Reception of a Genre

This book grows out of a simple question: “What did medieval readers think of romances?” That simple question is immediately bedevilled by another – “what did medieval readers think were romances?” – for as scholars in the field well know, medieval writers did not use labels for different genres the way that modern critics do. The simplicity of the question also calls for some amplification. “Readers” will have to be short-hand for “readers and hearers” since there is no way to determine whether some of the allusions, uses, and interpretations discussed in this book come from the minds of those who read or who heard the romances in question. The readers who concern me are from England, and the romances they read there are in verse and prose, in French and English, although it is often hard to tell in which of these languages readers have met the romances they name. The “when” of these medieval readers is from the eleventh-century emergence of the genre with the Chanson de Roland to roughly the end of the fifteenth century, though a twelfth-century reader and a fifteenth-century one will have experienced the genre very differently. The answer to my simple question turns out to be complex: there is a rich variety of responses to romances that their medieval readers have left us.