(there are more than 100 extant romances). The manu-
script evidence shows the social and geographical
diversity of the medieval audience of romance.
Romances written in the 13th century continued to be
copied into the 15th century, and the persistent
demand for more and more romance meant that new
texts were still being produced well into the early mod-
ern period. In the modern period, medieval romance
has been credited with having been the originator of
the novel and the ancestor of almost all contemporary
popular fi ction in print and on the screen.
Early criticism suggested that the readers of Middle
English romances were primarily lower-class or lower-
middle-class, an emergent bourgeoisie who wanted to
hear narratives that they thought were the same as those
that the aristocracy were enjoying in French, rendered
in English. By the end of the 14th century, this audi-
ence became more sophisticated, partly through read-
ing GEOFFREY CHAUCER’s subtle and subversive versions
of romances and lais (see LAY). Fifteenth-century
romance was directed at a more sophisticated bourgeois
audience that was conscious of social tone and criti-
cism, such as in Sir Thomas Malory’s prose work Morte
d’Arthur. More recent scholarship argues that the mean-
ing of the term popular, as attributed to Middle English
romance by early critics of the genre, is largely negative
in that it is used to denote a textual genre that was not
courtly or aristocratic. Some argued that the romances
read by the English aristocracy of the Middle Ages were
predominantly in French, so all Middle English
romances could be described as “popular.” However,
this raises the suspicion that “popular” and “courtly” are
disguised value judgments.
There has been a great deal of scholarly debate about
the kind of audience and the mode of composition and
reception of these romances. One view suggests that
romances in the Middle English period were the impro-
vised compositions of minstrels. According to this
argument, romances were recited orally at feasts and
festivals and were intended “for the people” (hence the
designation popular romances). The counterargument is
that so-called popular romances were composed and
copied for the amusement and edifi cation of the newly
literate classes. This does not mean the lower orders,
but rather the minor gentry and the prosperous middle
classes who formed the market for VERNACULAR books
in the later medieval period.
The question of gender has dominated recent schol-
arship in romances. It has increasingly been recog-
nized, for instance, that the courtly ideology voiced in
romance texts did women little service. One clear indi-
cation of this is the preponderance of male heroes in
Middle English romance, as the titles indicate: Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo, Sir Isumbras, Sir
Gowther, Amis and Amiloun, King Horn, Kyng Alisaunder,
Sir Tristrem, Sir Degaré, and so on. With very few
exceptions, Middle English romance is a genre that
deals almost exclusively with male concerns and puts
male experience at the center of its universe. Women
almost always play a secondary or supporting role:
They are mothers, mothers-in-law, lovers, wives, and
sisters. The genre itself, as indicated above, deals with
young men and their passage into maturity, their emer-
gence from a state of dependence on authoritative,
parental fi gures into autonomy and independence.
It is nevertheless generally believed that women
formed a large part of romance audiences at all levels
of medieval society, and it has recently been argued
that conventional interpretations of romance have been
partial and male-centered. Critics have begun to try to
reconstruct what may have been the experience of the
women in the audience, offering a new, female-cen-
tered “implied reader.” Such readings can, of course,
adduce little conclusive historical evidence in their
cause; even so, scholarship cannot dismiss audiences
we know existed simply because they have left few
traces and are therefore extremely diffi cult to access.
See also CHIVALRY, MIDDLE ENGLISH POETRY.
FURTHER READING
Brewer, Derek, ed. Studies in Medieval English Romances:
Some New Approaches. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1988.
Jewers, Caroline. Chivalric Fiction and the History of the
Novel. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.
McDonald, Nicola. Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays
in Popular Romance. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester Uni-
versity Press, 2004.
Putter, Ad, and Jane Gilbert, eds. The Spirit of Medieval Eng-
lish Popular Romance. Harlow, U.K.: Pearson Education,
2000.
Louise SylvesterROMANCE 347