of his penance. Notably, though their loss is painful to the father, the wife and sons do not seem to have suffered hardship once separated from him. In fact, though the sultan's purchase of his wife seems terrible at the time, she manages to inherit his realm after his death. This good fortune is a point of differentiation from the tale's source material in the St. Eustace legend, where the wife lives out a humble self-subsistence. Leila Norako reads the reunification of the family at the battle against the Saracens as an idealized version of Christian unity in the face of Muslim attacks. Debate Over Genre Homiletic Romance/Secular Hagiography The connection between the hagiography St. Eustace and the romance Sir Isumbras has greatly influenced modern analysis of the latter. The two are so closely intertwined that in the Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 codex, the two are only separated by three intervening texts. Because of the resulting complex relationship between Christian and chivalric ideals in Sir Isumbras, literary criticism of the romance over the past several decades has been dominated by questions over its generic identity. One of the first scholars to explore the similarities between Sir Isumbras and St. Eustace was Laurel Braswell. In her 1965 article, “Sir Isumbras and the Legend of Saint Eustace,” Braswell critiques William of Nassington's dismissal of the tale as “veyn carping” and argued that it had actually been transliterated from the hagiographic material. However, unlike later scholars, she does not find the reworking of the material problematic, calling the story “an artistic synthesis.” A few years later, in his 1969 book The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, Dieter Mehl included Sir Isumbras in a sub-category of tales he labeled “homiletic romances.” According to Mehl, in these stories “the plot is completely subordinated to the moral and religious theme…One could describe these works, therefore, as either secularized Saints’ legends or legendary romances because they occupy a position exactly in the middle between these two genres.” Other romances Mehl places in this category include The King of Tars, Robert of Sicily, Sir Gowther, Emaré, Le Bone Florence of Rome, Athelston, The Sege of Melayne, and Cheuelere Assigne. In her 1978 article, “Between Romance and Legend: ‘Secular Hagiography’ in Middle English Literature,” Diana Childress followed up Mehl’s classification with her own term, “secular hagiography.” Childress argues that Sir Isumbras and its