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Hungary and Hungarian Knights, in Middle English Literature* One of the commonplaces of those few scholars who have dealt with the question of why in the late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Middle EngUsh romances which generally in their sources deal with either unspecified settings or with generalized characters the name Hungary or Hungarian should suddenly start to appear, is that Hungary was a distant and exotic place appropriate to romances. Even a relatively cursory glance at the history of the period would show, however, that Hungary and Hungarians played an increasingly significant role in the affairs of late medieval Europe, and that particular traits in the country's history and personality of its rulers make the designation Hungarian quite appropriate to the literature in question, not in a general romantic sense, but in a more definite number of ways. It wUl be necessary to make a certain position clear even before w e begin, however. In approaching the study of the romances a number of theoretical assumptions are ordinarily made, either that literature breeds literature, that individual genius creates literature ex nihilo, or that literature is created in a matrix of historical events and personalities. The first view seems to obtain most amongst medievalists in that the absence of named authors has led scholars into the search for original sources for the manuscripts they deal with, a search which, given the paucity of information available of the kind normally central to modern literary study - such as an authorial personality, a canon of themes and images, or a body of contemporary opinion - leads to a game of postulating non-existent lost sources. At best, such a view yields a general picture of character-types and situations criss-crossing chronological and geographical boundaries of medieval Europe; at worst, it offers nothing but speculation upon speculation on some system of Platonic forms self-generating themselves in a historical vacuum. The second view, that individuals of genius create Uterature, runs either towards a romantic notion of a national spirit moulding particular romances out of some central store of general European themes and images, or towards a more or less folkloric view of dynamic creation along the lines of modern oral poets in parts of Yugoslavia or northern Greece. Insofar as such a view at least credits human personality to lie behind a particular version of a romance, the view offers some insight into the probable means of creation and hints at significance; but it veers again into a timeless realm of mechanical or *I must here thank two members of the Hungarian Institute of Historical Studies who have been extremely kind and patient in helping m e put together this essay, Professor Emil Niederhauser and Professor Lazlo Makkai. In advance, I apologize to them especially for any errors appearing in this study. 58 N. Simms mystical schemes of growth and development in lieu of any real notion of why and how a particular work came into being. The last view, which I think is properly designated History of Mentalities, not only incorporates the two first views but develops a larger dimension of trying to see literature as verbalized articulation in historical situations, mediating between the traditional themes and images plus traditional modes and methods of composition and the particular events and characters of a human situation with all the official and private needs of patrons, craftsmen, and audiences. One more introductory set of remarks before I go into the description of the Middle English romances with Hungarian settings or Hungarian knights, and that is a brief overview of Hungarian history and the types of influence that country had on western Europe. The first period covers the time of Magyar conquest of the Pannonian plain and Danube basin in central Europe, the century of nomadic raids north and south by Magyar warriors, and the establishment of the Arpad dynasty and the Christianization and Europeanization of the Hungarian kingdom; this period covers the ninth to thirteenth centuries. In this period the Magyars move from being a wild pagan terror in French chansons de geste to being, in popular imagination, a saintly and moral European people. The central period for our interests covers the Anjou dynasty...

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