2 - The Gawain-poet and medieval romance

Summary

The romance genre

Romance, the most influential genre of imaginative writing in the Middle Ages, at once looks back to the tradition of epic poetry and forward to the genre of the novel. While prose romances developed in the thirteenth century, poetry was the traditional mode of romance, and there exists an immensely diverse collection of verse narratives. The earliest French romances retold classical epics while reflecting new cultural interest in chivalry, courtliness and the individual: thus the focus of the twelfth-century Roman d’Eneas was the love of Dido and Aeneas. Thebes, Troy and the exploits of Alexander offered popular story matter, and romance writers took up earlier twelfth-century chansons de geste to treat the heroes of French history. A more courtly type of romance also developed, which drew on the ‘matter of Britain’, Celtic folk material, and in particular, on legends of King Arthur and the Round Table. In the later twelfth century, the lais of Marie de France, written in sophisticated Anglo-Norman octosyllabic couplets for a highly refined audience and treating intense moments of rarefied emotion, were balanced by the extended and complex verse narratives of Chrétien de Troyes, which developed the pattern of quest and adventure in the context of the knight-hero’s journey to self-realisation. These and the many French romances of the thirteenth century, along with a sophisticated tradition of lyric poetry, provided the substance of courtly entertainment in England, and in the fourteenth century French poets such as Froissart, Machaut and Deschamps shaped an international court culture in which poetry played a prominent role.