In this essay Corinne Saunders explores the secular genre most often associated with women, that of medieval romance, but also challenges the notion of romance as a womenߣs genre. While women were patrons, owners, readers, and even writers of courtly romances, the picture is complex: romances were often addressed to mixed audiences and read publicly rather than privately, and it is impossible to know for certain how women responded to the romance narratives that they encountered. Focusing on three central romance themes-- love and consent, virtuous suffering, and magic and enchantment ߝ this essay explores the imaginative spaces that female protagonists inhabit and the agency they demonstrate, and suggests how these might connect to ideals of Christian virtue, the constraints imposed on women by chivalry, and perhaps to the lived experiences of medieval women. Examples drawn from a range of Middle English romances, from Sir Orfeo, King Horn and Havelok the Dane to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Thomas Maloryߣs Morte Darthur at the very end of the period, show medieval romance as the locus of dialogue and debate about women and their place in medieval society and culture.

This essay focuses on the writer today known as ߢMarie de Franceߣ, who is among the earliest named women authors in French and England. Yet, we cannot be certain the same author composed all of the Anglo-Norman French works conventionally ascribed to her. Campbell asks what it might it mean to see ߢMarieߣ less as an exceptional female author and more as an example of a multilingual culture of womenߣs writing and translation. A critical focus on Marie as unique, Campbell argues, downplays the reliance of the works attributed to her on translation, and their connection to an Anglo-Norman literary culture in which women were active participants. The essay also explores the networks and translations depicted within Marieߣs works, and the ways in which these comment on the processes of composition and transmission to which translation is central. Characterised by collaboration, translation, intertextuality, and multilingualism, womenߣs literary culture is shown to challenge traditional notions of authorship.

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.

Violence emerges many times in medieval literature, either in the form of war or of personal violence. This paper examines a selection of narratives where various types of domestic violence and criminal activities leading to or based on violence are presented. Against the backdrop of an intensive theological and philosophical discourse on violence from St. Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, this chapter investigates violence in the private spheres of married couples (Marie de France), in the public sphere of the court to eliminate a threatening outsider (Nibelungenlied), within the family, pitting a mother-in-law against her daughter in law (Mai und Beaflor), which ultimately leads to matricide, then among friends and relatives (Boccaccio’s Decameron), and finally violence in the name of personal self-defence (Heinrich Kaufringer). As the analysis demonstrates, violence was ubiquitous in medieval society, but the poets always reflect also on legal conditions, the threat to society at large resulting from violence, and on the position of the individual when confronted with violence.