They were the bestsellers of their time; in the late medieval period, a number of shorter romances and tales, such as Floire et Blancheflor, Partonopeus de Blois, Valentine and Orson and many others, enjoyed striking popularity across different regions of Europe. This essay collection gathers together contributions from across Europe, to examine the complex processes by which medieval romances were adapted across European borders. By examining how the content, form and broader contextualisation of individual romances were altered by the transition from one region to another, the essays address the role translators, narrators, editors and compilers played in adapting the tales to different cultural and codicological settings. In this context, they discuss not only the shifting plotlines of the tales, but also the points at which the generic features of the texts shift in response to changing cultural codes. In doing so, they raise wider questions concerning the links between genre, manuscript form, cultural assimilation and the popularity of certain romance texts in different cultural communities.
This is an international essay collection offering insights into how popular romances were adapted into different linguistic and cultural communities of late medieval Europe. "They were the bestsellers of their time; in the late medieval period, a umber of shorter romances and tales, such as Floire et Blancheflor, Partonopeus de Blois, Valentine and Orson and many others, enjoyed striking popularity across different regions of Europe. This essay collection gathers together contributions from across Europe, to examine the complex processes by which medieval romances were adapted across European borders. By examining how the content, form and broader contextualisation of individual romances were altered by the transition from one region to another, the essays address the role translators, narrators, editors and compilers played in adapting the tales to different cultural and codicological settings. In this context, they discuss not only the shifting plotlines of the tales, but also the points at which the generic features of the texts shift in response to changing cultural codes. In doing so, they raise wider questions concerning the links between genre, manuscript form, cultural assimilation and the popularity of certain romance texts in different cultural communities"--Page 4 of cover.
Readers have long been fascinated by the enigmatic figure of M lusine - a beautiful fairy woman cursed to transform into a half-serpent once a week, whose part-monstrous sons are the ancestor of several European noble houses. This study is the first to consider how this romance developed from a local legend to European bestseller, analysing versions in French, German, Castilian, Dutch, and English. It addresses questions on how to study medieval literature from a European perspective, moving beyond national canons, and reading M lusine's bodily mutability as a metaphor for how the romance itself moves and transforms across borders. It also analyses key changes to the romance's content, form, and material presentation - including its images - and traces how the people who produced and consumed this romance shaped its international transmission and spread. The author shows how M lusine's character is adapted within each local context, while also uncovering previously unknown connections between the different branches of this multilingual tradition. Moving beyond established paradigms of separate national traditions, manuscript versus print, and medieval versus Renaissance literature, the book integrates literary analysis with art historical and book historical approaches. LYDIA ZELDENRUST is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York.
This new Companion provides a broad and perceptive overview of the most important vernacular literary genre of the Middle Ages. Freshly commissioned, original chapters from seventeen leading scholars introduce students and general readers to the form's poetics, narrative voice and manuscript contexts, as well as its relationship to the Mediterranean world, race, gender and the emotions, among many other topics. Providing fresh perspectives on the first pan-European literary movement, essays range across a broad geographical area, including England, France, Italy, Germany and the Iberian Peninsula, as well as a varied linguistic spectrum, including Arabic, Hebrew and Yiddish. Exploring the celebration of chivalric ideals and courtly refinements, the volume excavates the tensions and traumas lying beneath decorous surface appearances. An introduction, bibliography of texts and translations as well as chapter-by-chapter reading lists complete this essential guide.
What draws people to study abroad or volunteer in far-off communities? Often the answer is romance – the romance of landscapes, people, languages, the very sense of border-crossing – and longing for liberation, attraction to the unknown, yearning to make a difference. This volume explores the complicated and often fraught desires to study and volunteer abroad. In doing so, the book sheds light on how affect is managed by educators and mobilized by students and volunteers themselves, and how these structures of feeling relate to broader social and economic forces.
The cultural borders of Europe are today more visible than ever, and with them comes a sense of uncertainty with respect to liberal democratic traditions: whether treated as abstractions or concrete realities, cultural divisions challenge concepts of legitimacy and political representation as well as the legal bases for citizenship. Thus, an understanding of such borders and their consequences is of utmost importance for promoting the evolution of democracy. Cultural Borders of Europe provides a wide-ranging exploration of these lines of demarcation in a variety of regions and historical eras, providing essential insights into the state of European intercultural relations today.
Translations of French romances into other vernaculars in the Middle Ages have sometimes been viewed as "less important" versions of prestigious sources, rather than in their place as part of a broader range of complex and wider European text traditions. This consideration of how French romance was translated, rewritten and interpreted in medieval Sweden focuses on the wider context. It examines four major texts which appear in both languages: Le Chevalier au lion and its Swedish translation Herr Ivan; Le Conte de Floire et Blancheflor and Flores och Blanzeflor; Valentin et Sansnom (the original French text has been lost, but the tale has survivedin the prose version Valentin et Orson) and the Swedish text Namnlös och Valentin; and Paris et Vienne and the fragmentary Swedish version Riddar Paris och jungfru Vienna. Each is analysed through the lens of different themes: female characters, children, animals and masculinity. The author argues that French romance made a major contribution to the Europeanisation of medieval culture, whilst also playing a key role in the formation of a national literature in Sweden.
Covering the period from the fall of the Roman Empire through to the beginnings of the Renaissance, this is an indispensable volume which brings the complex and colourful history of the Middle Ages to life. Key features: * geographical coverage extends to the broadest definition of Europe from the Atlantic coast to the Russian steppes * each map approaches a separate issue or series of events in Medieval history, whilst a commentary locates it in its broader context * as a body, the maps provide a vivid representation of the development of nations, peoples and social structures. With over 140 maps, expert commentaries and an extensive bibliography, this is the essential reference for those who are striving to understand the fundamental issues of this period.
Empire of Magic offers a genesis and genealogy for medieval romance and the King Arthur legend through the history of Europe's encounters with the East in crusades, travel, missionizing, and empire formation. It also produces definitions of "race" and "nation" for the medieval period and posits that the Middle Ages and medieval fantasies of race and religion have recently returned. Drawing on feminist and gender theory, as well as cultural analyses of race, class, and colonialism, this provocative book revises our understanding of the beginnings of the nine hundred-year-old cultural genre we call romance, as well as the King Arthur legend. Geraldine Heng argues that romance arose in the twelfth century as a cultural response to the trauma and horror of taboo acts--in particular the cannibalism committed by crusaders on the bodies of Muslim enemies in Syria during the First Crusade. From such encounters with the East, Heng suggests, sprang the fantastical episodes featuring King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicle The History of the Kings of England, a work where history and fantasy collide and merge, each into the other, inventing crucial new examples and models for romances to come. After locating the rise of romance and Arthurian legend in the contact zones of East and West, Heng demonstrates the adaptability of romance and its key role in the genesis of an English national identity. Discussing Jews, women, children, and sexuality in works like the romance of Richard Lionheart, stories of the saintly Constance, Arthurian chivralic literature, the legend of Prester John, and travel narratives, Heng shows how fantasy enabled audiences to work through issues of communal identity, race, color, class and alternative sexualities in socially sanctioned and safe modes of cultural discussion in which pleasure, not anxiety, was paramount. Romance also engaged with the threat of modernity in the late medieval period, as economic, social, and technological transformations occurred and awareness grew of a vastly enlarged world beyond Europe, one encompassing India, China, and Africa. Finally, Heng posits, romance locates England and Europe within an empire of magic and knowledge that surveys the world and makes it intelligible--usable--for the future. Empire of Magic is expansive in scope, spanning the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, and detailed in coverage, examining various types of romance--historical, national, popular, chivalric, family, and travel romances, among others--to see how cultural fantasy responds to changing crises, pressures, and demands in a number of different ways. Boldly controversial, theoretically sophisticated, and historically rooted, Empire of Magic is a dramatic restaging of the role romance played in the culture of a period and world in ways that suggest how cultural fantasy still functions for us today.
The shaping and sharing of narrative has always been key to the negotiation and recreation of reality for individuals and cultural groups. Some stories, indeed, seem to possess a life of their own: claiming a peculiar agency and taking on distinct voices which speak across time and space. How, for example, do objects, manuscripts, and other artefacts communicate alternative or complementary narratives that transcend textual and linguistic boundaries? How are stories created, reshaped, and re-experienced, and how do these shifting contexts and media change meaning? This volume of essays explores these questions about meaning and identity in a range of ways. As a collection, it demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary and context-focused enquiry when approaching key issues of activity and identity in the medieval period. Ultimately, the process of making meaning through shaping narrative is shown to be as vital and varied in the medieval world as it is today. With a wide range of different disciplinary approaches from leading scholars in their respective fields, chapters include considerations of art, architecture, metalwork, linguistics, and literature. Alongside examinations of medieval cultural productions are explorations of the representation and adaptation of medieval storytelling in graphic novels, classroom teaching, and computer gaming. This volume thus offers an interdisciplinary exploration of how stories from across the medieval world were shaped, transformed, and transmitted.
