In the following excerpt, Harrison compares the two main women characters from The Song of Roland. She notes that Roland's fiancee Aude is described as having typically desirable "feminine" traits: she is beautiful, faithful, and devoted, and is identified primarily in terms of her relationships with male characters. In contrast, the anonymous author depicted the Saracen queen Bramimunde as a strong, active, indepedent individual, who is in fact the only surviving Saracen discussed by name in the Song.

Modern students of the humanities in high school, college, and graduate school who study the history of western civilization in a wide variety of disciplines from anthropology to comparative literature and French are currently exposed to the Chanson de Roland (in English, modern French, or Old French), usually they read short passages of a hundred verses or so, and they are told about the content and emphasis of the...