Anthony Munday’s Palmerin d’Oliva: Representing sexual threat in the Near East

Abstract

This article explores how Anthony Munday’s Palmerin d’Oliva (1588), Part II, portrays the threat of Muslims in the Near East. Munday’s source is the French L’Histoire de Palmerin d’Olive (1546), which Jean Maugin had translated from the anonymous Spanish chivalric romance Palmerín de Olivia (1511). I focus on the way that the description of the Muslim menace changes in the course of translation. I argue that both the French and English translators manipulate medieval and early modern sexual stereotypes used to describe Muslim culture in order to heighten the sense of Islamic aggression and the holiness of Christianity as a counter to its threat. Munday’s translation, in particular, represents the ambivalent views that his contemporary England held about Islam and the Near East, and also highlights the sanctity of Christian chastity and marriage, which are issues that he also develops in Part I of the Palmerin d’Oliva.