The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

First published 1967 under the title "Die mittelenglischen Romanzen des 13. and 14. Jahrhunderts", 1967 Carl Winter, Universitätsverlag, Heidelberg. First English language edition published 1968 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. A book on Middle English Romances hardly needs an apology. Much valuable work has been done on individual poems in recent years, but the few general surveys of the romances do not, on the whole, seem to have taken much account of the genre as a whole, and it is generally agreed that a fresh look is needed. In this study I propose to consider the romances rather as a characteristically English type of narrative poem than as inferior copies of French models and I attempt a new classification. Though I have tried to make full use of all previous scholarly work in the field, I have not aimed at completeness and certainly not at superseding the indispensable manuals of Laura A. Hibbard and J. E. Wells (J. B. Severs). Without these, any study of the romances would be a much more difficult undertaking. I am aware that much of what I have said will not be new to specialists, but I hope that I have succeeded in placing some of it in a new context and in suggesting some fresh lines of approach. I have, therefore, dealt rather briefly with source-problems, but have tried to select a fair number of typical and particularly interesting romances and in each case endeavoured to discuss those elements that seem most relevant for a better understanding of the poem in question. Since one of the assumptions of this book is that the term romance, as applied to about a hundred Middle English narrative poems, does not really have any precise and useful meaning, I toyed with the idea of doing without it altogether; but scholars on the whole know what they mean when they talk about romances, and it seemed more sensible to keep the term as a rather loose, but practical label which has to be defined afresh for each work.