10 - Modern and Academic Reception of the Popular Romance

Summary

The reception of popular medieval romance in England has always been inextricably linked with academic study of both the history of the language and of medieval society. Popular genres tend to evolve, often resisting coalescence around particular texts or authors, and the medieval romance lives on today through being subsumed in a variety of cultural contexts (the western, for example). Those medieval romances which have survived the passage of time, when encountered today, are found almost exclusively in the academy, and the study of their reception cannot be separated from literary history and intellectual inquiry. This leads to some unexpected observations, not only about the romance, but about the genre's relationship with other medieval artefacts and with the academy in which they have been revived.

In the context of the modern classroom, teaching the ‘Tale of Sir Thopas’, (Chaucer at his meta-textual best), can be a frustrating experience. Like all parody, ‘Thopas’ makes sense only in its ‘dependent and oppositional’ relationship with the popular romances it parodies, romances like the ones Chaucer the Pilgrim himself names in the poem:

Men speken of romances of prys,

Of Horn Child and of Ypotys,

Of Beves and of Sir Gy,

Of Sir Lybeux and Pleyndamour –

But Sir Thopas, he bereth the flour

Of roial chivalry! (897–902)

Modern students can only take our word, and Chaucer’s, for the fame and relevance of these figures. The joke is entirely lost to time. Guy of Warwick and Horn Child, hugely popular in the Middle Ages, are virtually unknown today; Beves of Hampton shares a name with a brain-dead cartoon teenager who chortles through MTV videos with his friend Butthead, and even that reference is slipping inexorably into the ever-receding pop cultural past. Lybeaus Desconus, with his relationship to the Gawain of Malory and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (henceforth SGGK), might have more purchase on the student imagination, but only if they have been exposed to those texts previously. Ypotis is an even harder sell, since it is not a romance at all, while Pleyndamour is completely unknown. In the midst of any course on medieval literature, I suspect students and casual readers might well become quite weary of hearing that every third reference is to something unknown and probably unknowable.