Ruodlieb and Romance in Latin: Audience and Authorship

Summary

What did it mean in the Middle Ages to write the sort of narrative that we now call a romance in Latin, or to read one? We have much evidence of the Church's disapproval of romance, yet romances in Latin exist: they must have been written mostly by clerics, and aimed at a largely ecclesiastical audience (of course many vernacular romances were also written by clerics). Stephen Jaeger and others have argued that the rapid development of the romance genre in the twelfth century was an attempt by clerics to try to establish civilized standards among the knightly class, but relatively few knights would have read Latin. Does this mean that romances in Latin were significantly different in tone and content from those in the vernacular, since they were aimed at a largely clerical audience rather than thuggish knights? Were the earliest Latin romances the ancestors of vernacular ones? On the other hand, some Latin Arthurian romances show clear evidence of vernacular influence in both motifs and style. We are accustomed to thinking of the twelfth century as the age of the rise of vernacular romance; but when we discuss Latin romance, we have to adjust such preconceptions, asking who constituted the target audience for such clerical storytelling and what their ‘horizon of expectations’ might have been.

Rosalind Field has recently asked ‘Why are we so dismissive of clerical culture?’ She is discussing the thirteenth century, but her response is also helpful to an understanding of earlier texts in Latin:

by comparison with the interest lavished on audiences, patrons and women, the clerical writers as a group seem to suffer from the Victorian disapproval of ‘monkish writers’ […] We should give more credit to the activities of the clerical author with secular interests … It may be that we should have a third category – always recognizing the porous boundaries between them – beside courtly and popular, that of clerical. Such a grouping does not mean ecclesiastical or pious. It does mean literate, confident of its audience and inter-textual. The authors may never be known or named but they have an authorial presence and a consciousness of the power of fiction.