Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England

Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England

Author: Michael Johnston

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014-05

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0199679789

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showing that contrary to the commonly held view that romances are representative of the "popular culture" of their day, in fact such texts appealed primarily to the gentry, England's elite landowners who lacked titles of nobility.


English Medieval Romance

English Medieval Romance

Author: William Raymond Johnston Barron

Publisher: Longman Publishing Group

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13:

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Starting with the European roots of romance, Dr Barron devotes the main body of his book to a detailed study of the English corpus. He discusses its rich variety of forms in the later Middle Ages, concluding that the English romances show their own conception of the romantic `mode'.


Performance and the Middle English Romance

Performance and the Middle English Romance

Author: Linda Marie Zaerr

Publisher: DS Brewer

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1843843234

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An examination of if and how medieval romance was performed, uniquely uniting the perspective of a scholar and practitioner. Although English medieval minstrels performed gestes, a genre closely related to romance, often playing the harp or the fiddle, the question of if, and how, Middle English romance was performed has been hotly debated. Here, the performance tradition is explored by combining textual, historical and musicological scholarship with practical experience from a noted musician. Using previously unrecognised evidence, the author reconstructs a realistic model of minstrel performance, showing how a simple melody can interact with the text, and vice versa. She argues that elements in Middle English romance which may seem simplistic or repetitive may in fact be incomplete, as missing an integral musical dimension; metrical irregularities, for example, may be relics of sophisticated rhythmic variation that make sense only with music. Overall, the study offers both a more accurate comprehension of minstrel performance, and a deeper appreciation of the romances themselves. Linda Marie Zaerr is Professor of Medieval Studies at Boise State University.


The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance

Author: Roberta L. Krueger

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-06-22

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 9780521556873

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This Companion presents fifteen original and engaging essays by leading scholars on one of the most influential genres of Western literature. Chapters describe the origins of early verse romance in twelfth-century French and Anglo-Norman courts and analyze the evolution of verse and prose romance in France, Germany, England, Italy, and Spain throughout the Middle Ages. The volume introduces a rich array of traditions and texts and offers fresh perspectives on the manuscript context of romance, the relationship of romance to other genres, popular romance in urban contexts, romance as mirror of familiar and social tensions, and the representation of courtly love, chivalry, 'other' worlds and gender roles. Together the essays demonstrate that European romances not only helped to promulgate the ideals of elite societies in formation, but also held those values up for questioning. An introduction, a chronology and a bibliography of texts and translations complete this lively, useful overview.


Christianity and Romance in Medieval England

Christianity and Romance in Medieval England

Author: Rosalind Field

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 184384219X

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The essays collected here show how the romances of medieval England engaged with contemporary Christian culture, and demonstrate the importance of reading them with an awareness of that culture.


Boundaries in Medieval Romance

Boundaries in Medieval Romance

Author: Neil Cartlidge

Publisher: DS Brewer

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9781843841555

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


Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance

Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance

Author: Corinne J. Saunders

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1843842211

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"This study looks at a wide range of medieval Englisih romance texts, including the works of Chaucer and Malory, from a broad cultural perspective, to show that while they employ magic in order to create exotic, escapist worlds, they are also grounded in a sense of possibility, and reflect a complex web of inherited and current ideas." --Book Jacket.


Pulp Fictions of Medieval England

Pulp Fictions of Medieval England

Author: Nicola McDonald

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2004-10

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780719063190

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Pulp fictions of medieval England comprises ten essays on individual popular romances; with a focus on romances that, while enormously popular in the Middle Ages, have been neglected by modern scholarship. Each essay provides valuable introductory material, and there is a sustained argument across the contributions that the romances invite innovative, exacting and theoretically charged analysis. However, the essays do not support a single, homogenous reading of popular romance: the authors work with assumptions and come to conclusions about issues as fundamental as the genre's aesthetic codes, its political and cultural ideologies, and its historical consciousness that are different and sometimes opposed. Nicola McDonald's collection and the romances it investigates, are crucial to our understanding of the aesthetics of medieval narrative and to the ideologies of gender and sexuality, race, religion, political formations, social class, ethics, morality and national identity with which those narratives engage.


The Exploitations of Medieval Romance

The Exploitations of Medieval Romance

Author: Laura Ashe

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1843842122

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As one of the most important, influential and capacious genres of the middle ages, the romance was exploited for a variety of social and cultural reasons: to celebrate and justify war and conflict, chivalric ideologies, and national, local and regional identities; to rationalize contemporary power structures, and identify the present with the legendary past; to align individual desires and aspirations with social virtues. But the romance in turn exploited available figures of value, appropriating the tropes and strategies of religious and historical writing, and cannibalizing and recreating its own materials for heightened ideological effect. The essays in this volume consider individual romances, groups of writings and the genre more widely, elucidating a variety of exploitative manoeuvres in terms of text, context, and intertext. Contributors: Neil Cartlidge, Ivana Djordjevic, Judith Weiss, Melissa Furrow, Rosalind Field, Diane Vincent, Corinne Saunders, Arlyn Diamond, Anna Caughey, Laura Ashe