6 - The Matter of Chaucer: Chaucer and the Boundaries of Romance

Summary

Jean Bodel in the late twelfth century divided romances into three groups, reflecting their subject matters: the matter of France (concerned with Charlemagne and other French Christian leaders fighting Islam), the matter of Rome (classical subjects), and the matter of Britain (subjects related to the world of Arthur). But romance is a varied genre and other discernable types include romances that celebrate particular dynasties, like Guy of Warwick; romances with oriental settings; and romances centred on conflicting love and loyalty, like the Lancelot or Tristan stories. Recurrent plot patterns include calumniated wives, abandoned noble babies, dispossessed heirs, Muslim maidens who convert and marry Christian heroes, and family romances in which relations, initially separated, are finally reunited.

Roger Ascham famously condemned romance as ‘open manslaughter and bold bawdrye’, and romance typically deals with secular subjects at odds with the highest Christian ideals: glorification of warfare, revenge, extra-marital passion, worldly glory, luxury and magic or, in romances with classical sources, pagan gods. Yet many romances include Christian history, like crusades or wars against the pagan Anglo-Saxons, or motifs related to Christian spirituality, like the wise hermit or the grail, which from around 1200 is identified as the cup of the Last Supper, symbolizing a spiritual perfection taking knights beyond the Round Table's earthly chivalry. Some romances, including Sir Gowther and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, centre on the Christian pattern of penitence, where a hero's success lies less in chivalric triumphs than contrition, confession and subsequent reconciliation with divine and human order. The genres of romance and saint's life can be similar, as Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale illustrates. Nevertheless, Georges Duby argued, romance's most characteristic plot is the lone quest of a nobly born youth, leading, after adventures demonstrating his prowess, to an advantageous marriage and the acquisition of land.

Chaucer's romances form a distinctive group, both like and unlike other medieval romances: the matter of Chaucer, we might say. Exemplifying a range of romance types, they treat romance self-consciously and raise questions about the cultural myths of aristocratic chivalry it celebrates. Little concerned with the classic plot of the noble hero's quest for land and bride, except in the absurd Sir Thopas, Chaucer's romances show recurrent interest in a group of essentially philosophical problems: free will and determinism; the moral status of sexual desire; and how adversity fits into a cosmic and human order created by a benevolent divinity.