Thinking Medieval Romance

Theoretically savvy and polemical arguments about a broad range of French, Middle English, and Mediterranean romances, that will revise scholars' and students' understanding of what medieval romances are and, more importantly, what they do to and for their readers.

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.