Masculine crusaders, effeminate Greeks, and the female historian: relations of power in Sir Walter Scott's Count Robert of Paris

Gender employed as a methodological lens in the analysis of historical fiction can help to reveal implicit or explicit evaluative statements. It is deployed here to examine hierarchies in the military, political and cultural context of the encounter between ‘virile’ Westerners and ‘effeminate’ Greeks in Sir Walter Scott’s last novel, Count Robert of Paris (1831), which is set in Constantinople at the start of the First Crusade (1096-7). Scott’s depiction of Westerners and Orientalized Greeks is set against the geopolitical concerns of the author’s own time. The gendered perspective through which Scott constructs relationships in Count Robert makes it clear that the ancestors of modern Britain and France must control the East, represented here by the Byzantine Greeks. On the other hand, Scott’s ambivalent and fluctuating portrayal of the twelfthcentury historiographer Anna Comnena as a fictional character in the novel reveals his own uncertain stance between rejection and admiration of the female historian, as well as a more complex approach to gender dynamics in times of change