Popular romances survive in a number of manuscripts, both medieval and post-medieval, though the variety of contexts that result from their varied transmission has affected their modern interpretation. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, for example, itself part of an often diffuse tradition, presents a basic identity which allows for interpretation of individual tales and the collection as a whole, and themes across common manuscript fragments. The individual romance, each a distinct tale which may share themes or even characters with other romances, can look very different in its manuscript context; scribes and collectors exerted a significant amount of power over how a text was presented to its initial audience, and therefore to posterity. This chapter will address some of the problems raised by the presence of popular romances in extant manuscripts, followed by an examination of the impact of one very influential post-medieval repository of romances, the Percy Folio manuscript.

Medieval manuscripts of popular romances

Maldwyn Mills

There are parallels between some of the romances discussed in this book and some of the MS collections in which they appear. Most particularly, perhaps, in the way in which the content of both will often seem more varied than unified. Individual romances may be written in more than one narrative mode, and about more than one kind of human experience: the two halves of Le Bone Florence of Rome are devoted in turn to large-scale fighting, and the sufferings of a pious heroine; those of The Awntyrs off Arthure to a stark warning against sin, and a combat between knights. This same variety is also to be found, not only in those manuscripts in which romances rub shoulders with works of other kinds, but in the (relatively rare) ones in which romances alone are to be found. London, British Library, MS Egerton 2862, the most substantial of these last, offers in sequence two stories of combative English heroes (Kyng Richard and Beuous of Hampton), one of love, chivalry, and the search for lost parents (Sir Degarre), another of mutual love, separa tion, and reunion (Fflorence and Blanchefloure), a chronicle of large-scale fighting (The Batell of Troye), a tale of male friendship and suffering (Amis and Amiloun), and a story telling of its hero's chivalry, its heroine's suffering, and their separation, reunion, and finding of a son lost (Sir Egleamoure). In this collection, as in some of the texts it contains, we can find both significant points of contact between the individual items, and a frequent diversity of content, and sometimes style.