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  3. Studies in Medieval Romance

This series aims to provide a forum for critical studies of the medieval romance, a genre that plays a crucial role in literary history, reflects medieval secular concerns, and raises complex questions regarding medieval reading and writing, social structures, human relationships, and the psyche. The scope of the series extends from the early Middle Ages into the Renaissance period, and although its main focus is on English literature, comparative studies are welcomed.

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15 results in Studies in Medieval Romance

Boundaries in Medieval Romance

Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition

A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance

Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance
  • Corinne Saunders
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    02 March 2023
    Print publication:
    15 April 2010
  • The themes of magic and the supernatural in medieval romance are here fully explored and put into the context of thinking at the time in this first full study of the subject.

Cultural Translations in Medieval Romance

Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory
  • Jamie McKinstry
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    02 June 2021
    Print publication:
    15 October 2015
  • In Middle English romances many memories are created, stored, forgotten, and rediscovered by both the characters and audience; such memory work is not, however, either simple or obvious. This study examines the ways in which recollection is achieved and sustained through physical, cognitive, and interpretative challenges. It uses examples such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo,and Emaré, alongside romances by Chaucer and Malory, to investigate the genre's reliance on individual and collective memorial processes. The author argues that a tale's objects, places, dreams, discoveries, disguises, prophecies, and dramatic ironies influence that romance's essential memory work, which relies as much on creativity as it does accuracy. He also explores the imaginative crafts of memory that are employed by romances themselves.

    Dr Jamie McKinstry teaches in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, where he is a member of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

The Mélusine Romance in Medieval Europe

Romance Rewritten

Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great
  • Transnational Texts in England and France
  • Volume 20
  • Venetia Bridges
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 July 2019
    Print publication:
    31 July 2018
  • An investigation into the depiction and reception of the figure of Alexander in the literatures of medieval Europe.

Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
  • With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
  • Edited by Rosalind Field, Alison Wiggins
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2017
    Print publication:
    19 July 2007
  • Guy of Warwick is England's other Arthur. Elevated to the status of national hero, his legend occupied a central place in the nation's cultural heritage from the Middle Ages to the modern period. Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor spans the Guy tradition from its beginnings in Anglo-Norman and Middle English romance right through to the plays and prints of the early modern period and Spenser's Faerie Queene, including the visual tradition in manuscript illustration and material culture as well as the intersection of the legend with local and national history. This volume addresses important questions regarding the continuities and remaking of romance material, and the relation between life and literature. Topics discussed are sensitive to current critical concerns and include translation, reception, magnate ambition, East-West relations, the construction of "Englishness" and national identity, and the literary value of "popular" romance.

    ALISON WIGGINS is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow; ROSALIND FIELD is Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.

    CONTRIBUTORS: JUDITH WEISS, MARIANNE AILES, IVANA DJORDJEVIC, ROSALIND FIELD, ALISON WIGGINS, A.S.G. EDWARDS, ROBERT ALLEN ROUSE, DAVID GRIFFITH, MARTHA W. DRIVER, SIAN ECHARD, ANDREW KING, HELEN COOPER

Medieval Romance and Material Culture

Performance and the Middle English Romance
  • Linda Marie Zaerr
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    16 August 2012
  • Although English medieval minstrels performed 'gestes', a genre closely related to romance, often playing the harp or the fiddle, the question of if, and how, Middle English romance was performed has been hotly debated. Here, the performance tradition is explored by combining textual, historical and musicological scholarship with practical experience from a noted musician. Using previously unrecognised evidence, the author reconstructs a realistic model of minstrel performance, showing how a simple melody can interact with the text, and vice versa. She argues that elements in Middle English romance which may seem simplistic or repetitive may in fact be incomplete, as missing an integral musical dimension; metrical irregularities, for example, may be relics of sophisticated rhythmic variation that make sense only with music. Overall, the study offers both a more accurate comprehension of minstrel performance, and a deeper appreciation of the romances themselves. Linda Marie Zaerr is Professor of Medieval Studies at Boise State University.

Women's Power in Late Medieval Romance
  • Amy N. Vines
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    20 October 2011
  • The cultural and social power of women in the Middle Ages is perhaps hard to trace, with evidence for it scarce. This book argues that medieval romances provide a central, but under-explored, source for and examples of such authority. By reassessing the influence exerted by female characters, in a spectrum that includes both intellectual and chivalric aid and, in some cases, patronage, it considers how they functioned as models of cultural, intellectual, and social authority in medieval literary texts. In addition to examples set by the family connections, socio-political networks, and textual communities in which they lived, this study argues that women also learned methods of influence from the books they read. In texts like 'Troilus and Criseyde' and 'Partonope of Blois', the female reader encounters an explicit demonstration of how a woman`s intellectual and financial resources can be used. The literary representations of women's cultural power expose a continuum of influence from non-material effects to material sway in the medieval patronage system, an influence often unacknowledged in strictly historical and extra-literary sources. Amy N. Vines is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

Anglicising Romance
  • Tail-Rhyme and Genre in Medieval English Literature
  • Rhiannon Purdie
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    18 September 2008
  • A reappraisal of the tail-rhyme form so strongly associated with medieval English romance, and how it became so appropriated. Tail-rhyme romance unites a French genre with a continental stanza form, so why was it developed only in Middle English literature? For English audiences, tail-rhyme becomes inextricably linked with the romance genre in a way that no other verse form does. The first examples are recorded near the beginning of the fourteenth century and by the end of it Chaucer's 'Sir Thopas' can rely on it to work as a shorthand for the entire Middle English romance tradition. How and why this came to be is the question that 'Anglicising Romance' sets out to answer. Its five chapters discuss the stanza's origins; the use of tail-rhyme in Anglo-Noman literature; questions of transmission and manuscript layout; the romances of the Auchinleck manuscript; and the geographic spread of tail-rhyme romance. The individual entries in the Appendix present newly reassessed evidence for the provenance and date of each of the thirty-six extant tail-rhyme romances. RHIANNON PURDIE is Senior Lecturer in Mediaeval English at the University of St Andrews.

Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance
  • Edited by Neil Cartlidge
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    19 April 2012
  • Medieval romances so insistently celebrate the triumphs of heroes and the discomfiture of villains that they discourage recognition of just how morally ambiguous, antisocial or even downright sinister their protagonists can be, and, correspondingly, of just how admirable or impressive their defeated opponents often are. This tension between the heroic and the antiheroic makes a major contribution to the dramatic complexity of medieval romance, but it is not an aspect of the genre that has been frequently discussed up. Focusing on fourteen distinct characters and character-types in medieval narrative, this book illustrates the range of different ways in which the imaginative power and appeal of romance-texts often depends on contradictions implicit in the very ideal of heroism. Dr Neil Cartlidge is Lecturer in English at the University of Durham. Contributors: Neil Cartlidge, Penny Eley, David Ashurst, Meg Lamont, Laura Ashe, Judith Weiss, Gareth Griffith, Kate McClune, Nancy Mason Bradbury, Ad Putter, Robert Rouse, Siobhain Bly Calkin, James Wade, Stephanie Vierick Gibbs Kamath