Medieval romance frequently, and perhaps characteristically, capitalises on the dramatic and suggestive possibilities implicit in boundaries - not only the geographical, political and cultural frontiers that medieval romances imagine and imply, but also more metaphorical demarcations. It is these boundaries, as they appear in insular romances circulating in English and French, which the essays in this volume address. They include the boundary between reality and fictionality; boundaries between different literary traditions, modes and cultures; and boundaries between different kinds of experience or perception, especially the "altered states" associated with sickness, magic, the supernatural, or the divine.
Author(s): Neil Cartlidge (ed.)
Series: Studies in Medieval Romance, 6
Publisher: D. S. Brewer
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: X+198
City: Cambridge
Preface vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Abbreviations x
Introduction / Neil Cartlidge 1
When Romance Comes True / Helen Cooper 13
The Curious History of the Matter of England / Rosalind Field 29
How English are the English Charlemagne Romances? / Phillipa Hardman and Marianne Ailes 43
The "Sege of Melayne"; or, How the French Screwed Up and "Oure Brettons" Rescued Them / Elizabeth Berlings 57
Romance Society and its Discontents: Romance Motifs and Romance Consequence's in "The Song of Dermot and the Normans in Ireland" / Simon Meecham-Jones 71
England, Ireland and Iberia in "Olyuer of Castylle": The View from Burgundy / Elizabeth Williams 93
The Alliterative "Siege of Jerusalem": The Poetics of Destruction / Arlyn Diamond 103
The Peace of the Roads: Authority and "auctoritas" in Medieval Romance / Robert Rouse 115
The Hero and his Realm in Medieval English Romance / Laura Ashe 129
The Courteous Warrior: Epic, Romance and Comedy in "Boeve de Haumtone" / Judith Weiss 149
Rewriting Divine Favour / Ivana Djordjevic 161
Bodily Narratives: Illness, Medicine and Healing in Middle English Romance / Corinne Saunders 175
Index 191
