1 - Popular Romance: The Material and the Problems

Summary

The Middle English verse romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries have always posed a problem to academic study and modern readers. The majority are textually fragile, anonymous, and lack clear cultural and social contexts. Dealing with such textual and cultural problems is the business of scholarship, but these works remain resistant to an academic discourse that privileges difficulty in interpretation, an elite response, a professional readership. More seriously they are evidently the ancestors of a popular literary culture that academic discourse prefers to ignore, unless under the copious umbrella of cultural studies.

There are basic problems with the double meaning of ‘popular’ as both widely appreciated and culturally of ‘the people’, with an accompanying subtext of mediocrity: ‘Rather than being only demographically descriptive, in critical practice, “popular” has tended to drag in its train the sense “unsophisticated”.’ This perceived lack of sophistication has in turn generated some questionable assumptions about audience and reception, assumptions which have all too often served to mark the superior cultural level of critic and reader.

However, since 1971, when John Halverson was able to remark that ‘Havelok the Dane is one of a very small number of Middle English romances that still retain their charm’, attitudes to the anonymous romances have moved considerably – Derek Brewer remarked on the ‘explosion of interest’ that took place in the 1980s, and this has continued. The reasons have as much to do with new developments in critical approaches as with the romances themselves, especially the willingness to give serious consideration to works outside the canonical texts recognized as major Literature. At the same time a new appreciation of the power of narrative convention has altered attitudes, most notably in Helen Cooper's recent adaptation of the ‘meme’ to chart the movement of romance conventions from the Angevin period to the Renaissance.

The initial problem has always been the unmanageable nature of the raw material and the sheer quantity of narratives of all shapes and none. Various taxonomic strategies have been used to organize Middle English romances. The clearest and most influential is by subject matter – as in the Manual, Hibbard (Loomis)'s Mediæval Romance in England, Barron's English Medieval Romance and numerous anthologies. Categorization by subject matter tends to adopt the Matters of medieval narrative: Rome, France, Britain, sometimes extended to England, but this leaves a large and varied group of works under Miscellaneous or ‘non-cyclic’.