-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...