This dismissal of Eleanor may be a part of the romance’s fourteenth-century rejection of the Frenchness of England’s royal family in the thirteenth century. This story of Richard the Lionheart’s legendary parentage is quite remarkable in that it elides the quite obvious historical fact that Richard’s mother was Eleanor of Aquitaine. The physical characteristics of this new soldier clearly mark him as ethnically and ethically other: his physical aspect is Middle Eastern or African, and with his sword he lifts a skewered child to his mouth and takes a large, exaggerated bite.

p1 Retaining the traditional formal aspects of the iconography of the scene- King Herod and weeping Jewish women flanking Roman soldiers who slaughter the babies-the illustrator has removed one of the Roman soldiers and in his place inserted a Saracen straight out of the landscape of romance and chanson de geste. This image, in the lower register of folio fourteen, illustrates the Massacre of the Innocents, as the title asserts: “ICI FAIT HERODE OCCIRE LES INNOCENS.” The Psalter illustrator, however, effects a radical redrawing of the traditional imagery of the scene.

This strange accusation is expressed in a striking image from the Winchester Psalter, an image which is part of an illustrated Biblical cycle (figure 5.1). Far more than any other group in the European Middle Ages, it is the Muslim-or rather the Saracen of imaginative literature-who is accused of cannibalism.

Crusader kings 2 cannibal