Genealogical narratives often include a strand of violence and physical effort for women, particularly through childbirth but also through exile, migration for marriage, and establishing an independent life, as the previous chapters show. This chapter explores genealogical transmission and its relationship to violence and women’s action in the context of administrative communication networks in the Middle English Athelston, in which the king kicks his wife, killing his heir, and sentences his pregnant sister to a trial by fire. Drawing on network theory, which emphasizes the “doers” and “doing” of a network, the chapter explores the alignment of the two royal heir-bearers with messengers, which positions the women as key transmitters, not unlike the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation, rather than as wives who simply carry their husbands’ children. In this model of transmission, the women influence succession not only through childbearing but also through royal petitioning, letter writing, and prayer.

In this essay Corinne Saunders explores the secular genre most often associated with women, that of medieval romance, but also challenges the notion of romance as a womenߣs genre. While women were patrons, owners, readers, and even writers of courtly romances, the picture is complex: romances were often addressed to mixed audiences and read publicly rather than privately, and it is impossible to know for certain how women responded to the romance narratives that they encountered. Focusing on three central romance themes-- love and consent, virtuous suffering, and magic and enchantment ߝ this essay explores the imaginative spaces that female protagonists inhabit and the agency they demonstrate, and suggests how these might connect to ideals of Christian virtue, the constraints imposed on women by chivalry, and perhaps to the lived experiences of medieval women. Examples drawn from a range of Middle English romances, from Sir Orfeo, King Horn and Havelok the Dane to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Thomas Maloryߣs Morte Darthur at the very end of the period, show medieval romance as the locus of dialogue and debate about women and their place in medieval society and culture.

In Chapter 1, I identify the range of economic, religious, and social values attached to landscape in Middle English romances. This analysis begins by examining how romances’ descriptions of landscape often concentrate on economically significant topographical features, especially natural resources, and the laborers who manage and harvest them. For example, I examine the hilly iron mines and accompanying settlements of smiths in Sir Isumbras, the working of stone quarries in William of Palerne, and sea harvests in Havelok the Dane. The chapter then builds on these arguments to explain how descriptions of abandoned or ravaged agricultural landscapes in Sir Degrevant and the Tale of Gamelyn betray the anxieties of an increasingly “bourgeois-gentry” readership about the lack of human control over the English landscape in the wake of population decline caused by civil war, the bubonicplague, and the Little Ice Age.

My introduction situates the study by defining “landscape” within the genre of Middle English popular romance, examines the current critical conversation regarding medieval conceptions of the environment, and places late medieval romances in the context of the burgeoning Little Ice Age. It concludes with a précis of the following study.