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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2020
The Origins of a Medieval Genre
The generic term ‘romance’, used to designate a specific group of medieval narratives, goes back to the Old French expression mettre en romanz ‘to translate into the vernacular French’, lit. ‘to put into Romance language’. The first French romances from the middle of the twelfth century were actually the result of translations of Latin chronicles and epics. It is worth noting that at the very origin of the French romans as a literary category, the activity of translating a narrative from one language (Latin) to another (French) was highlighted to such a degree that it gives the new genre its name. The importance of the process of interlinguistic translation (and by extension transformation, adaptation, rewriting) which from the beginning was an integral part of the genre was underscored in countless romances in many different languages by comments which contribute to the innovative awareness that narratives written in the vernacular could and did exist in more than one language, change their forms and styles, adapt accordingly different meanings and functions, and were narrated by the self-conscious figure of a narrator.
Such meta-fictional features became generically constitutive and are found throughout the corpus. They were part of romance's specific narrative mode which is characterised by a great degree of explicit (meta-) fictionality; this was introduced and further developed by such writers as Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, or Wolfram von Eschenbach. Hence, medieval romance is often considered to be one of the prerequisites for the emergence and evolution of the genre of the modern novel.
Other essential criteria that are applied to define the corpus of romance on the thematic level are a set of common themes and contents such as: the focus on a royal universe, in which chivalric behaviour by individual knights is staged; the importance of adventures and physical fights which the knight has to endure; the love between the knight and a lady; and, more generally, the essential role of gender issues, emotions, and imaginations. On the formal level, the early European romances were written in verse, while prose romances are usually a later phenomenon.
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