Fiction and Belief

This chapter considers the relations of fiction and belief in the literary cultures of medieval Latin Christendom, including various literatures in the vernacular. In many modern literary histories, the medieval period has served as an archaic predecessor to fiction-properly-so-called. Nonetheless, sophisticated and contested models of fictionality were in circulation in the Middle Ages. This chapter explores the theoretical and historiographic issues that arise in studying fiction and belief in the western Middle Ages, including the limits of literary-theoretical vocabularies, the genres against which fiction was defined, and the varied scales of medieval fictions.