This study has asserted that memory (and its associated cognitive and interpretative processes) is essential to a romance's success as morally satisfying, entertaining, and challenging literature. Moreover, the role of memory can change according to the aesthetics and aims of a particular tale. Consequently, the faculty occupies a prominent role across the romance genre in narratives that are, variously, courtly and complex, metrical and local, or Arthurian and legendary. Memory, as had become abundantly clear, serves an essential, practical function in episodic narratives: the faculty allows a character to reaffirm and develop their identity whilst simultaneously maintaining the unity of a particular tale as episodes are encountered, stored, and remembered. However, it has also been asserted that romances reveal much about the processes, mechanisms, and abilities of memory itself. We might even go so far as to suggest that the prominence of memory, and its usefulness in a romance, might offer a new way in which to unite this disparate and often disputed genre. Jeffrey Prager observes that although “[r]emembering the past is now widely understood as a valuable activity in and of itself … how and why we remember in the present is a topic of relatively little popular interest.” In romances how we remember is embedded in that particular tale's exploration of a given theme or moral which are, of course, the individual memories themselves. Without memory or memories, it could be argued, the tales simply don't work.

Romances are tales set in the past which have been designed to be read, understood, and even re-imagined in the present. The past is of great value in a romance and without it the genre could not exist at all. To reach that past, however, must involve the memorial faculty, as Bertrand Russell has explained: “immediate knowledge by memory is the source of all our knowledge concerning the past: without it, there could be no knowledge of the past by inference, since we should never know that there was anything past to be inferred.” In such a historically-conscious genre as romance, this assertion acquires additional force, uniting past and present through the social and cultural Wir-Gefühl which was so desirable throughout the Middle Ages.