Books by Christopher Taylor
Cambridge Elements in the Global Middle Ages, 2025
The Global Legend of Prester John delves into the enduring fascination with Prester John, an unre... more The Global Legend of Prester John delves into the enduring fascination with Prester John, an unreachable, collectively-imagined Christian priest-king who figured prominently in Europe's entrance into an interconnected global world. This Element draws on “The International Prester John Project,” an archive of Prester John narratives, from papal epistles to missionary diaries to Marvel comics, all of which respond to the Christian heterotopia promised in the twelfth-century Letter of Prester John. During the medieval and early modern periods, the desire to legitimize the letter's contents influenced military tactics and papal policy while serving as a cultural touchstone for medieval maps, travel narratives, and romance tales. By providing an overview of distinct narrative paths the legend took along with an analysis of the themes of malleability and elasticity within and across these paths, this Element addresses how belief in Prester John persisted for six centuries despite a lack of evidence.
Papers by Christopher Taylor
In considering the increasing interest in the study of a global Middle Ages, there seem to be few... more In considering the increasing interest in the study of a global Middle Ages, there seem to be few individuals, either fictional or actual, that had a more powerful cosmopolitan currency than the figure of Prester John and the legends surrounding his kingdom. As a product of cultural imaginings and questionably recounted historical events, the search for and legitimization of Prester John has commanded consistent interest, both popular and scholarly, almost continuously since first mention of the figure of John in 1145. The now infamous Letter of Prester John, which details the magnificent Christian kingdom lying somewhere in the East, beyond the approaching threat of an ever-expanding Islam, has long catalyzed a hunt, by both adventurers and scholars, to seek the elusive patriarch. The very indeterminacy of the geographic location of Prester John allowed the European imagination to consequently imagine him everywhere precisely because he could neither be confirmed nor denied existence anywhere. This report will explore the ways that a reading of the Prester John legend reveals competing ambitions of enclosure and expansion within twelfth and thirteenth-century Latin Christendom, specifically around the time of the Fifth Crusade. This report will trace the ideational tensions within a presumed Christian Crusading West trying to legitimate itself against the dialectical buttress of what was increasingly professed as its heretical other, Islam. The Fifth Crusade, especially, seemed to hinge on the possibility of the harmonious convergence of Eastern and Western Christian powers, literalizing the sense of Christian enclosure around all of Islam. Prester John's kingdom thus served two functions: first, to comprise the other half of the Christian enclosure, and secondly, to mark a phenomenological limit point of human experience that domesticated alterity under the banner of a sovereign priest-king. v Table of Contents WAITING FOR PRESTER JOHN .
Studi e materiali di Storia delle Religioni, 2023
“Tracing the Paths of an Imaginary King” seeks to contextualize and account for Prester John’s su... more “Tracing the Paths of an Imaginary King” seeks to contextualize and account for Prester John’s supposed, repeated re-emergences across five centuries by identifying and describing five achronological narrative paths that the legend took. In so doing, this essay wrestles with the questions of how and why writers and adventurers throughout Europe continued to imagine Prester John despite repeated, sometimes costly failures to identify any evidence of his existence. By outlining distinct, yet permeable paths this essay addresses the ease with which the legend transformed in response to historical and cultural pressures, in order to account its durability, elasticity, and influence.
The Once and Future Herod: Vernacular Typology and the Unfolding of Middle English Cycle Drama
New Medieval Literatures 15
From the writings of early Church Fathers through the twelfth century, Herod the Great was consid... more From the writings of early Church Fathers through the twelfth century, Herod the Great was considered an exemplar of arrogance as madness, a role that is expanded in the English Cycle plays of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. In the York, Chester, N-Town, Towneley, and Coventry plays, Herod’s keen historical foresight betrays his awareness of the unfolding of Christian eschatology. The predetermined failure of his own actions to prevent the ascendancy of Christ suggest the impotence of a non-Christian future. Herod’s performances align deviance with knowledge, reaffirming faith and humility as the governing ethics of Christian epistemology. As a medium through which playwrights develop a kind of vernacular typology, the dramatic Herod testifies to the vitality of cycle drama within the landscape of fifteenth-century vernacular theology in England.
Literature Compass
In a global Middle Ages, there are few individuals, fictional or historical, who have exercised a... more In a global Middle Ages, there are few individuals, fictional or historical, who have exercised a stronger cosmopolitan pull than Prester John. A product of anxious cultural imaginings mixed with hope for historical change, Prester John has commanded consistent interest since 1145. Over the course of six centuries, Prester John figured centrally in Christendom’s understanding of what the distant world was like: crusading aspirations depended on his materialization; missionary undertakings in the East leveraged their chances of converting the heathen against a presumption of his existence, and mercantile-minded men from Marco Polo through Christopher Columbus dreamt of the putative riches of his kingdom. From its inception in the twelfth century, the Prester John legend linked the impulse to explore a global landscape with the desire for this landscape to be revealed as a continuation of, rather than a departure from, the known: as already Christian. Nowhere is this better expressed than in the original Latin Letter, the primary source for the legend of John. Produced in
the mid-twelfth century at the zenith of the Crusading impulse, the legend situates John as a Christian sovereign ruling authoritatively over an East that is beyond Dar al-Islam and, despite its exotic and
strange landscape, remains decidedly Christian.
Prester John, Christian Enclosure, and the Spatial Transmission of Islamic Alterity
Contextualizing the Muslim Other in Medieval Christian Discourse, Nov 2012
Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, Nov 2011
In considering the increasing interest in the study of a global Middle Ages, there
seem to be fe... more In considering the increasing interest in the study of a global Middle Ages, there
seem to be few individuals, either fictional or actual, that had a more powerful
cosmopolitan currency than the figure of Prester John and the legends surrounding his
kingdom. As a product of cultural imaginings and questionably recounted historical
events, the search for and legitimization of Prester John has commanded consistent
interest, both popular and scholarly, almost continuously since first mention of the figure
of John in 1145. The now infamous Letter of Prester John, which details the magnificent
Christian kingdom lying somewhere in the East, beyond the approaching threat of an
ever-expanding Islam, has long catalyzed a hunt, by both adventurers and scholars, to
seek the elusive patriarch. The very indeterminacy of the geographic location of Prester
John allowed the European imagination to consequently imagine him everywhere
precisely because he could neither be confirmed nor denied existence anywhere. This
report will explore the ways that a reading of the Prester John legend reveals competing
ambitions of enclosure and expansion within twelfth and thirteenth-century Latin
Christendom, specifically around the time of the Fifth Crusade. This report will trace the
ideational tensions within a presumed Christian Crusading West trying to legitimate itself
against the dialectical buttress of what was increasingly professed as its heretical other,
Islam. The Fifth Crusade, especially, seemed to hinge on the possibility of the
harmonious convergence of Eastern and Western Christian powers, literalizing the sense
of Christian enclosure around all of Islam. Prester John’s kingdom thus served two
functions: first, to comprise the other half of the Christian enclosure, and secondly, to
mark a phenomenological limit point of human experience that domesticated alterity
under the banner of a sovereign priest-king.
Thesis Chapters by Christopher Taylor
“Unknowing the Middle Ages” argues that attention to a late-medieval preoccupation with the unkno... more “Unknowing the Middle Ages” argues that attention to a late-medieval preoccupation with the unknowable helps untangle the work of literary discourse from historical and theological modes of inquiry. The project asserts that the topos of the unknown in late-medieval English literature offers more than some mystery to be revealed; instead, it winds through the poetic fabric of narrative and provides structure for some of the most often-studied Middle English texts.
I begin by illustrating how, in the thirteenth century, many putatively “literary” texts reflected a theological emphasis on explication and disclosure. Buoyed by the institutionalization of Scholastic thought and an ecclesiastically-sanctioned program of surveillance, epistemology and religious ethics began to coalesce across textual communities from the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 well into the fourteenth century. What resulted was an eschatological poetics focused on revelation, sometimes to the detriment of a concurrent desire to create a united Christendom. By focusing on fourteenth-century Middle English texts, my project traces what I see as an important shift away from the teleological clarity of this revelatory poetics. I identify what I call a late-medieval “poetics of unknowing,” an act of literary refinement that recognizes impossibility as a productive site for poiesis.
In other words, a “poetics of unknowing” reorients the impossible not as endpoint but as the ethical site from which Middle English literary discourse takes place in the late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In order to trace this “poetics of unknowing” as a strategy that emerges under specific historical circumstances, each of my four chapters addresses a figure whose textual history extends at least five hundred years, and who, across these centuries, had come to signify a historical or theological truth. The central focus of each chapter is to consider how, in late-medieval literary narratives, authors come to un-know the truths that had established the popularity of these figures. When translated into literary contexts, these four figures—Herod the Great, Prester John, the Pearl, and Criseyde— overlap at questions of representation, exceeding the logics of the texts that they inhabit, expressed through the difficulty their readers have had putting them—and the epistemological conundrums they embody—to rest.
Chapter one traces the evolution of the medieval Herod the Great from a paragon of madness in the writings of early Church Fathers to the comical, raging showman of the late-medieval English mystery cycles. Across these English plays, playwrights re-imagine Herod’s role as the one true foil of Christ, at once willfully impudent toward yet presciently aware of Christian eschatology. Herod’s hubristic performances and vivid on-stage deaths become shorthand for an entire legion of similarly fruitless attempts to alter the course of Christian history. An obsession with Herod’s impotence, shared by medieval writers and modern scholars, all but guarantees one of two possibilities: either he will not be able to transmit the real threat he poses to the Christian system or the villainy he engenders will inherit his impotence in the face of real power. This chapter also urges an expanded understanding of medieval typological thought, and, through it, a reconsideration of the literary stakes of medieval religious drama. These pageants, far from eliciting a naive confabulation of theological and cultural identity, illustrate an important medieval tension between the authority of inherited exegetical practices and the practical utility of narrative invention when it comes to understanding the complex narrative of Christian history.
In chapter two, I turn from biblical history to the foundational narrative of English secular history, the Matter of Troy. Rather than treat how England un-knew its own history by forging a genealogical relationship with the classical past, I concentrate on a later invention to the Troy-England tradition, the figure of Criseyde. Criseyde emerges in the twelfth century as a figure whose betrayal of her lover Troilus provided misogynistic medieval readers with a knowable moral lesson to explain the Fall of Troy. In the minds of medieval readers, Criseyde became, a historical figure whose actions foretold the inherently untrustworthy dispositions of all courtly women. Chapter two offers a focused reading of Chaucer’s revisionist account, Troilus and Criseyde, which not only challenges the historical record, but also the very possibility of a knowable past. I explore the relationship between Chaucer’s narrator and Criseyde in order to show how Chaucer’s Troilus attempts to un-know Criseyde through an ethics of re-telling that focuses on the moments that exceed narrative certainty. Judging by the impressions that Chaucer’s ambiguous heroine created for generations of readers, it becomes clear that Chaucer’s text successfully re-opens the question of English history Criseyde was invented to help settle.
In chapter three, I turn to a dream vision that fits neither Kathryn Lynch’s rubric for the “high medieval dream vision” nor the demands for clarity to which other thirteenth-century literary narratives worked toward. The Middle English elegy Pearl, written in the late fourteenth century, challenges the epistemological demands of its genre by insisting that even within the scene of dream revelation, divine knowledge remains suspended in the impossible-to-reach realm separating material from divine worlds. As a poem, Pearl tests the very boundaries the maiden cautions against, raising a paradox: to what degree can one communciate the immaterial knowledges that escape human cognition while writing from within the material world? I look more specifically at the relationship between a complex history of pearl symbolism and contemporary theological, mathematical, and scientific debates in order to show how Pearl reveals a shared concern among these discourses regarding the incommensurability of language and faith. Rather than affirm the pearl as an object that the good Christian can obtain or recover, Pearl interrogates the limits of symbolism and material knowledge to instruct the dreamer in exactly what can and cannot be known about loss.
The final chapter addresses the political stakes of literary unknowing through a reading of one of the most lasting legends in European history, the legend of Prester John. Although a twelfth-century invention, the figure of Prester John maintained a mystique, and an unknowability, well through the thirteenth century’s investment in debunking Eastern splendor. In fact, many of the tropes of wonder, suppressed by more naturalistic travel accounts, survive through the Letter of Prester John. I argue that as historical belief in a kingdom of Prester John began to fade, the hope he inspired survives through literature, where John cements his importance as a figure who came to represent the untapped potential of the geo-political unknown. Given the legend’s association with a fantasy of a globalized Christendom, fiction provides a fitting landscape in which his unknowability can be less problematically explored: here John’s elusiveness becomes not a hindrance to finding his kingdom, but indicates the degree to which, through literature, he guards and continually reshapes the limits of what was geographically knowable.
As my conclusion explores, the ultimate purpose of this dissertation is to outline a reading method applicable to a number of late-medieval texts. I offer unknowing as a reading ethic that underwrites a late-medieval movement toward understanding the literary as a sovereign discourse. By focusing on four better-known figures of medieval literary history, I create a background of historical certainty against which the literary “poetics of unknowing” labors.
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Books by Christopher Taylor
Papers by Christopher Taylor
the mid-twelfth century at the zenith of the Crusading impulse, the legend situates John as a Christian sovereign ruling authoritatively over an East that is beyond Dar al-Islam and, despite its exotic and
strange landscape, remains decidedly Christian.
seem to be few individuals, either fictional or actual, that had a more powerful
cosmopolitan currency than the figure of Prester John and the legends surrounding his
kingdom. As a product of cultural imaginings and questionably recounted historical
events, the search for and legitimization of Prester John has commanded consistent
interest, both popular and scholarly, almost continuously since first mention of the figure
of John in 1145. The now infamous Letter of Prester John, which details the magnificent
Christian kingdom lying somewhere in the East, beyond the approaching threat of an
ever-expanding Islam, has long catalyzed a hunt, by both adventurers and scholars, to
seek the elusive patriarch. The very indeterminacy of the geographic location of Prester
John allowed the European imagination to consequently imagine him everywhere
precisely because he could neither be confirmed nor denied existence anywhere. This
report will explore the ways that a reading of the Prester John legend reveals competing
ambitions of enclosure and expansion within twelfth and thirteenth-century Latin
Christendom, specifically around the time of the Fifth Crusade. This report will trace the
ideational tensions within a presumed Christian Crusading West trying to legitimate itself
against the dialectical buttress of what was increasingly professed as its heretical other,
Islam. The Fifth Crusade, especially, seemed to hinge on the possibility of the
harmonious convergence of Eastern and Western Christian powers, literalizing the sense
of Christian enclosure around all of Islam. Prester John’s kingdom thus served two
functions: first, to comprise the other half of the Christian enclosure, and secondly, to
mark a phenomenological limit point of human experience that domesticated alterity
under the banner of a sovereign priest-king.
Thesis Chapters by Christopher Taylor
I begin by illustrating how, in the thirteenth century, many putatively “literary” texts reflected a theological emphasis on explication and disclosure. Buoyed by the institutionalization of Scholastic thought and an ecclesiastically-sanctioned program of surveillance, epistemology and religious ethics began to coalesce across textual communities from the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 well into the fourteenth century. What resulted was an eschatological poetics focused on revelation, sometimes to the detriment of a concurrent desire to create a united Christendom. By focusing on fourteenth-century Middle English texts, my project traces what I see as an important shift away from the teleological clarity of this revelatory poetics. I identify what I call a late-medieval “poetics of unknowing,” an act of literary refinement that recognizes impossibility as a productive site for poiesis.
In other words, a “poetics of unknowing” reorients the impossible not as endpoint but as the ethical site from which Middle English literary discourse takes place in the late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In order to trace this “poetics of unknowing” as a strategy that emerges under specific historical circumstances, each of my four chapters addresses a figure whose textual history extends at least five hundred years, and who, across these centuries, had come to signify a historical or theological truth. The central focus of each chapter is to consider how, in late-medieval literary narratives, authors come to un-know the truths that had established the popularity of these figures. When translated into literary contexts, these four figures—Herod the Great, Prester John, the Pearl, and Criseyde— overlap at questions of representation, exceeding the logics of the texts that they inhabit, expressed through the difficulty their readers have had putting them—and the epistemological conundrums they embody—to rest.
Chapter one traces the evolution of the medieval Herod the Great from a paragon of madness in the writings of early Church Fathers to the comical, raging showman of the late-medieval English mystery cycles. Across these English plays, playwrights re-imagine Herod’s role as the one true foil of Christ, at once willfully impudent toward yet presciently aware of Christian eschatology. Herod’s hubristic performances and vivid on-stage deaths become shorthand for an entire legion of similarly fruitless attempts to alter the course of Christian history. An obsession with Herod’s impotence, shared by medieval writers and modern scholars, all but guarantees one of two possibilities: either he will not be able to transmit the real threat he poses to the Christian system or the villainy he engenders will inherit his impotence in the face of real power. This chapter also urges an expanded understanding of medieval typological thought, and, through it, a reconsideration of the literary stakes of medieval religious drama. These pageants, far from eliciting a naive confabulation of theological and cultural identity, illustrate an important medieval tension between the authority of inherited exegetical practices and the practical utility of narrative invention when it comes to understanding the complex narrative of Christian history.
In chapter two, I turn from biblical history to the foundational narrative of English secular history, the Matter of Troy. Rather than treat how England un-knew its own history by forging a genealogical relationship with the classical past, I concentrate on a later invention to the Troy-England tradition, the figure of Criseyde. Criseyde emerges in the twelfth century as a figure whose betrayal of her lover Troilus provided misogynistic medieval readers with a knowable moral lesson to explain the Fall of Troy. In the minds of medieval readers, Criseyde became, a historical figure whose actions foretold the inherently untrustworthy dispositions of all courtly women. Chapter two offers a focused reading of Chaucer’s revisionist account, Troilus and Criseyde, which not only challenges the historical record, but also the very possibility of a knowable past. I explore the relationship between Chaucer’s narrator and Criseyde in order to show how Chaucer’s Troilus attempts to un-know Criseyde through an ethics of re-telling that focuses on the moments that exceed narrative certainty. Judging by the impressions that Chaucer’s ambiguous heroine created for generations of readers, it becomes clear that Chaucer’s text successfully re-opens the question of English history Criseyde was invented to help settle.
In chapter three, I turn to a dream vision that fits neither Kathryn Lynch’s rubric for the “high medieval dream vision” nor the demands for clarity to which other thirteenth-century literary narratives worked toward. The Middle English elegy Pearl, written in the late fourteenth century, challenges the epistemological demands of its genre by insisting that even within the scene of dream revelation, divine knowledge remains suspended in the impossible-to-reach realm separating material from divine worlds. As a poem, Pearl tests the very boundaries the maiden cautions against, raising a paradox: to what degree can one communciate the immaterial knowledges that escape human cognition while writing from within the material world? I look more specifically at the relationship between a complex history of pearl symbolism and contemporary theological, mathematical, and scientific debates in order to show how Pearl reveals a shared concern among these discourses regarding the incommensurability of language and faith. Rather than affirm the pearl as an object that the good Christian can obtain or recover, Pearl interrogates the limits of symbolism and material knowledge to instruct the dreamer in exactly what can and cannot be known about loss.
The final chapter addresses the political stakes of literary unknowing through a reading of one of the most lasting legends in European history, the legend of Prester John. Although a twelfth-century invention, the figure of Prester John maintained a mystique, and an unknowability, well through the thirteenth century’s investment in debunking Eastern splendor. In fact, many of the tropes of wonder, suppressed by more naturalistic travel accounts, survive through the Letter of Prester John. I argue that as historical belief in a kingdom of Prester John began to fade, the hope he inspired survives through literature, where John cements his importance as a figure who came to represent the untapped potential of the geo-political unknown. Given the legend’s association with a fantasy of a globalized Christendom, fiction provides a fitting landscape in which his unknowability can be less problematically explored: here John’s elusiveness becomes not a hindrance to finding his kingdom, but indicates the degree to which, through literature, he guards and continually reshapes the limits of what was geographically knowable.
As my conclusion explores, the ultimate purpose of this dissertation is to outline a reading method applicable to a number of late-medieval texts. I offer unknowing as a reading ethic that underwrites a late-medieval movement toward understanding the literary as a sovereign discourse. By focusing on four better-known figures of medieval literary history, I create a background of historical certainty against which the literary “poetics of unknowing” labors.