Guy of Warwick is England's other Arthur. Elevated to the status of national hero, his legend occupied a central place in the nation's cultural heritage from the Middle Ages to the modern period. Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor spans the Guy tradition from its beginnings in Anglo-Norman and Middle English romance right through to the plays and prints of the early modern period and Spenser's Faerie Queene, including the visual tradition in manuscript illustration and material culture as well as the intersection of the legend with local and national history. This volume addresses important...

As the first cultural history of the sea in medieval English literature, this book traces premodern myths of insularity from their Old English beginnings to Shakespeare's Tempest. Beginning with a discussion of biblical, classical and pre-Conquest treatments of the sea, it investigates how such works as the Anglo-Norman Voyage of St Brendan, the Tristan romances, the chronicles of Matthew Paris, King Horn, Patience, The Book of Margery Kempe and The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye shape insular ideologies of Englishness. Whether it is Britain's privileged place in the geography of salvation or...

Medieval romance frequently, and perhaps characteristically, capitalises on the dramatic and suggestive possibilities implicit in boundaries - not only the geographical, political and cultural frontiers that medieval romances imagine and imply, but also more metaphorical demarcations. It is these boundaries, as they appear in insular romances circulating in English and French, which the essays in this volume address. They include the boundary between reality and fictionality; boundaries between different literary traditions, modes and cultures; and boundaries between different kinds of...

Naming and namelessness are among the major themes of medieval romance. Because the genre is so difficult to define, scholars have viewed romance as containing a critical number of themes; this book treats naming as a major theme of romance, and furthermore examines romance's relationship with contemporary naming-theory. A new genre, it is able to play with naming in a way that previously established genres are not. The book begins with a discussion of the medieval background to romance, and explores a series of naming-patterns found across a broad range of texts. It continues with detailed...

A comprehensive guide to the medieval popular romance, one of the age's most important literary forms.

-An important and powerful meditation on romance genre, reception and ethical/moral purpose -- amongst many other aspects of romance.- Professor ROBERT ROUSE, University of British Columbia. Medieval readers, like modern ones, differed in whether they saw -noble storie, and worthie for to drawen to memorie- in romance, or -drasty rymyng, nat worth a toord-. This book tackles the task of discerning what were the medieval expectations of the genre in England: the evidence, and the implications. Safe for monastic, trained readers, romances provided moral examples. But not all readers saw that...

The world of medieval romance is one in which magic and the supernatural are constantly present: in otherwordly encounters, in the strange adventures experienced by questing knights, in the experience of the uncanny, and in marvellous objects - rings, potions, amulets, and the celebrated green girdle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This study looks at a wide range of medieval English romance texts, including the works of Chaucer and Malory, from a broad cultural perspective, to show that while they employ magic in order to create exotic, escapist worlds, they are also grounded in a sense...

The popular genre of medieval romance explored in its physical, geographical, and literary contexts.

An examination of if and how medieval romance was performed, uniquely uniting the perspective of a scholar and practitioner.

Medieval romance narratives glitter with the material objects that were valued and exchanged in late-medieval society: lovers' rings and warriors' swords, holy relics and desirable or corrupted bodies. Romance, however, is also a genre in which such objects make meaning on numerous levels, and not always in predictable ways. These new essays examine from diverse perspectives how romances respond to material culture, but also show how romance as a genre helps to constitute and transmit that culture. Focusing on romances circulating in Britain and Ireland between the twelfth and sixteenth...