One of the most important developments in the continuing rehabilitation of the often neglected and critically derided genre of romance over the past twenty years is the increasing acceptance of romance not as a literary ‘walled garden’, divorced from the expression of political struggles of medieval Europe, but as a witness for the cultural preoccupations and psychological tensions of their time of production. Indeed, the extensive production and wide circulation of romance in medieval Europe might encourage expectations that the romance form – reckoned by Pearsall to be ‘the principal secular literature of entertainment of the Middle Ages’ – should offer a valuable source for the understanding of at least some elements of the psychology and ethical dilemmas of those generations which were rich in romance production.

But any analysis of the relationship of the conventions of romance genre with the exercise of political action in medieval society has proved complex and elusive. Though romance traditions clearly possess, in Crane's words, the potential to ‘respond forcefully to issues of their time and place’, they do so in a manner that is characteristically oblique in its formulation, maintaining a distance from engagement in real events. It is possible, if not inevitable, to read the insular romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as covert expressions of the cultural struggles produced by the overturning of political structures after the Norman Conquest, and the beginning of the Plantagenet monarchy's colonial project, but the influence of such concerns is articulated indirectly through the choice of story or the patterning of narrative development.3 Romances of Charlemagne or of a remote Arthurian Britain serve as the sites within which Angevin society exercised or exorcised its ambitions and fears. Romances may embody anxieties about displacement and the precariousness of political control in romance patterns of usurpation, narratives of lost sons whose lords are finally restored, and the return from exile of the true heir,4 but the relationship of these motifs to the real political turmoils of the day or to its psychological harvest is distant and tangential in its formulation.

Much of the research on the political implications of romance texts where the author's name is known have focused on issues of patronage and provenance that might shed light on the particular ideological demands the text was designed to promote.