"Empire of Magic offers a genesis and genealogy for medieval romance and the King Arthur legend through the history of Europe's encounters with the East in crusades, travel, missionizing, and empire formation. It also produces definitions of "race" and "nation" for the medieval period and posits that the Middle Ages and medieval fantasies of race and religion have recently returned." "Empire of Magic is expansive in scope, spanning the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, and detailed in coverage, examining various types of romance - historical, national, popular, chivalric, family, and travel romances, among others - to see how cultural fantasy responds to changing crises, pressures, and demands in a number of different ways. Boldy controversial, theoretically sophisticated, and historically rooted, Empire of Magic is a restaging of the role romance played in the culture of a period and world in ways that suggest how cultural fantasy still functions for us today."--Jacket.