What's in a Name

To investigate the ways in which romances in England were read in the Middle Ages seems like a simple aim, though perhaps one destined to be stymied for lack of evidence. But the evidence is there if we look for it; the greater difficulty is justifying the logical connection between what we have looked at and the genre category of romance. If we are to try to find the horizon of expectations for a genre, it helps to be sure that the genre has, at least roughly, agreed boundaries. But what belongs to the category of romance for modern readers of Middle English literature, including me, is prejudged in a way that has proven hard to root out even though scholars are becoming increasingly aware of it: a text is a romance if it is recognized as one in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, Volume I. It is not a romance, even if it is called one by its author, if it does not have the recognition of John Edwin Wells and J. Burke Severs.