Romances’ formal innovations and authorial self-consciousness are studied from another angle by Sylvie Lefèvre, who examines the variety of authorial framing techniques and narratorial interventions in French romance. Although we possess little information about historical authors before the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many stories call attention to their creators, sometimes billed as an “acteur,” who can assert himself (or, more rarely, herself) in numerous guises: as an omniscient narrator who animates the dialogue of characters; as a parallel persona who compares his amorous affair to that of his characters; as an intradiegetic narrator who plays a role inside the story beside the characters; as a full-blown amorous persona himself, who describes the progress of his affair; or as a pseudohistorical agent based on a historical author from the previous century. Whether in verse or prose, in intradiegetic or extradiegetic narration, romances proved fertile ground for artistry, experimentation, and innovation, first in French and later in other European traditions. While some authors remain firmly entrenched inside the fiction of their creations, others created bridges to “real” incidents beyond the tale, blurring the distinction between fiction and history in ways that anticipate the modern novel.

Early medieval Italy was the most densely urbanized part of western Eurasia until the eleventh century. This chapter examines the practices of urbanism in the Italian peninsula, considering the social and political implications of living in cities and how they shaped the ways of life and patterns of governance in Latin- and Greek-speaking areas of the Italian peninsula. Special consideration is paid to how the Carolingian conquest and Frankish control of parts of Italy might have challenged the roles played by cities in economic and political life in those areas. Urbanism and investment in cities were tools for Carolingian rulers of Italy and their contemporaries.