The ending of Hue de Rotelande's ‘letter-perfect pastiche’ of romance, Ipomedon, might raise a few eyebrows amongst readers of the tradition. The hero, Ipomedon, and his on-off sweetheart, La Fière, ‘The Proud’ duchess of Calabria, are finally brought back together after being at cross purposes for some time, driven apart, paradoxically, by their devotion to the same set of chivalric ideals and equally afraid to commit to each other at different points of the story. Yet, in a departure from the virtuous tone of other such ‘tremblante’ romance reunions, their happy marriage is cast as something of an orgy: ‘Or(e) s’entreaiment tant par amur,/K’il s’entrefoutent tute jur’ (‘Now they are so much in love with each other/That they fuck each other all day long’). This salacious account of their crowning marriage is only the tip of the iceberg. In fact, it pales next to the lewd epilogue, more closely aligned to the register of a fabliau, in which ‘Hue’ propositions his female audience with

a finely veiled innuendo:

A Credenhulle a ma meisun,

Chartre ai de l’absoluciun:

S’il i ad [u] dame u pucele,

U riche vedve u damsiele,

Ne voille creire, ke jo l’ai,

Venge la: jo li musterai;

Ainz ke d’iloc s’en seit turne,

La charter li ert enbreve,

E ço n’ert pas trop grant damages,

Se li seaus li pent as nages. (lines 10569–78)

Medievalists understandably find this manner of ending variously ‘boisterous’, ‘sudden, crude’, ‘provocative’, misogynistic; for Brenda Hosington it is a ‘literary hoax’, and for M. Dominica Legge it is ‘too shameless to be quoted’.

This ending is an acquired taste, and seems to provoke critical revulsion because it parodies the squeaky-clean spectacles of devotion which often mark the close of romance by suggesting they are merely a smokescreen for sexual debauchery.