Middle English romance, long the ugly duckling of medieval literary
studies, has over the past couple of decades come back into fashion,
just as a romance hero after battles, privations, and adventures is
reintegrated into his society. Boydell and Brewer have been leaders in
this recuperation, with a list of monographs and essay collections on
romance unparalleled by any other publisher. So this present
Unlike the most influential of the recent essay collections on the
romances, Henk Aertsen and Alasdair MacDonald's
There is no full consensus among the authors represented in this
That quibble aside, each of the volume's essays considers an important aspect of these texts. Rosalind Field begins the collection by addressing my quibble in part by considering what constitutes "popular" in both an Anglo-Norman and a Middle English context, concluding that, unlike the romances of chivalry, the popular romances "deal with the bases of human existence in society: getting born, surviving childhood, negotiating the family, finding a mate, facing threats, achieving justice and accepting mortality" (29). A major problem in discussion of these texts was for the second half of the twentieth century the difficulty of classifying them into a neat genre, and Raluca Radulescu tackles the long-standing question of their generic unwieldiness concluding that medieval authors saw genre in a much more flexible way than we, and that their response to these texts was less conditioned by generic expectations.
Two essays deal with the conditions of survival of romance texts: Maldwyn Mills and Gillian Rogers with the manuscripts and Jennifer Fellows with the movement of romances into print in the early sixteenth century. Mills outlines the contents of the major anthology manuscripts in which most romances have come down to us, though something seems to have gone wrong with the use of boldface in the table on pp. 53-4. Rogers surveys the contents of the seventeenth- century Percy Folio for popular romance, a discussion which seems out of place in such a collection of background essays, especially so in that her stated purpose is to argue for a consideration of the Percy materials as a whole, pressing the discussion well beyond romance into ballad and historical poetry (a good deal of it non-medieval). Fellows focuses on the five romances in CUL Ff.2.38 which appeared in print, hoping to "throw some light on the practices of sixteenth-century printers in the selection and treatment of Middle English romance texts" (67). Her discussion of the treatment of the texts sheds light on the kinds of changes printers brought to the romances, but her conclusion is that the reasons for the printers' selection of texts is a question "that it would be hard to answer" (78).
Themes of national and personal identity inform the essays of Thomas Crofts and Robert Allen Rouse ("Middle English Popular Romance and National Identity") and Joanne Charbonneau and Désirée Cromwell ("Gender and Identity in the Popular Romances"). Questions of identity have been central to much of the scholarship on the romances in the recent past, and both these essays provide welcome surveys of these discussions. Crofts and Rouse warn that while the theme of nationalism can be followed through some of the romances, many offer "more complex challenges" and remind us that "generalizing about medieval genres" (95) tends to be a mug's game. Gender identity, especially in its relation to family structures, is a central concern of many of the romances, and Charbonneau and Cromwell outline the texts' concerns with the upholding and the subversion of traditional gender roles at a time when these were understood socially as rapidly shifting territory.
Ad Putter contributes an essay on the metrics of popular romance, marked by close analysis of the different uses and effects inherent in four-beat couplets, the bob-and-wheel stanza, or the tail-rhyme stanza. This is a particularly useful essay, since metrics tends in many cases to be left out of the discussion. Putter's outline of the usefulness to the poet of the three-beat lines in tail-rhyme is very effective in an area where many critics simply hold their noses. Karl Reichl considers issues of orality with respect to the romances, both from the point of view of reading aloud in public or private and of professional (minstrel) performance. His discussion of the imprecision of terms for performers (138) would benefit from reference to Abigail Ann Young's articles on the subject. [3] His discussion of bilingual minstrels (147, note 52) would also benefit from the inclusion of Constance Bullock-Davies seminal lecture "Professional Interpreters and the Matter of Britain," even though that deals primarily with French and Welsh texts rather than English. [4]
Phillipa Hardman makes an interesting but ultimately unconvincing case
for children as the target audience for many of the popular romances.
She is, of course, quite right that a "preponderance of narratives
[are] centred on children or family groups," but that is a big "or"
and it is very difficult to argue successfully (as Hardman attempts to
do) that some of the "family"-oriented romances like "Amis and
Amiloun" could have been "especially appropriate for parental guidance
of young readers." The earlier sections of the tale do, no doubt,
trace the "exemplary development" of the sworn brothers, but I do not
see the story of the murder of the children as leading very happily to
the appropriate upbringing of children (159). On the other hand, the
Finally, Cory James Rushton considers the modern and academic
reception of the popular romances, demonstrating the clear influence
of these stories on contemporary popular literature (Harry Potter,
Star Wars,
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Notes:
1. Aertsen, Henk and MacDonald, Alasdair A.
2. Krueger, Roberta L., ed.
3. Young, Abigail Ann. "Plays and Players: The Latin Terms for
Performance.""
4. Bullock-Davies, Constance.