De France dulce m’unt tolud la flor”: On the Chanson de Roland and the Liber floridus

This article looks at the encyclopedic Liber Floridus (Lambert de St Omer, c. 1121) and the Oxford Chanson de Roland (c. 1100) and how these coeval texts illustrate contemporary ideas about history, an emerging sense of nationalism, the Crusades, and the treatment of human emotions, especially anger and the complex effects it has on the psyche. I argue that in the Liber floridus’ analysis there is a source for contemporary emotion theory, and that in the Oxford Chanson de Roland we see something of its practical application. To read the Liber floridus is to encounter doctrinally, politically, stylistically, and psychologically the cultural mind-set that produced the Chanson de Roland and its apocalyptic, divisive, crusading outlook.