Babylon, to illuminate post-1291 anxieties about royal politics, Christian infighting, and God’s will and support. It brings these romances into conversation with two main bodies of literary and historical material. The first consists of writings that polemically engage with the question of whether English and French kings should prioritize domestic affairs or crusading activity. The second consists of poems, letters, and chronicles that, written by Christians following crusading defeats, feature wrathful rebukes of God and threats of conversion to Islam. I draw on this latter corpus to offer a new interpretation of the literary motif of the “afflicted Muslim” who vents his military frustration on his “gods,” arguing that such depictions should be understood as projections of Latin Christian anxieties about God’s lack of support to the crusading enterprise.

Roberto Bolaño’s writing emphasizes the ways exile shapes individual and collective responses to traumatic losses, which are often produced by state violence. The dispersive nature of these responses demands an approach to collective memory that resists the purported coherence of the national narrative. My analysis considers the effort to establish coherency in By Night in Chile in contrast to the calls for openness that characterize the other texts I analyze: The Spirit of Science Fiction, “Visit to the Convalescent,” and Woes of the True Policeman. In reference to discussions of memory and trauma by Adeila Assmann and Nelly Richard, my reading of Bolaño’s texts pairs a critique of authorial coherence with a critique of national coherence. I focus especially on narrative boundaries and fissures, including the motifs of holes and storms. I conclude that an open, interrelational textual analysis of a single author’s work enables a critique of that work that, in turn, strengthens a critique of national narratives and their propensity to conceal traumatic pasts.

Chapter 3 turns to Manasses’ production of lamentations and consolatory discourses. A model for understanding the occasional text as an expression of a cultural and semiotic relationship between writer and patron, characterised by similarity, is employed. Four texts are examined: the Monody on the death of Theodora, wife of John Kontostephanos, the Consolation for John Kontostephanos (comforting him in his sorrow at the loss of Theodora), the Funerary oration on the death of Nikephoros Komnenos and the Monody on the death of his goldfinch. John Kontostephanos, who is also mentioned in the Itinerary, and Nikephoros Komnenos both seem to have been important patrons for Manasses. The reading of the Monody on the death of his goldfinch underlines the lament’s focus on the literary activities of the narrator, where the bird – a frequent symbol in Manasses’ works – seems to function as a sort of literary muse or even rhetorical alter ego of the writer.

This chapter offers an understanding of puritan aesthetics by approaching it through the religious experience of conversion. Insofar as aesthetics are ever thought of in relation to puritanism, the usual scholarly conversation concerns the role, relevance, and consequences of the puritan plain style. Plain style matters, but it does not explain the broader aesthetic intentions or forms of puritan writing. Conversion comes much closer to the heart of it. Radical Protestants in early New England insisted that true religion began with the power of God acting on the individual to produce conversion to a new life of delight in God. The unconverted might seek to “prepare” themselves for that transformation of the heart, but predestinarian theology demanded that the crucial moment of change must be utterly external – a true work of God and not one of self-fashioning. In preaching, in poetry, and in personal conversion relations, puritans used the language of the heart to describe God’s power in conversion. This chapter traces how the response to sorrow and beauty characterizes puritan conversion stories from the first establishment of the colony of Massachusetts.