Books in the Studies in Medieval Romance series

A fresh and invigorating survey of the sea as it appears in medieval English literature, from romance to chronicle, hagiography to autobiography.

New approaches to the everlasting malleability and transformation of medieval romance.The essays here reconsider the protean nature of Middle English romance. The contributors examine both the cultural unity of romance and its many variations, reiterations and reimaginings, including its contexts and engagements with other discourses and forms, as they were "e;rewritten"e; during the Middle Ages and beyond. Ranging across popular, anonymous English and courtly romances, and taking in the works of Chaucer and Arthurian romance (rarely treated together), in connection with continental sources and analogues, the chapters probe this fluid and creative genre to ask just how comfortable, and how flexible, are its nature and aims? How were Middle English romances rewritten toaccommodate contemporary concerns and generic expectations? What can attention to narrative techniques and conventional gestures reveal about the reassurances romances offer, or the questions they ask? How do romances' central concerns with secular ideals and conduct intersect with spiritual priorities? And how are romances transformed or received in later periods? The volume is also a tribute to the significance and influence of the work of Professor Helen Cooper on romance. Elizabeth Archibald is Professor of English Studies at Durham University; Megan G. Leitch is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University; Corinne Saunders is Professor of English andCo-Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham University. Contributors: Elizabeth Archibald, Julia Boffey, Christopher Cannon, Neil Cartlidge, Miriam Edlich-Muth, A.S.G. Edwards, Marcel Elias, Megan Leitch, Andrew Lynch, Jill Mann, Marco Nievergelt, Ad Putter, Corinne Saunders, Barry Windeatt, R.F. Yeager

New approaches to this most fluid of medieval genres, considering in particular its reception and transmission.Romance was the most popular secular literature of the Middle Ages, and has been understood most productively as a genre that continually refashioned itself. The essays collected in this volume explore the subject of translation, both linguistic and cultural, in relation to the composition, reception, and dissemination of romance across the languages of late medieval Britain, Ireland, and Iceland. In taking this multilingual approach, this volume proposes a re-centring, and extension, of our understanding of the corpus of medieval Insular romance, which although long considered extra-canonical, has over the previous decades acquired something approaching its own canon - a canon which we might now begin to unsettle, and of which we might ask new questions.The topics of the essays gathered here range from Dafydd ap Gwilym and Walter Map to Melusine and English Trojan narratives, and address topics from women and merchants to werewolves and marvels. Together, they position the study of romance in translation in relation to cross-border and cross-linguistic transmission and reception; and alongside the generic re-imaginings of romance, both early and late, that implicate romance in new linguistic, cultural, and social networks. The volume also shows how, even where linguistic translation is not involved, we can understand the ways in which romance moved across cultural and social boundaries and incorporated elements of different genres into its own capacious and malleable frame as types of translatio - in terms of learning, or power, or both.

Important and wide-ranging studies of the ideological exploitations performed by and upon the medieval romance.

What did medieval readers think of romance? Their attitudes to it, and the implications for the genre, are explored in this provocative study.

A survey of the significance of names, or their absence, in medieval English, French, and Anglo-Norman romance.

Investigation into the importance of the Anglo-Saxon past in medieval literature.

A wide-ranging collection on one of the most interesting features of medieval romance.

The themes of magic and the supernatural in medieval romance are here fully explored and put into the context of thinking at the time in this first full study of the subject.

The first interdisciplinary enquiry into a key figure in medieval and early modern culture.

A study of romance and the Orient in Chaucer and in anonymous popular metrical romances.

The legend of Melusine examined in a pan-European context.

An investigation into the depiction and reception of the figure of Alexander in the literatures of medieval Europe.

Investigations into the heroic - or not - behaviour of the protagonists of medieval romance.

Studies of how the physical manifests itself in medieval romance - and medieval romances as objects themselves.

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