Table Of ContentTHE SPIRIT OF
MEDIEVAL ENGLISH
POPULAR ROMANCE
EDITED BY
AD PUTTER AND JANE GILBERT
I~ ~?io~;!;~~:up
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2000 by Pearson Education Limited
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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-29888-0 (pbk)
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The spirit of medieval English popular romance I edited by Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert.
p. cm. -- (Longman medieval and Renaissance library)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-582-29880-6 (alk. paper) - ISBN 0-582 29888-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. English literature-Middle English, 1100-1500-History and criticism.
2. Romances, English-History and criticism. 3. Popular literaturc--English-·
History and criticism. 4. Popular culturc---England-History-To 1500. 5. Tales,
Medieval-History and criticism. I. Putter, Ad. II. Gilbert, Jane. III. Series.
00-020189
Typeset by 35 in 11/ 13 pt Baskerville MT
CONTENTS
Preface ............................................................................................................... vii
Notes on references and abbreviations ................................................................... viii
Introduction
Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert ......................................................................... 1
Chapter 1 Lai le Freine: The Female Foundling and the
Problem of Romance Genre
Elizabeth Archibald .................................................................................... 39
Chapter 2 Lanval to Sir Laurifal: A Story Becomes Popular
iviyra Stokes ................................................................................................ 56
Chapter 3 The Tale ef Gamelyn: Class Warfare and the
Embarrassments of Genre
T. A. Shippey ............................................................................................. 78
Chapter 4 The Romance Hypothetical: Lordship and the
Saracens in Sir Isumbras
Elizabeth Fowler ......................................................................................... 97
Chapter 5 Violence, Narrative and Proper Name:
Sir Degare, 'The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney',
and the Folie Tristan d'O:efOrd
James Simpson ......................................................................................... 122
Chapter 6 Loving Beasts: The Romance of William
ef Paleme
Arlyn Diamond ........................................................................................ 142
THE SPIRIT OF MEDIEVAL ENGLISH POPULAR ROMANCE
Chapter 7 The Narrative Logic of Emare
Ad Putter .................................................................................................. 157
Chapter 8 Tiie Seege ef Troye: 'ffo r wham was wakened
al this wo'?
Nicola F. McDonald ................................................................................ 181
Chapter 9 Romance and Its Discontents in Eger and Grime
Antony J. Hasler ....................................................................................... 200
Chapter 10 From Beyond the Grave: Darkness at Noon in
Tiie Awnfyrs qff Arthure
Margaret Robson ..................................................................................... 219
Chapter 11 Gender, Oaths and Ambiguity in Sir Tristrem
and Beroul's Roman de Tristan
Jane Gilbert .............................................................................................. 237
Chapter 12 Sir Difeo: Madness and Gender
A. C. Spearing .......................................................................................... 258
Bibliography .................................................................................................... 273
Notes on contributors ........................................................................................ 297
Index ............................................................................................................... 299
Vl
PREFACE
The Middle English popular romances are today accessible to readers in
numerous editions and anthologies. The number of recent student editions
of popular romances is particularly gratifying, even as it shows up how little
literary critics have managed to say about them. Why, readers might want
to know, should we bother at all with popular romances? The embarrassment
surrounding that question perhaps explains the predominance in romance
studies of scholarship on manuscripts, editorial problems, and textual history
- scholarship which can proceed very well without requiring from its prac-
titioners any belief in the aesthetic value of popular romances, and which
has accordingly done little to alter their reputation as poetic disasters.
The aim of this collection is to help bring these romances back into the
arena of critical discussion. Each contributor has been asked to develop
an interpretation of one particular Middle English romance to reveal the
interests it holds for modern literary criticism. No restrictions have been
imposed on methodology or on the traffic of ideas between disciplines. The
result is a volume with a wide spectrum of approaches: historicist, nar-
ratological, psychoanalytical, and others. That, we think, is how it should
be. For if popular romance is ever to regain some of the vitality it possessed
in medieval times, it will need to be read with all the resourcefulness and
theoretical awareness that characterizes literary criticism today.
For the benefit of non-specialists the contributors have also been asked to
introduce the romance of their choice by briefly setting out the relevant infor-
mation concerning dates of composition, audience, manuscripts, sources, and
relevant secondary criticism. The general introduction does the same for the
genre of popular romance as a whole. The first part, 'A Historical Introduction',
discusses the medieval context of popular romances; the second, 'A Theo-
retical Introduction', explores the modern reception of popular romances and
the interpretive possibilities opened up by developments in literary theory.
It is to be hoped that, by offering readings of as well as introductions to
popular romances, this book may both suggest appropriate strategies of
interpretation and serve as a starting point for further analytical approaches.
We should like to thank Elizabeth Archibald, Charlotte Brewer, John
Burrow, Tony Edwards, Jill Mann, Maldwyn Mills, Rhiannon Purdie and
James Simpson for their comments on sections of this book. The index was
compiled by Demelza Curnow, and financed by a grant from the Arts
Faculty Research Fund of the University of Bristol. We thank them and the
staff at Pearson Education. A.P.
J.C.
Vll
NOTE ON REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS
The reference system adopted for secondary sources is the author-year system.
When more than one work by the same author appeared in the same year,
the year of publication is followed by a, b, c, etc. In the case of authors with
the same surname, we also give the initial. Full bibliographical details for the
author-year references can be found by checking the integrated bibliography
at the end of this book. In the case ofp rimary sources, full bibliographical details
appear in notes at the end of each chapter as well as in the bibliography.
References to Chaucer, Langland, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Malory
are to the standard editions as listed in the bibliography of primary sources.
We have modernized the orthography of thorns and yoghs in all Middle
English citations. References to Sigmund Freud are to The Standard Edition ef
the Complete Psychologi,cal Works ef Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols
(London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), abbreviated as SE.
The following abbreviations are also used:
CCM Cahiers de civilisation midievale
CFMA Classiques frarn;ais du Mayen Age
ChR Chaucer Review
EETS o.s. Early English Text Society, original series
EETS e.s. Early English Text Society, extra series
MAE Medium Aevum
MED Middle English Dictionary
MI.R. Modem Lrmguage Review
MS Mediaeval Studies
NM Neuphilologi,sche Mitteilungen
N&Q_ Notes and Qjteries
OED O:eford English Dictionary
PMLA Publications ef the Modem Language Association ef America
RMS Reading Medieval Studies
SATF Societe des anciens textes frarn;ais
SP Studies in Philology
STS Scottish Text Society
TLF Textes litteraires frarn;:ais
YES Yearbook ef English Studies
Vlll
INTRODUCTION
A Historical Introduction
AD PUTTER
The difficulty of being precise about the authorship and audience of the
Middle English popular romances is largely due to the fact that the narratives
that are conventionally brought together under this term are an extremely
varied group. The first volume of the Manual ef the Writings in Middle English,
devoted to 'The Romances' (Severs 1967), lists over a hundred medieval
narratives, from King Horn (1225) to Lord Berners' Arthur ef Little Britain
(before 1533), and a cursory glance at this list should suffice to persuade
anyone that the category of 'romance' is loose and fuzzy at the edges.
The resemblances shared by the overwhelming majority of romances are
very broad: romances usually end happily with the restoration of an order
that was disrupted at the beginning of the story; the cast is aristocratic,
consisting of knights and kings, queens and ladies; the setting is idealized,
often supernatural. 1 Such general resemblances of course hardly demarcate
the genre, and they pale into insignificance when compared with the strik-
ing resemblances shown by members of various branches within the
romance family. Thus some romances tell of the self-fulfilment of a knight
in adventures of love and chivalry (e.g. Sir Laurifal, Sir Degare, Sir Perceval ef
Galles); some trace the fortuitous wanderings of calumniated, exiled or
abandoned ladies (Emare, Lay le Freine, Le Bone Florence); others deal with
outlaw heroes (Gamef:yn, The Gest ef Robyn Hode), or with classical legends (The
Seege ef Troy, King Alisaunder); some are based on, or call themselves, 'Breton
lays' (Sir Oifeo, Lai le Freine, Sir Degare); while still other romances contain a
strong didactic or penitential impulse (Sir Isumbras, Robert ef Sicif:y, and the
first fragment of the Awnryrs eff Arthure). Subdivisions could easily be multi-
plied. Arthurian romances, homiletic romances, society romances, crusad-
ing romances, family romances, penitential romances, exemplary romances,
Charlemagne romances: these are some examples of subgenres that critics
1
THE SPIRIT OF MEDIEVAL ENGLISH POPULAR ROMANCE
have at one time or another found useful. However, it should be noted that
in the indeterminate field of romance the areas occupied by these subgenres
are likewise unbounded and overlapping: Sir Laurifal is at the same time a
'Breton lay', a 'chivalric romance', and an 'Arthurian romance'; Sir Isumbras
is a 'penitential romance', but also a 'family romance', with plenty of crusad-
ing to boot. For the sake of convenience, strict definitions and demarcations
of 'romance' and its family branches can be proposed, but such conceptual
borders are, and always have been, blurred: sharp dividing lines can be
imposed but they cannot convincingly be demonstrated. In Wittgenstein's
terminology, romance is a 'family-resemblance' category: we should think
of them as forming a complex network of relationships and similarities, not
as a set that can be defined on the basis of specific properties common to
each of its members (Wittgenstein 1953, 31-2).
We can spare ourselves the trouble of agonizing needlessly about prob-
lems of definition if we accept that we have inherited the word 'romance',
with all its vagueness, from those who talked before us. Indeed, the use of
'romance' as a generic label goes back to the medieval period. In Middle
English 'romance' originally designated 'romance languages' (especially
French), but English writers of the fourteenth century first began to use it to
single out narratives containing fanciful, miraculous, amorous or chivalrous
matter (Strohm 1977). But 'romaunce' never was a precise generic marker.
Thus the fourteenth-century poet of a Life ef St Gregory, who announced to
his listeners that he would 'ariht biginne romauncen of this ilke song',
evidently thought of this saint's life as a kind of'romance' (Hoops 1929, 35).
The term was also extended to works which literary historians today might
prefer to call chronicles or epics. Geoffrey Chaucer uses it, for example, of
a history of Thebes (Troilus and Crisryde, II, 100). The categorical inexactness
of 'romance' is further reflected in manuscript compilations, in which a
saint's life is sometimes found in the middle of a sequence of romances
(Thompson 1983, 118), and in which romances are sometimes found in the
middle of chronicles or religious material (Guddat-Figge 1976, 39-40). The
vexed questions that exercise critics today - how to separate romance from
chronicles and saints' lives - are thus bound up with the earliest usages of
the word; in an important sense, they are not 'our' problem.
We shall say more about the implications of the adjective 'popular' that
often qualifies the romances to which this book is devoted, but for the
moment let us simply note that 'popular' is not a magic word that suddenly
imposes uniformity on the romances it specifies. The meaning of 'popular'
is largely negative (not courtly, not aristocratic), and since the romances read
by the English aristocracy of the Middle Ages were predominantly in French,
all Middle English romances could be called 'popular'. Alliterative romances
(particularly Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), Chaucer's 'romances', Gower's
2
INTRODUCTION
tales and the prose romances of the fifteenth century, including Malory's
Marte D'Arthur, are sometimes cited as exceptions to the rule that Middle
English romances are 'popular' as a matter of course, but the coincidence
that the exceptions are all greatly admired raises the suspicion that 'popu-
lar' and 'courtly' are disguised value judgements, masquerading as objective
statements about audience or 'tone'.
Even if we can legitimately isolate the romances of Chaucer, Gower,
Malory, Sir Gawain and the fifteenth-century prose romances, the 'popular
romances' remain a heterogeneous group, and it is no surprise that there
has been much debate about the kind of audience and the mode of com-
position and reception that we should envisage for them. For newcomers to
this debate, the opposing views could be described as follows:
1. Popular romances are the improvised compositions of minstrels. They
were recited orally at feasts and festivals, intended for the ears of ordin-
ary folk, for the 'people' (whence the designation 'popular' romances).
2. So-called popular romances were composed and copied for the amuse-
ment and edification of the newly literate classes - not the lower orders,
but the gentry and the prosperous middle classes who formed the mar-
ket for the trade in vernacular books in the later medieval period.
These two positions - let us call them the 'romantic' and the 'revisionist'
positions - really only mark out the extreme poles of the debate. In practice
critics situate themselves somewhere in between these two poles, though
they usually betray marked inclinations towards one or the other.
The view one takes of the qualities of popular romance, such as its
formulaic style, depends a great deal on these inclinations. Critics have long
noted the profusion of stock phrases and tags, which are usually found in
popular romances as solutions to specific metrical challenges (Baugh 1959;
Wittig 1978). For example, the word 'knyght' repeatedly calls forth the
rhyming phrase 'strong in fyght'; knights and ladies are not simply 'glad'
but 'glad and blythe', and consequently thank God 'many a sythe'. The
'romantic' treats these tags and formulas as evidence of minstrel improvisa-
tion, as the instinctive resource of a performer who must keep the story
going without the aid of a written text. For the 'revisionist', however, they
betray the hand of the hack professional who draws liberally from the stock
of conventional lines and phrases to ease the work of written composition or
translation.
So which of these two positions is more persuasive, the 'romantic' or the
'revisionist'? The next section looks at the various kinds of evidence that
have been brought to bear on this question, first of all the evidence of
surviving romance manuscripts.
3
