This chapter discusses ways in which the Arthurian legend was transformed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries by French and English romance writers, focusing on the introduction of new characters, changes to the roles of traditionally central characters, and conflicting loyalties and values. Arthur is often displaced from the central role in the plot and can seem passive and ineffective. Gawain is the Top Knight in the English tradition, but Lancelot (a French addition) becomes increasingly important, not least because of his long affair with the queen, which is a contributing factor to the final collapse of Camelot. Family matters increasingly lead to conflicts of loyalties: Morgan le Fay is hostile to her brother, Arthur, and his Orkney nephews grow in number, some loyal but some treacherous. Mordred is not only Arthur’s nephew but sometimes also his son by incest, destined to kill his father. The Grail quest features first Perceval and then Galahad (Lancelot’s illegitimate son); its spiritual values challenge the ethos of secular chivalry and ennobling love. Does this quest bring glory to Arthur’s Round Table, or is it a critique of a fatally flawed society? Important variations in medieval approaches to the legend appear through this period.

Romance was created in twelfth-century England and France for aristocratic patrons and audiences whose courtly lifestyle it idealized and celebrated; as the earliest genre to celebrate love as life’s goal, it was revolutionary. Initially translating Latin sources, romance authors innovatively combined pre-existing genres: classical epic’s historical drive was disrupted by the lyric’s focus on individual emotional experience, creating a new kind of narrative fiction. Where earlier heroes had sacrificed their lives fighting for great causes, the romance hero suffers and fights to prove his worthiness to a beloved, and wins marriage, wealth, and reputation as confirmation of his value. Here the fictional genre betrays its real-world ideological role: to justify the patriarchal, misogynistic, exploitative and exclusionary structures of aristocratic chivalric society, representing – literally romanticizing – its values as morally admirable. Within decades the romance took multiple paths: in the creation of pseudohistorical heroes and legendary pasts; in the limitless proliferation of fictional quests from King Arthur’s court; and in parody and critique, such as Chrétien de Troyes’s helplessly subservient Lancelot, or Marie de France’s assertive female protagonists. Finally, Thomas of Britain’s Tristan transforms the romance into tragedy, another new development in this most capacious and influential genre, forerunner of the novel.

This chapter investigates the connections between classical ideals of generosity and the portrayal of largesse found in romance literature and other vernacular texts in the central Middle Ages. It investigates the place of generosity in the romances of antiquity, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and those of later romance writers. Based on this survey, the chapter argues that, while aristocratic audiences adapted and transformed many of the ideals they found, their conception of largesse was deeply dependent on the portrayal of generosity found in classical literature and moral philosophy.