Chivalric Romance
Chivalric romance is a genre of medieval literature that typically features tales of knights, chivalry, and courtly love. These stories often involve quests, battles, and adventures, and they are characterized by a strong sense of honor, bravery, and idealized love. Chivalric romances were popular in the Middle Ages and continue to influence literature and popular culture today.
7 Key excerpts on "Chivalric Romance"
...I then suggest how understanding romance as a strategy might yield a different corpus, cutting across traditional generic categories to encompass hagiography, lais and other vernacular forms. COURTS, KNIGHTS, AND CLERKS The genre of medieval romance is conventionally defined as the group of narratives in the vernacular that emerge around 1150 in the court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in England (where Anglo-Norman, a form of French, was the elite language) and tell stories of love and adventure. Although generally situated in a distant classical or Arthurian past, the stories feature all the trappings of contemporary court and chivalric culture, so that, for example, Greek and Roman “knights” skirmish in patently medieval tournaments. The primary sources for this literature are Greek and Roman legends (the story of Thebes, the Trojan war) as well as specific classical texts (Virgil, Statius, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Apollonius), medieval historiography, Celtic legends, and the chansons de geste. Since the thirteenth century, romance has traditionally been divided into three subjects (although many texts classified as romances elude this early characterization): the matter of Rome, which includes primarily reworkings of the story of Troy and the Aeneid ; the matter of Britain, which comprises the stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table; and the matter of France: stories of the French knights made famous by the chansons de geste. Although the characters might often resemble those of the earlier French epics, in romances there is a much greater emphasis on the private over the public, on the perspective of women, and on the knights' experience of love...
eBook - ePub- Angela Jane Weisl, Anthony Joseph Cunder(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...That said, modern readers should also be aware of certain differences. The resolutions of the stories may not be as neat as those found in contemporary romance – sometimes because the stories do not actually end due to manuscript loss, and sometimes because medieval authors were less interested in the conclusion than they were in the process. The obstacles facing the protagonists are as much internal as external, and the outer conflicts are often there to represent the inner struggles the knight faces as he embarks on his quest for both the lady and the honor and glory of chivalry. Indeed, some medieval romance sets the love plot aside entirely – or at least makes it secondary to this knightly development – and instead finds meaning in a religious resolution. Modern readers may find themselves asking, “Where’s the love story?” And yet, for all that, the romance – along with the lyric and the fabliau – remains the genre of desire. That desire, however, may take on different forms than those with which the modern reader is familiar. The phrase “Chivalry is not dead,” often heard these days, acknowledges both the medieval romance’s antecedents in the epic and its fascination with manners and courtesy; it has been suggested that the romance, medieval literature’s most popular genre, was born from the intersection of the lyric and the epic, drawing the subject matter from one and the form from the other. The rise of the troubadour lyric and its descendants in France, Germany, Italy, and England (11th to 13th century) develops a sophisticated language and philosophy of love, which then finds its narrative expression in the romance – the genre of the quest in search of the fully realized self...
eBook - ePub- Gillian Beer(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...2 Medieval to Renaissance Romance: History and Myth Medieval romance as a genre was separate from epic or allegory, though it had elements of both. It allowed a casual interplay between history and miracle. Love and adventure in the romance were both presented through a ritualized code of conduct, but although this code was preoccupied with niceties of behaviour it recognized and accepted irrational impulses and unforeseeable actions. The writers could encompass the marvellous and the everyday without any change of key. The romances often included complex psychological analysis – particularly in the work of writers like Chrétien de Troyes and Hartmann von Aue in his refashioning of Chrétien’s romances – yet its insights were not primarily analytical; instead its significance evolved out of the interpenetrating levels of event. The romance writer’s mediating presence allows us to accept what he shows. He will intervene to comment and interpret, controlling the tone in such a way that he seems to bestow upon us a certain grace and dexterity of response and absolve us from the need to make full-scale interpretations’. The matter of the romances is open; its system of values is set before us within the poems themselves; its mythic levels of suggestion require no arcane knowledge. The central delight offered us is that of being told a story. This is not to say that the medieval romances are ‘primitive’; they demand alertness and application from the reader. Clearly there are differing degrees of literary sophistication among medieval romance writers, but the finest of them display a broad and assured literary consciousness such as we find in Chaucer. The medieval romance writers suggest the infinity which everywhere touches upon the world they display without resort to the fully sustained fourfold system of medieval allegory: the literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical levels...
eBook - ePubThe Arthurian Legend
Comparison of Treatment in Modern and Mediaeval Literature
- Margaret J. C. Reid(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The “Romantic Revival” includes among other things a revival of interest in the “Middle Ages,” often rather inaccurately termed the “Gothic Revival.” There was an eager study of Malory and Spenser. But the interest proved a creative one and did not issue merely in a slavish copy of the mediæval. A literature must be studied in the society which produces it and thus a very general comparison between the Chivalrous Ages and the Romantic Revival is not useless. Both the periods in question had their ideals of love; in the earlier age, of “Courtly Love” and in the later, of “Romantic Love.” This ideal of love had in both cases its root in a spirit of revolt, 1 the one against a constant preoccupation with things of the soul and the next world, which the Middle Ages showed, the other against the limited and formal art and culture of the eighteenth century. Each had its revolt against marriage. 2 In the Age of Chivalry, the relationship was ignored in the romantic relationship between knight and lady, often a married lady of higher birth than her lover. In the Romantic Revival, the legal bond of marriage was considered too narrow a vessel for the seething potion of romantic passion. Yet no marriage could have contained more restricting rules than the chivalric code. This is perhaps why the representative poets of the Romantic Revival—Shelley, Keats, Byron—found more appropriate subjects for their poems, passionate in love and revolt, in the myths and legends of Greece and Italy. Chivalric love, especially as represented in Malory, is too conventional and literary a theme. It was the poets of the early nineteenth century—Tennyson, Morris, Swinburne—who found in the subjects of Arthurian legend what they considered inspiring themes for their poems. Tennyson, of course, was a Victorian in sentiment and an upholder of the religious sanctity of the institution of marriage...
eBook - ePubThe Mediaeval Mind (Volume 1 of 2)
A History of the Development of Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages
- Henry Osborn Taylor(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
...Or we might draw upon the knightly precepts (the Ritterlehre) of the Winsbeke and the Winsbekin (printed in Hildebrand’s Didaktik aus der Zeit der Kreuzzüge, Deutsche Nat. Litt.). And we might delve in the great store of Latin Chronicles which relate the mediaeval history of German kings and nobles. In Spanish, there would be the Cid, and how much more besides. In Italian we should have latter-day romantic chivalry; Pulci’s Rotta di Roncisvalle ; Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato ; Ariosto’s Orlando furioso ; still later, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, which takes us well out of the Middle Ages. And in English there is much Arthurian romance; there is Chevy Chace ; and we may come down through Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, to the sunset beauty of Spenser’s Fairie Queen. This glorious poem should serve to fix in our minds the principle that chivalry, knighthood, was not merely a material fact, a ceremony and an institution; but that it also was that ultra-reality, a spirit. And this spirit’s ideal creations—the ideal creations of the many phases of this spirit—accorded with actual deeds which may be read of in the old Chronicles. For final exemplification of the actual and the ideally real in chivalry, the reader may look within himself, and observe the inextricable mingling of the imaginative and the real. He will recognize that what at one time seems part of his imagination, at another will prove itself the veriest reality of his life. Even such wavering verity of spirit was chivalry. [708] See Gaston Paris in Journal des savants, 1892, pp. 161-163. Of course the English reader cannot but think of the brief secret marriage between Romeo and Juliet. [709] Marriage or no marriage depends on the plot; but occasionally a certain respect for marriage is shown, as in the Eliduc of Marie de France, and of course far more strongly in Wolfram’s Parzival...
- Ármann Jakobsson, Sverrir Jakobsson, Ármann Jakobsson, Sverrir Jakobsson(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...5 Courtly Literature Stefka G. Eriksen The Old French term roman appeared in French medieval texts along with other terms such as lai, fabliau, chanson de geste, conte, and dit. These terms convey medieval authors’ awareness of various types of narratives and reflect our modern need to classify and categorize, on the one hand, and to discuss generic similarities and differences, on the other. 1 In this context, I will be less interested in distinctions between genres, and more focused on links and dynamics. ‘Romance’ will here be understood in a broader sense, signifying a variety of courtly narrative genres mostly in Old French, but also in German and Latin. 2 The main reason for the deployment of this broad definition is that the reproduction of these European narrative genres in medieval Scandinavia resulted in the creation of a separate genre, the so-called riddarasögur, or chivalric sagas. The main focus of this chapter is to survey the development of scholarly attitudes towards the genre and its connection to other Old Norse genres. The background master narrative about riddarasögur scholarship is well known and was told in detail by Marianne E. Kalinke already in 1985, in a major historiographical article on Norse chivalric sagas (riddarasögur). 3 While many scholars working at the beginning of the twentieth century considered the chivalric sagas unoriginal, tasteless, and lacking any literary merit, the past four or five decades have seen a change of attitudes: scholars have promoted the riddarasögur ’s independent value and significance for the development of literary culture in medieval Scandinavia. Differences between source texts and target texts are no longer explained by the lack of competence of the Old Norse translators, but rather by their conscious writing strategies searching to adapt their texts to new target contexts...
eBook - ePubMandeville's Medieval Audiences
A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371-1550)
- Rosemary Tzanaki(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This critical confusion arises at least partly from the etymology and multiple meanings of the word ‘romance’ itself. It was originally used to denote a language developed from popular Latin, and, by extension, a work translated into or later written in the vernacular. In England, however, the term came to mean any work in French or Anglo-Norman as opposed to the vernacular. Eventually almost any fictional narrative poem could be called a romance. Romance appears to be defined by what it is not; thus, for example, Ker discusses the issue of ‘romance’ as opposed to ‘epic’, ending with a description of what is in effect the courtly romance; ‘courteous sentiment, running through a succession of wonderful adventures, is generally enough to make a romance’. 4 As Finlayson observes, ‘By almost common consent, all narratives dealing with aristocratic personae and involving combat and/or love are called romances, if written after 1100. As a loose, deliberately inclusive way of categorising narrative poems, this has some merit in distinguishing them from rustic tales, homilies, satires, histories, and allegories’. 5 While the roman courtois is admittedly a main type, there are many others: saints’ lives, for instance, often contain elements perceived as being of a romance type, as do some of the later chansons de geste and indeed most histories. Such ‘romance’ elements can include courtly love itself, marvels, exotic adventures, feats of arms, the code of chivalry, or deeds of great heroes of the past, although these are by no means common to all works classified under the label of ‘romance’. Romance as a literary style was not exclusive to the layman. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it had also been adopted by the clergy. The modes of chivalrous love and adventure were transformed into allegorical material on divine love...
