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1 - “For Love and For Lovers”

The Origins of Romance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2023

By
Laura Ashe
Edited by
Roberta L. Krueger
Roberta L. Krueger
Affiliation:
Hamilton College, New York
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Summary

Romance was created in twelfth-century England and France for aristocratic patrons and audiences whose courtly lifestyle it idealized and celebrated; as the earliest genre to celebrate love as life’s goal, it was revolutionary. Initially translating Latin sources, romance authors innovatively combined pre-existing genres: classical epic’s historical drive was disrupted by the lyric’s focus on individual emotional experience, creating a new kind of narrative fiction. Where earlier heroes had sacrificed their lives fighting for great causes, the romance hero suffers and fights to prove his worthiness to a beloved, and wins marriage, wealth, and reputation as confirmation of his value. Here the fictional genre betrays its real-world ideological role: to justify the patriarchal, misogynistic, exploitative and exclusionary structures of aristocratic chivalric society, representing – literally romanticizing – its values as morally admirable. Within decades the romance took multiple paths: in the creation of pseudohistorical heroes and legendary pasts; in the limitless proliferation of fictional quests from King Arthur’s court; and in parody and critique, such as Chrétien de Troyes’s helplessly subservient Lancelot, or Marie de France’s assertive female protagonists. Finally, Thomas of Britain’s Tristan transforms the romance into tragedy, another new development in this most capacious and influential genre, forerunner of the novel.

Keywords

Geoffrey of MonmouthWaceromance origins/ beginningsMarie de FranceEneasTristanlovetragedyChrétien de Troyes
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance , pp. 14 - 28
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Suggestions for Further Reading

Ashe, Laura. Early Fiction in England: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Chaucer. London: Penguin, 2015.Google Scholar
Ashe, Laura. Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Ashe, Laura. The Oxford English Literary History vol. 1: 1000–1350. Conquest and Transformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Bridges, Venetia. “The Romans Antiques Across Time and Space.” In Medieval Romances Across European Borders, ed. Edlich-Muth, Miriam. Turnhout: Brepols, 2018, pp. 107–32.Google Scholar
Cooper, Helen. The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Gaunt, Simon. Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, Dennis Howard. The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction, 1150–1220. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ingham, Patricia Clare. Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaeger, C. Stephen. Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patterson, Lee. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Rollo, David. Historical Fabrication, Ethnic Fable, and French Romance in Twelfth-Century England. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1998.Google Scholar
Weiss, Judith. “Insular Beginnings: Anglo-Norman Romance.” In A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary, ed. Saunders, Corinne J.. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, pp. 26–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whitman, Jon. “Thinking Backward and Forward: Narrative Order and the Beginnings of Romance,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 4.2 (2006), 131–50.Google Scholar

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