Introduction

Summary

MEDIEVAL ROMANCE INCLUDES some of the most well-known medieval texts and authors within its ranks. From their stories of chivalric escapades written in the vernacular of Old French, referred to as romanz, medieval authors birthed the term “romance.” The popularity of medieval romance has scarcely waned since its first iterations in the twelfth century. Literary and film adaptations of medieval romance continue to enjoy immense popularity and directly or indirectly inspire new forms of romance in medieval or medievalesque settings. Ground-breaking scholarship on medieval romance has enthusiastically explored romance as performance or as a structured narrative, or pointed to its connections to misogyny.

Recent scholarly initiatives look beyond the traditional linguistic borders of Old French, English, and Italian to determine where, and how, romance travelled to other communities. Several publications strive to establish cross-disciplinary discussions by focusing on the general romance tradition or on specific narratives, reflecting the reality of medieval text production as an interconnected web of adaptations. At times, however, romance generates spontaneously, without a clear pathway of transmission from an earlier set of texts. While the inherent interconnectedness through myths, storytelling, and courtly culture underscores the relevance of romance as a transcultural and translingual phenomenon, specific temporal and regional ideations can look quite different and require analysis that looks at their own unique cultural milieu, their Sitz im Leben. Since romance emerges both genetically and generically, sometimes no clear path between cultural contributions to the genre exists, and individual texts can slip out of view.

One cultural setting that has remained largely exempt from the scholarly conversation about medieval romance is the Jewish community, whose own medieval romance texts are scarcely studied. Over the past few years, collections on medieval romance have started to include some Jewish texts, such as the Hebrew Arthurian romance Melekh Artus (1279). While this increased awareness of non-Christian literature is applaudable, Jewish lit-erary contribution has been unfairly limited to texts readily identifiable as romance, particularly Arthurian literature, or focused on the act of translation from a non-Jewish to a Jewish audience. Despite several recent articles and monographs that attest to various types of romances produced in Jewish languages in the medieval period, Jewish literature is not yet counted as part of the genre, and it lacks its own literary status.