‘Of Aunters They Began to Tell’: Informal Story in Medieval England and Modern America

Summary

Evelyn Birge Vitz has suggested that ‘if we can see and hear the medieval romances performed, we will understand many new things about their dramatic and interactive capacities: their performance quality’. As one of the performers she has inspired and encouraged, I have performed medieval English and French romances in many ways, with and without music, on a quest to understand how they might have been embodied by minstrels. I would like to extend her injunction in a new direction, turning to informal contexts, and considering a mode of storytelling that moves beyond the gestour in the feast hall and into impromptu and intimate storytelling. The fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English romances contain hints of amateur narrative entertainments that mimic what minstrel performance may have been. These scenes, in which characters informally entertain each other in the modes employed by minstrels, are intimately bound up with the genre of romance.

My own experience with storytelling bears some striking parallels with this evidence from medieval England. Just as modern performance can illuminate medieval conceptions of romance, so modern informal storytelling may provide access to a broader world of medieval narrative entertainment, characterizing it in terms of overlapping continuums (such as public–intimate, professional–amateur, competitive–genial, feasting–working, etc.), and demonstrating how story may be intimately engaged with music, and how impromptu elements may be introduced at any level of formality. In this study, I will follow a methodology similar to Randall Rosenfeld's application of experimental archaeology to medieval music improvisation, exploring ‘the range of supportable interpretations through performing them’.

Only recently have the performance dimensions of the Middle English romance genre been acknowledged by scholars such as Ad Putter:

Throughout the medieval and early modern period, romances were transmitted orally and indeed musically. Although we encounter them today frozen in writing, many of them […] would not have made it into written form if they had not previously been carried in the living memories of storytellers.

Until now, scholars who considered performance have focused on the evidence – largely accounting documents and textual evidence from romances – for formal minstrel performance of this genre. They prepared the ground for looking at storytelling in medieval England in a broader context. A similar process has already occurred in the field of musicology.