Thinking Medieval Romance

Medieval romances with their magic fountains, brave knights, and beautiful maidens have come to stand for the Middle Ages more generally. This close connection between the medieval and the romance has had consequences for popular conceptions of the Middle Ages, an idealized fantasy of chivalry and hierarchy, and also for our understanding of romances, as always already archaic, part of a half-forgotten past. And yet, romances were one of the most influential and long-lasting innovations of the medieval period. To emphasize their novelty is to see the resources medieval people had for thinking about their contemporary concern and controversies, whether social order, Jewish/ Christian relations, the Crusades, the connectivity of the Mediterranean, women’s roles as mothers, and how to write a national past. This volume takes up the challenge to ’think romance’, investigating the various ways that romances imagine, reflect, and describe the challenges of the medieval world.

Katherine C. Little, 1. Professor of English, University of Colorado Boulder, Nicola McDonald, Senior Lecturer, Department of English and Related Literature, University of York

Katherine C. Little is Professor of English at University of Colorado Boulder. Author of Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England and Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry, she has also published essays on the Wycliffite heresy, the Piers-Plowman-tradition, and the poetry of Chaucer and Spenser.

Nicola McDonald is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature & the Centre for Medieval Studies, at the University of York. Editor of Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Middle English Romance and Medieval Obscenities, her research focuses on Middle English romance as a fundamentally interrogative genre. She also works on medieval women, in particular women’s literacy and ludic culture and is, additionally, the author of essays on Chaucer, Gower, and late-medieval household miscellanies.