A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance (review)

Critical interest in Middle English popular romances was almost nonexistent until some three decades ago. Early English Text Society editions, many of them very old, emphasized their linguistic features—they were regularly noted as the subject of parody in Chaucer's Sir Thopas—but there was no sustained interest in them on their own terms. There were indeed major problems in the way of according them the kind of attention that the academic community was familiar with providing. They are almost all anonymous by definition: if a romance is by a named author, such as Chaucer or Malory (or even the Gawain poet, whose eponymous title gives the illusion of removing him from the "anonymous" category), it is taken to fall outside the "popular" classification. Where we do have an author's name, we know nothing about him: "Thomas Chestre" might possibly be the man of that name who was taken prisoner in the Hundred Years' War at the same time as Chaucer, but given how common both names were, it is not very likely. As Rosalind Field notes in her chapter on "The material and the problems," we may feel comfortable with the "Death of the Author," but we still need our dead author to be identifiable. Historical and historicist approaches are customarily thwarted since we have very little idea when most of the romances were written, their longevity assuring that most surviving manuscripts are copies made long after they were composed. For the same reasons, there are only a handful that can be firmly assigned to any particular region. Even the fact that they were written in English tells us very little, since, as a number of them pointed out, everyone in England understood English. Anglo-Norman and French romances, from which a good number of them are derived, had a more limited circulation among those who spoke French, though they were not necessarily as restricted as the "courtly" epithet for them might suggest: the royal court did indeed remain predominantly French-speaking for longer than most of the country, but high baronial courts, a number of gentry households, international merchants, and the big abbeys and monasteries and cathedrals contained potential audiences for romances in both French and English. That a romance is in English does not therefore inevitably mark it as aimed at a middle-class or less sophisticated audience, especially in the later fourteenth century when Chaucer opted for English for a readership that included the royal court.

It is notoriously difficult to define romance, and adding "popular" to it doubles the problem. Almost every contributor to this new Companion spends some time on it, and the definitions vary widely. "Popular" has often been used as a synonym for mediocre or unsophisticated, but the extensive recent work on individual texts has made many such judgements seem ignorant or careless. The editors' introduction proposes a judicious rebalancing of unsophistication into "those texts in Middle English . . . which show a predominant concern with narrative at the expense of symbolic meaning" (p. 7), though that still might be taken either to rule out certain critical approaches or to eliminate any thoughtfully read text that proves to have hidden depths. Some contributors emphasize their interest in monsters and battles, others their concern with ordinary life and the domestic. Their generic affiliations, going backward, link them with folktales and legends; going forward, with fantasy and science fiction. A recent essay collection devoted to them was entitled Pulp Fictions, and by the sixteenth century, when large numbers were printed in cheap formats, they have some claim to being the first genre that deserves the term; but manuscript culture was always an elite process. Prose romances are normally excluded, often tacitly (though they too were regarded as pulp fiction by the Elizabethans), or because they fall outside the category of minstrel performance that the metrical texts seem to invite, however little we know about what that might mean. Alliterative romances also figure rather rarely: Sir Gawain and...