Marcel Elias

My research focuses on the literary and cultural history of Europe and the eastern Mediterranean during the Middle Ages. In particular, I work in the areas of Middle English and Old French literature, epic and romance, crusade and travel writing (in various languages), Christian-Muslim relations, emotion studies, and postcolonial studies. My first book, English Literature and the Crusades, takes as its subject the Middle English crusade romances that proliferated between the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) and the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453). It brings these romances into conversation with a vast Euro-Mediterranean archive to offer a novel account of late medieval crusade culture: as ambivalent and self-critical, animated by tensions and debates, and fraught with anxiety. These romances, I argue, uphold ideals of holy war while expressing anxieties about issues as diverse as God’s endorsement of the crusading enterprise, the conversion of crusaders to Islam, the inadequacy of Christian warriors vis-à-vis their Muslim counterparts, and the morality of violence.

My second book, How the Muslim Counter-Crusading Movement Shaped European Culture, will be a new cultural history of premodern Europe. Whereas much scholarship has emphasized the role of Latin Christian expansion (into Islamic Spain, Sicily, the Levant, and elsewhere) in the “making” of Europe during the central Middle Ages, my book will instead situate Muslim resistance at the heart of cultural change. This resistance, carried out on both military and cultural fronts, resulted in new formulations of Muslim and Christian identity. Europe absorbed these formulations, reworking them first during the central and later Middle Ages, then during the early modern period, before Enlightenment thinkers repurposed them to define modernity.

I am also the editor of New Directions in Medieval Postcolonialism, a special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies that introduces new postcolonial voices and analytical methods into medieval studies to advance urgent conversations about race, religious difference, and the global Middle Ages. My essays have appeared in Speculum, Review of English Studies, New Medieval Literatures, Studies in Philology, The Oxford History of Poetry in English, and elsewhere. My research has been supported by fellowships from Yale University, St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Council for British Research in the Levant. During my PhD in Cambridge, I was a Scholar of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Selected Publications

Book

-English Literature and the Crusades: Anxieties of Holy War, 1291-1453 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024).

Edited Collection

-New Directions in Medieval Postcolonialism, ed. Marcel Elias, a special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 55:3 (2025).

Articles

• “‘Resistance Within’: Honorat Bovet on Expansionism and Race,” in Race and Identity in the Late Medieval World, ed. Sarah Ifft Decker, a special issue of Digital Philology 15:1 (January 2026) (in press).

• “Second-Wave Medieval Postcolonialism,” in New Directions in Medieval Postcolonialism, ed. Marcel Elias, a special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 53:3 (2025), 399-418.

• “Unsettling Orientalism: Toward a New History of European Representations of Muslims and Islam, c. 1200-1450,” Speculum 100:2 (2025), 466-97.

• “Crusade Romances and the Matter of France,” in The Oxford History of Poetry in English, vol. 2 (1100-1400), ed. Helen Cooper and Robert R. Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 339-55.

• “Approaches to Teaching the ‘Multicultural Middle Ages,’” co-written with Ardis Butterfield, New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy & Profession 2 (2021), 10-27.

• “Chaucer and Crusader Ethics: Youth, Love, and the Material World,” The Review of English Studies 70 (2019), 618-39.

• “Rewriting Chivalric Encounters: Cultural Anxieties and Social Critique in the Fourteenth Century,” in Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance, ed. Elizabeth Archibald, Megan Leitch, and Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2018), 49-68.

• “Interfaith Empathy and the Formation of Romance,” in Emotion and Medieval Textual Media, ed. Mary Flannery (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 99-124.

• “Violence, Excess, and the Composite Emotional Rhetoric of Richard Coeur de Lion,” Studies in Philology 114:1 (2017), 1-38.

• “Mixed Feelings in the Middle English Charlemagne Romances: Emotional Reconfiguration and the Failures of Crusading Practices in the Otuel Texts,” New Medieval Literatures 16 (2016), 172-212.

• “The Case of Anger in The Siege of Milan and The King of Tars,” Comitatus 43 (2012), 41-56.

Courses

Undergraduate:

• Readings in English Poetry I
• The Senior Essay
• The Multicultural Middle Ages (with Ardis Butterfield)
• Knights, Crusaders, Travelers, and Poets
• Religion, Race, and Empire in Medieval Literatures

Graduate: 

• Postcolonial Middle Ages