‘Of his ffader spak he no thing’: Family Resemblance and Anxiety of Influence in Fifteenth-Century Prose Romance

Summary

In recent decades, the traditionally disparaged medieval popular romances have received increased attention. Studies of this previously marginalised genre have, however, tended to remain silent about texts at its own margins, such as the Middle English prose romances. The prose romances are even less frequently allowed into conversation with courtly romances, and if they figure anywhere, it is usually in discussions of Arthurian romance. Yet on the other hand, Malory's Arthuriad still tends to be considered as a genre unto itself, rather than as one among quite a few English prose romances written around the same time. According to Larry Benson, the other fifteenth-century English prose romances ‘hardly established a tradition of English secular prose on which Malory could draw for his style’, and if silence implies consent, more recent criticism has tended to agree. This essay aims to explore the extent to which the English prose romances can be read together, as a sub-genre, and as a response to more conventional romances, a response in which the shift in form or medium may be as telling as the shift in content.

One auspicious exception to the relative neglect of the prose romances is Helen Cooper's 1997 essay ‘Counter-Romance: Civil Strife and Father-Killing in the Prose Romances’, which adumbrates a way in which Malory's Morte Darthur can be understood as part of a larger insular genre. Cooper argues convincingly that these texts take a distinctly darker approach to individual success and chivalric cohesion than is found in earlier verse romances. Yet whereas Cooper focuses on the texts’ concerns about family members betraying each other, this essay considers a wider range of familial anxieties: a range that sometimes includes, but goes beyond, betrayal within the family unit or affinity group. For instance, in the late prose romance Huon of Burdeux (c.1515), when Earl Amaury, the ‘felon traytour’, is glossed as ‘son to on of the nevewse of the traytour Ganelon’, the reader is invited to infer that Amaury is predisposed to be a traitor by blood. The idea of genetic ‘treasonousness’ is a recurring axiom in Huon; here, this is not a fear that a family will become fractured, but rather a fear that a family will show too much unity, but of the wrong sort.