Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Katherine C. Little (1. Professor of English, University of Colorado Boulder) ,  Nicola McDonald (Senior Lecturer, Department of English and Related Literature, University of York)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 16.30cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 24.20cm
Weight:   0.538kg
ISBN:  

9780198795148

ISBN 10:   0198795149
Pages:   256
Publication Date:   08 November 2018
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Katherine C. Little and Nicola McDonald: Introduction I. Does Romance Think? 1: Nicola McDonald: The Wonder of Middle English Romance 2: James Simpson: Unthinking Thought: Romance's Wisdom II. Romance Thinks Politics 3: Laura Ashe: Killing the King: Romance and the Politicization of History 4: Lee Manion: Thinking through the English Crusading Romance: Sir Gowther and the Baltic III. Romance thinks religion 5: Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner: Weaving a Tapestry from Biblical Exegesis to Romance Textuality: Caught in the Web of Chrétien's Conte du Graal 6: Geoff Rector: Marie de France, the Psalms, and the Construction of Romance Authorship 7: Emma O'Loughlin Bérat: Romance and Revelation IV. Romance Thinks Music 8: Emma Dillon: Song and the Soundscape of Old French Romance 9: Monika Otter: Music by Tristan: The Two Lais of Chèvrefeuille V. Rethinking the term 'Romance' 10: Sharon Kinoshita: Romance in/ and the Medieval Mediterranean 11: Michelle R. Warren: Good History, Bad Romance, and the Making of Literature

Reviews

The volume takes the reader on a journey that opens up fascinating new perspectives on this important medieval literary genre. * Editions *

Author Information

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.

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