Charles Samuelson (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)

Charles Samuelson (BA Amherst College; PhD Princeton University) is a specialist of medieval French literature and culture. His research uses close textual analysis and looks to both medieval learned culture and modern theory to take to task entrenched notions about the gender and sexual politics of medieval texts. His monograph, Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature (The Ohio State University Press, 2022), considers in tandem two genres of verse narratives that have not previously been studied together: verse romances, best known for Chrétien de Troyes’s twelfth-century Arthurian fictions; and dits, associated with Guillaume de Machaut’s fourteenth-century narrative poetry. It makes the case for important continuities between these two genres both characterized by their extreme literary self-consciousness and studies how literary play and experimentation bleed, in these texts always about love, into issues of gender and sexual politics. Resisting the notion that medieval texts about “courtly love” are either (proto-)heteronormative or just unrelated to modern heteronormativity, as well as the tendency always to situate queerness at margins, this book explores how one facet of their “courtliness”—namely, their sophistication, as valued by medieval courts—maps in disruptive, even queer, ways onto influential modern conceptions of queerness.

At the National Humanities Center, he will be working a second major project on representations of sexual consent in medieval literature, for which articles have appeared or are forthcoming in The Romanic Review, Digital Philology, Postmedieval, Speculum, and The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in French. He is also an editor of the journal Exemplaria: Medieval/Early Modern/Theory and a member of the editorial board of Speculum.

Selected Publications

• Samuelson, Charles. Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Edited by Ethan Knapp. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2022.
• Samuelson, Charles. “‘Yes and No Means Yes and No’: Sexual Consent in Yvain ou le Chevalier au lion.” Digital Philology 12, no. 1 (2022): 30–61.
• Samuelson, Charles “Erec et Enide and the Concept of Consent.” Romanic Review 113, no. 2 (2022): 151–76.
• Samuelson, Charles. “Consent and/to Gender in le Roman de Silence.” Postmedieval 16, no. 4 (2025). Forthcoming.
• Samuelson, Charles. “Consent in the Old French Tristan Material: Thomas of Britain’s Ambivalent Representations of Female Sexual Trauma.” Speculum 101, no. 2 (April 2026). Forthcoming.