romance

romance
romance1
romancer, n.
n., adj. /roh mans", roh"mans/; v. /roh mans"/, n., v., romanced, romancing, adj.
n.
1. a novel or other prose narrative depicting heroic or marvelous deeds, pageantry, romantic exploits, etc., usually in a historical or imaginary setting.
2. the colorful world, life, or conditions depicted in such tales.
3. a medieval narrative, originally one in verse and in some Romance dialect, treating of heroic, fantastic, or supernatural events, often in the form of allegory.
4. a baseless, made-up story, usually full of exaggeration or fanciful invention.
5. a romantic spirit, sentiment, emotion, or desire.
6. romantic character or quality.
7. a romantic affair or experience; a love affair.
8. (cap.) Also, Romanic. Also called Romance languages. the group of Italic Indo-European languages descended since A.D. 800 from Latin, as French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian, Provençal, Catalan, Rhaeto-Romanic, Sardinian, and Ladino. Abbr.: Rom.
v.i.
9. to invent or relate romances; indulge in fanciful or extravagant stories or daydreams.
10. to think or talk romantically.
v.t.
11. Informal.
a. to court or woo romantically; treat with ardor or chivalrousness: He's currently romancing a very attractive widow.
b. to court the favor of or make overtures to; play up to: They need to romance the local business community if they expect to do business here.
adj.
12. (cap.) Also, Romanic. of, pertaining to, or noting Romance: a Romance language.
[1250-1300; ME romaunce Romanic language, composition in such a language < OF, deriv. of romanz, romans (adj.) Romanic < VL *Romanice (adv.) in a Romance language, deriv. of L Romanicus ROMANIC]
Syn. 1. story, fiction. 4. falsehood, fable. 6. allure, fascination, exoticism.
romance2
/roh mans"/, n.
1. Music. a short, simple melody, vocal or instrumental, of tender character.
2. Sp. Lit. a short epic poem, esp. a historical ballad.
[1595-1605; < F < Sp: kind of poem, ballad < OF romanz ROMANCE1]

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Literary form that developed in the aristocratic courts of mid-12th-century France and had its heyday in France and Germany between the mid-12th and mid-13th century in the works of such masters as Chrétien de Troyes and Gottfried von Strassburg.

The staple subject matter is chivalric adventure (see chivalry), though love stories and religious allegories are sometimes interwoven. Most romances draw their plots from classical history and legend, Arthurian legend, and the adventures of Charlemagne and his knights. Written in the vernacular, they share a taste for the exotic, the remote, and the miraculous. Lingering echoes of the form can be found in later centuries, as in the Romanticism of the 18th–19th century and today's popular romantic novels.

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Introduction
 literary (literature) form, usually characterized by its treatment of chivalry, that came into being in France (French literature) in the mid-12th century (Middle Ages). It had antecedents in many prose works from classical antiquity (the so-called Greek (classical literature) romances), but as a distinctive genre it was developed in the context of the aristocratic courts of such patrons as Eleanor of Aquitaine.

      The Old French word romanz originally meant “the speech of the people,” or “the vulgar tongue,” from a popular Latin word, Romanice, meaning written in the vernacular, in contrast with the written form of literary Latin. Its meaning then shifted from the language in which the work was written to the work itself. Thus, an adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38), made by Wace of Jersey in 1155, was known as Li Romanz de Brut, while an anonymous adaptation (of slightly later date) of Virgil's Aeneid was known as Li Romanz d'Enéas; it is difficult to tell whether in such cases li romanz still meant “the French version” or had already come to mean “the story.” It soon specialized in the latter sense, however, and was applied to narrative compositions similar in character to those imitated from Latin sources but totally different in origin; and, as the nature of these compositions changed, the word itself acquired an increasingly wide spectrum of meanings. In modern French a roman is just a novel, whatever its content and structure; while in modern English the word “romance” (derived from Old French romanz) can mean either a medieval narrative composition or a love affair, or, again, a story about a love affair, generally one of a rather idyllic or idealized type, sometimes marked by strange or unexpected incidents and developments; and “to romance” has come to mean “to make up a story that has no connection with reality.”

      For a proper understanding of these changes it is essential to know something of the history of the literary form to which, since the Middle Ages, the term has been applied. The account that follows is intended to elucidate historically some of the ways in which the word is used in English and in other European languages.

The component elements
      The romances of love, chivalry, and adventure produced in 12th-century France have analogues elsewhere, notably in what are sometimes known as the Greek romances—narrative works in prose by Greek writers from the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD. The first known, the fragmentary Ninus romance, in telling the story of the love of Ninus, mythical founder of Nineveh, anticipates the medieval roman d'antiquité. A number of works by writers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD—Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, and Longus—introduce a theme that was to reappear in the roman d'aventure: that of faithful lovers parted by accident or design and reunited only after numerous adventures. Direct connection, however, can be proved only in the case of the tale of Apollonius of Tyre, presumably deriving from a lost Greek original but known through a 3rd- or 4th-century Latin version. This too is a story of separation, adventure, and reunion, and, like the others (except for Longus' pastoral Daphnis and Chloë), it has a quasi-historical setting. It became one of the most popular and widespread stories in European literature during the Middle Ages and later provided Shakespeare with the theme of Pericles.

Style and subject matter
      But the real debt of 12th-century romance to classical antiquity was incurred in a sphere outside that of subject matter. During the present century, scholars have laid ever-increasing emphasis on the impact of late classical antiquity upon the culture of medieval Europe, especially on that of medieval France. In particular, it is necessary to note the place that rhetoric (the systematic study of oratory) had assumed in the educational system of the late Roman Empire. Originally conceived as part of the training for public speaking, essential for the lawyer and politician, it had by this time become a literary exercise, the art of adorning or expanding a set theme: combined with grammar and enshrined in the educational system inherited by the Christian Church, rhetoric became an important factor in the birth of romance. Twelfth-century romance was, at the outset, the creation of “clerks”—professional writers who had been trained in grammar (that is to say, the study of the Latin (Latin literature) language and the interpretation of Latin authors) and in rhetoric in the cathedral schools. They were skilled in the art of exposition, by which a subject matter was not only developed systematically but also given such meaning as the author thought appropriate. The “romance style” was, apparently, first used by the authors of three romans d'antiquité, all composed in the period 1150–65: Roman de Thebes, an adaptation of the epic Thebaïs by the late Latin poet Statius; Roman d'Enéas, adapted from Virgil's Aeneid; and Roman de Troie, a retelling by Benoît de Sainte-Maure of the tale of Troy, based not on Homer (who was not known in western Europe, where Greek was not normally read) but on 4th- and 5th-century Latin versions. In all three, style and subject matter are closely interconnected; elaborate set descriptions, in which the various features of what is described are gone through, item by item, and eulogized, result in the action's taking place in lavish surroundings, resplendent with gold, silver, marble, fine textiles, and precious stones. To these embellishments are added astonishing works of architecture and quaint technological marvels, that recall the Seven Wonders of the World and the reputed glories of Byzantium. Troie and Enéas have, moreover, a strong love interest, inspired by the Roman poet Ovid's (Ovid) conception of love as a restless malady. This concept produced the first portrayal in Western literature of the doubts, hesitations, and self-torment of young lovers, as exemplified in the Achilles–Polyxena story in Troie and in the Aeneas–Lavinia story in Enéas. Yet even more important is the way in which this new theme is introduced: the rhetorical devices appropriate to expounding an argument are here employed to allow a character in love to explore his own feelings, to describe his attitude to the loved one, and to explain whatever action he is about to take.

Developing psychological awareness
      As W.P. Ker, a pioneer in the study of medieval epic and romance, observed in his Epic and Romance (1897), the advent of romance is “something as momentous and as far-reaching as that to which the name Renaissance is generally applied.” The Old French poets who composed the chansons de geste (chanson de geste) (as the Old French epics are called) had been content to tell a story; they were concerned with statement, not with motivation, and their characters could act without explicitly justifying their actions. Thus, in what is one of the earliest and certainly the finest of the chansons de geste, the Chanson de Roland (Chanson de Roland, La) (c. 1100), the hero's decision to fight on against odds—to let the rear guard of Charlemagne (Charlemagne legend)'s army be destroyed by the Saracen hordes in the hopeless and heroic Battle of Roncesvalles rather than sound his horn to call back Charlemagne—is not treated as a matter for discussion and analysis: the anonymous poet seems to take it for granted that the reader is not primarily concerned with the reason why things happened as they did. The new techniques of elucidating and elaborating material, developed by romance writers in the 12th century, produced a method whereby actions, motives, states of mind, were scrutinized and debated. The story of how Troilus fell in love with Briseïs and how, when taken to the Grecian camp, she deserted him for Diomedes (as related, and presumably invented, by Benoît de Sainte-Maure in his Roman de Troie) is not one of marvellous adventures in some exotic fairyland setting: it is clearly a theme of considerable psychological interest, and it was for this reason that it attracted three of the greatest writers of all time: Boccaccio in his Filostrato (c. 1338), Chaucer in his Troilus and Criseyde (before 1385), and Shakespeare in his Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02). With the 12th-century pioneers of what came to be called romance, the beginnings of the analytical method found in the modern novel can easily be recognized.

Sources and parallels
      Where exactly medieval romance writers found their material when they were not simply copying classical or pseudo-classical models is still a highly controversial issue. Parallels to certain famous stories, such as that of Tristan and Iseult (Tristan and Isolde), have been found in regions as wide apart as Persia and Ireland: in the mid-11th-century Persian epic of Wis and Ramin and in the Old Irish Diarmaid and Gráinne; but while in the latter case it is possible to argue in favour of a genetic link between the two traditions, the former is more likely to be a case of parallel development due, on the one hand, to the inner logic of the theme and, on the other, to certain similarities in the ideological and social background of the two works. Failure to maintain the essential distinction between source and parallel has greatly hindered the understanding of the true nature of medieval romance and has led to the production of a vast critical literature the relevance of which to the study of the genre is at best questionable.

The marvellous
      The marvellous is by no means an essential ingredient of “romance” in the sense in which it has been defined. Yet to most English readers the term romance does carry implications of the wonderful, the miraculous, the exaggerated, and the wholly ideal. Ker regarded much of the literature of the Middle Ages as “romantic” in this sense—the only types of narrative free from such “romanticizing” tendencies being the historical and family narrative, or Icelanders' sagas developed in classical Icelandic literature at the end of the 12th and in the early 13th century. The Chanson de Roland indulges freely in the fantastic and the unreal: hence Charlemagne's patriarchal age and preternatural strength (he is more than 200 years old when he conquers Spain); or the colossal numbers of those slain by the French; or, again, the monstrous races of men following the Saracen banners. Pious legends, saints' lives, and stories of such apocryphal adventures as those of the Irish St. Brendan (Brendan, Saint) (c. 486–578) who, as hero of a legend first written down in the 9th-century, Navigatio Brendani, and later widely translated and adapted, wanders among strange islands on his way to the earthly paradise—these likewise favour the marvellous. The great 12th-century Roman d'Alexandre, a roman d'antiquité based on and developing the early Greek romance of Alexander the Great (the Alexander romance), was begun in the first years of the century by Alberic de Briançon and later continued by other poets. It introduces fantastic elements, more especially technological wonders and the marvels of India: the springs of rejuvenation, the flower-maidens growing in a forest, the cynocephali (dog-headed men), the bathyscaphe that takes Alexander to the bottom of the ocean, and the car in which he is drawn through the air by griffins on his celestial journey.

The setting (setting)
      The fact that so many medieval romances are set in distant times and remote places is not an essential feature of romance but rather a reflection of its origins. As has been seen, the Old French word romanz early came to mean “historical work in the vernacular.” All the romans d'antiquité have a historical or pseudohistorical theme, whether they evoke Greece, Troy or the legendary world of Alexander; but, while making some attempt to give antiquity an exotic aspect by means of marvels or technological wonders, medieval writers were quite unable to create a convincing historical setting; and thus in all important matters of social life and organization they projected the western European world of the 12th century back into the past. Similarly, historical and contemporary geography were not kept separate. The result is often a confused jumble, as, for example, in the Anglo-Norman (Anglo-Norman literature) Hue de Rotelande's Protesilaus, in which the characters have Greek names; the action takes place in Burgundy, Crete, Calabria, and Apulia; and Theseus is described as “king of Denmark.” This lavish use of exotic personal and geographical names and a certain irresponsibility about settings was still to be found in some of Shakespeare's romantic comedies: the “seacoast of Bohemia” in The Winter's Tale (Winter's Tale, The) is thoroughly medieval in its antecedents. In the medieval period, myth and folktale and straightforward fact were on an equal footing. Not that any marvel or preternatural happening taking place in secular (as opposed to biblical) history was necessarily to be believed: it was simply that the remote times and regions were convenient locations for picturesque and marvellous incidents. It is, indeed, at precisely this point that the transition begins from the concept of romance as “past history in the vernacular” to that of “a wholly fictitious story.”

Medieval verse romances

Arthurian romance (Arthurian legend)
The matter of Britain
      In his Historia regum Britanniae, Geoffrey Of Monmouth “invented history” by drawing on classical authors, the Bible, and Celtic (Celtic literature) tradition to create the story of a British kingdom, to some extent paralleling that of Israel. He described the rise of the British people to glory in the reigns of Uther Pendragon and Arthur, then the decline and final destruction of the kingdom, with the exile of the British survivors and their last king, Cadwalader. Romances that have Arthur or some of his knights as main characters were classified as matière de Bretagne (Arthurian legend) by Jehan Bodel (Bodel, Jehan) (fl. 1200) in a well-known poem. There is in this “matter of Britain” a certain amount of material ultimately based on the belief—probably Celtic in origin—in an otherworld into which men can penetrate, where they can challenge those who inhabit it or enjoy the love of fairy women. Such themes appear in a highly rationalized form in the lays (lais) of the late 12th-century Marie De France, although she mentions Arthur and his queen only in one, the lay of Lanval.

      It was Chrétien de Troyes (fl. 1160–85) who in five romances (Erec; Cligès; Lancelot, ou Le Chevalier de la charrette; Yvain, ou Le Chevalier au lion; and Perceval, ou Le Conte du Graal) fashioned a new type of narrative based on the matter of Britain. The internal debate and self-analysis of the roman d'antiquité is here used with artistry. At times, what seems to matter most to the poet is not the plot but the thematic pattern he imposes upon it and the significance he succeeds in conveying, either in individual scenes in which the action is interpreted by the characters in long monologues or through the work as a whole. In addition to this, he attempts what he himself calls a conjointure—that is, the organization into a coherent whole of a series of episodes. The adventures begin and end at the court of King Arthur; but the marvels that bring together material from a number of sources are not always meant to be believed, especially as they are somehow dovetailed into the normal incidents of life at a feudal court. Whatever Chrétien's intentions may have been, he inaugurated what may be called a Latin tradition of romance—clear, hard, bright, adorned with rhetoric, in which neither the courtly sentiment nor the enchantments are seriously meant. Chrétien had only one faithful follower, the trouvère Raoul de Houdenc (fl. 1200–30), author of Méraugis de Portlesguez. He shared Chrétien's taste for love casuistry, rhetorical adornment, and fantastic adventure. For both of these authors, elements of rhetoric and self-analysis remain important, although the dose of rhetoric varies from one romance to another. Even in Chrétien's Perceval, ou Le Conte du Graal (“Perceval, or the Romance of the Grail”)—the work in which the Grail appears for the first time in European literature—the stress is on narrative incident interspersed with predictions of future happenings and retrospective explanations. Arthurian romances of the period 1170–1250 are romans d'aventure, exploiting the strange, the supernatural, and the magical in the Arthurian tradition. A number (for example, La Mule sans frein [“The Mule Without a Bridle”], c. 1200, and L'Âtre périlleux [“The Perilous Churchyard”], c. 1250) have as their hero Arthur's nephew Gawain, who in the earlier Arthurian verse romances is a type of the ideal knight.

Love (courtly love) as a major theme
      The treatment of love varies greatly from one romance to another. It is helpful to distinguish sharply here between two kinds of theme: the one, whether borrowed from classical antiquity (such as the story of Hero and Leander or that of Pyramus and Thisbe, taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses) or of much more recent origin, ending tragically; the other ending with marriage, reconciliation, or the reunion of separated lovers. It is noteworthy that “romance,” as applied to a love affair in real life, has in modern English the connotation of a happy ending. This is also true of most Old French love romances in verse: the tragic ending is rare and is usually linked with the theme of the lover who, finding his or her partner dead, joins the beloved in death, either by suicide or from grief.

The Tristan story
      The greatest tragic love story found as a romance theme is that of Tristan and Iseult. It was given the form in which it has become known to succeeding generations in about 1150–60 by an otherwise unknown Old French poet whose work, although lost, can be reconstructed in its essentials from surviving early versions based upon it. Probably closest in spirit to the original is the fragmentary version of c. 1170–90 by the Norman poet Béroul. From this it can be inferred that the archetypal poem told the story of an all-absorbing passion caused by a magic potion, a passion stronger than death yet unable to triumph over the feudal order to which the heroes belong. The story ended with Iseult's death in the embrace of her dying lover and with the symbol of two trees growing from the graves of the lovers and intertwining their branches so closely that they could never be separated. Most later versions, including a courtly version by an Anglo-Norman poet known only as Thomas (Thomas The Rhymer), attempt to resolve the tragic conflict in favour of the sovereignty of passion and to turn the magic potion into a mere symbol. Gottfried von Strassburg's German (German literature) version, Tristan und Isolde (c. 1210), based on Thomas, is one of the great courtly romances of the Middle Ages; but, although love is set up as the supreme value and as the object of the lovers' worship, the mellifluous and limpid verse translates the story into the idyllic mode. Another tragic and somewhat unreal story is that told in the anonymous Chastelaine de Vergi (c. 1250), one of the gems of medieval poetry, in which the heroine dies of grief because, under pressure, her lover has revealed their secret and adulterous love to the duke of Burgundy. The latter tells it to his own wife, who allows the heroine to think that her lover has betrayed her. The theme of the dead lover's heart served up by the jealous husband to the lady—tragic, sophisticated, and far-fetched—appears in the anonymous Chastelain de Couci (c. 1280) and again in Daz Herzmaere by the late 13th-century German poet Konrad von Würzburg. The theme of the outwitting of the jealous husband, common in the fabliaux (fabliau) (short verse tales containing realistic, even coarse detail and written to amuse), is frequently found in 13th-century romance and in lighter lyric verse. It occurs both in the Chastelain de Couci and in the Provençal romance Flamenca (c. 1234), in which it is treated comically.

The theme of separation and reunion
      But the theme that has left the deepest impress on romance is that of a happy resolution, after many trials and manifold dangers, of lovers' difficulties. As has been seen, this theme was derived from late classical Greek romance (Hellenistic romance) by way of Apollonius of Tyre and its numerous translations and variants. A somewhat similar theme, used for pious edification, is that of the legendary St. Eustace (Eustace, Saint), reputedly a high officer under the Roman emperor Trajan, who lost his position, property, and family only to regain them after many tribulations, trials, and dangers. The St. Eustace theme appears in Guillaume d'Angleterre, a pious tale rather than a romance proper, which some have attributed to Chrétien de Troyes.

      A variant on the theme of separation and reunion is found in the romance of Floire et Blancheflor (c. 1170), in which Floire, son of the Saracen “king” of Spain, is parted by his parents from Blancheflor, daughter of a Christian slave of noble birth, who is sold to foreign slave dealers. He traces her to a tower where maidens destined for the sultan's harem are kept, and the two are reunited when he gains access to her there by hiding in a basket of flowers. This romance was translated into Middle High German, Middle Dutch, Norse, and Middle English (as Floris and Blancheflur, c. 1250) and in the early 13th century was imitated in Aucassin et Nicolette, which is a chantefable (a story told in alternating sections of sung verse and recited prose) thought by some critics to share a common source with Floire et Blancheflor. In it, the roles and nationality, or religion, of the main characters are reversed; Nicolette, a Saracen slave converted to Christianity, who proves to be daughter of the king of Carthage, disguises herself as a minstrel in order to return to Aucassin, son of Count Gavin of Beaucaire. Jean Renart's L'Escoufle (c. 1200–02) uses the theme of lovers who, accidentally separated while fleeing together from the emperor's court, are eventually reunited; and the highly esteemed and influential Guillaume de Palerne (c. 1200) combines the theme of escaping lovers with that of the “grateful animal” (here a werewolf, which later resumes human shape as a king's son) assisting the lovers in their successful flight. The popular Partenopeus de Blois (c. 1180), of which 10 French manuscripts and many translated versions are known, resembles the Cupid and Psyche story told in the Roman writer Apuleius' Golden Ass (2nd century AD), although there is probably no direct connection. In the early 13th-century Galeran de Bretagne, Galeran loves Fresne, a foundling brought up in a convent; the correspondence between the two is discovered, and Fresne is sent away but appears in Galeran's land just in time to prevent him from marrying her twin sister, Fleurie.

      The theme of a knight who undertakes adventures to prove to his lady that he is worthy of her love is represented by a variety of romances including the Ipomedon (1174–90) of Hue de Rotelande and the anonymous mid-13th-century Anglo-Norman Gui de Warewic. Finally, there are many examples of the “persecuted heroine” theme; in one variety a person having knowledge of some “corporal sign”—a birthmark or mole—on a lady wagers with her husband that he will seduce her and offer proof that he has done so (this is sometimes called the “Imogen theme” from its use in Shakespeare's Cymbeline). The deceit is finally exposed and the lady's honour vindicated. In the early 13th-century Guillaume de Dôle by Jean Renart, the birthmark is a rose; and in the Roman de Violette, written after 1225 by Gerbert de Montreuil, it is a violet. Philippe de Beaumanoir's La Manekine (c. 1270), Jean Maillart's La Contesse d'Anjou (1361), and Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale (after 1387) all treat the theme of the tribulations of a wife falsely accused and banished but, after many adventures, reunited with her husband.

Medieval prose romances

Arthurian themes
      The Arthurian prose romances arose out of the attempt, made first by Robert De Boron in the verse romances Joseph d'Arimathie, ou le Roman de l'estoire dou Graal and Merlin (c. 1190–1200), to combine the fictional history of the Holy Grail with the chronicle of the reign of King Arthur. Robert gave his story an allegorical meaning, related to the person and work of Christ. A severe condemnation of secular chivalry and courtly love characterize the Grail branch of the prose Lancelot-Grail, or Vulgate, cycle as well as some parts of the post-Vulgate “romance of the Grail” (after 1225); in the one case, Lancelot (here representing fallen human nature) and, in the other, Balain (who strikes the Dolorous Stroke) are contrasted with Galahad, a type of the Redeemer. The conflict between earthly chivalry and the demands of religion is absent from the Perlesvaus (after 1230?), in which the hero Perlesvaus (that is, Perceval) has Christological overtones and in which the task of knighthood is to uphold and advance Christianity. A 13th-century prose Tristan (Tristan de Léonois), fundamentally an adaptation of the Tristan story to an Arthurian setting, complicates the love theme of the original with the theme of a love rivalry between Tristan and the converted Saracen Palamède and represents the action as a conflict between the treacherous villain King Mark and the “good” knight Tristan.

      In the 14th century, when chivalry enjoyed a new vogue as a social ideal and the great orders of secular chivalry were founded, the romance writers, to judge from what is known of the voluminous Perceforest (written c. 1330 and still unpublished in its entirety), evolved an acceptable compromise between the knight's duty to his king, to his lady, and to God. Chivalry as an exalted ideal of conduct finds its highest expression in the anonymous Middle English Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight (c. 1370), whose fantastic beheading scene (presumably taken from a lost French prose romance source) is made to illustrate the fidelity to the pledged word, the trust in God, and the unshakable courage that should characterize the knight.

Structure
      The Vulgate Lancelot-Grail cycle displays a peculiar technique of interweaving that enables the author (or authors) to bring together a large number of originally independent themes. The story of Lancelot, of Arthur's kingdom, and the coming of Galahad (Lancelot's son) are all interconnected by the device of episodes that diverge, subdivide, join, and separate again, so that the work is a kind of interlocking whole, devoid of unity in the modern sense but forming as impregnable a structure as any revolving around a single centre. One of its most important features is its capacity for absorbing contrasting themes, such as the story of Lancelot's love for Guinevere, Arthur's queen, and the Quest of the Grail; another feature is its ability to grow through continuations or elaborations of earlier themes insufficiently developed. The great proliferation of prose romances at the end of the Middle Ages would have been impossible without this peculiarity of structure. Unlike any work that is wholly true to the Aristotelian principle of indivisibility and isolation (or organic (organic unity) unity (unities)), the prose romances satisfy the first condition, but not the second: internal cohesion goes with a tendency to seek connections with other similar compositions and to absorb an increasingly vast number of new themes. Thus the prose Tristan brings together the stories of Tristan and Iseult, the rise and fall of Arthur's kingdom, and the Grail Quest. It early gave rise to an offshoot, the romance of Palamède (before 1240), which deals with the older generation of Arthur's knights. A similar example of “extension backward” is the Perceforest, which associates the beginnings of knighthood in Britain with both Brutus the Trojan (reputedly Aeneas' grandson and the legendary founder of Britain) and Alexander the Great and makes its hero, Perceforest, live long before the Christian era.

Later developments
      The Arthurian prose romances were influential in both Italy (Italian literature) and Spain (Spanish literature); and this favoured the development in these countries of works best described as romans d'aventure, with their constantly growing interest in tournaments, enchantments, single combat between knights, love intrigues, and rambling adventures. In Italy, early prose compilations of Old French epic material from the Charlemagne cycle were subsequently assimilated to the other great bodies of medieval French narrative fiction and infused with the spirit of Arthurian prose romance. The great Italian heroic and romantic epics, Matteo Boiardo's Orlando innamorato (1483) and Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1516), are based on this fusion. The serious themes of the Holy Grail and death of Arthur left no mark in Italy. The romantic idealism of Boiardo and Ariosto exploits instead the worldly adventures and the love sentiment of Arthurian prose romance, recounted lightly and with a sophisticated humour.

      In Spain the significant development is the appearance, as early as the 14th, or even the 13th, century, of a native prose romance, the Amadís de Gaula (Amadís of Gaul). Arthurian in spirit but not in setting and with a freely invented episodic content, this work, in the form given to it by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo in its first known edition of 1508, captured the imagination of the polite society of western Europe by its blend of heroic and incredible feats of arms and tender sentiment and by its exaltation of an idealized and refined concept of chivalry. Quickly translated and adapted into French, Italian, Dutch, and English and followed by numerous sequels and imitations in Spanish and Portuguese, it remained influential for more than four centuries, greatly affecting the outlook and sensibility of western society. Cervantes parodied the fashion inspired by Amadís in Don Quixote (1605); but his admiration for the work itself caused him to introduce many of its features into his own masterpiece, so that the spirit and the character of chivalric romance may be said to have entered into the first great modern novel.

      More important still for the development of the novel form was the use made by romance writers of the technique of multiple thematic structure and “interweaving” earlier mentioned. Like the great examples of Romanesque ornamental art, both sculptural and pictorial, the cyclic (cycle) romances of the late Middle Ages, while showing a strong sense of cohesion, bear no trace whatever of the classical concept of subordination to a single theme: an excellent proof, if proof were needed, of the limited relevance of this concept in literary aesthetics. Even those romances which, like the Amadís and its ancestor, the French prose Lancelot, had one great figure as the centre of action, cannot be said to have progressed in any way toward the notion of the unity of theme.

The spread and popularity of romance literature
      This is as true of medieval romances as of their descendants, including the French and the English 18th-century novel and the pastoral (pastoral literature) romance, which, at the time of the Renaissance, revived the classical traditions of pastoral poetry and led to the appearance, in 1504, of the Arcadia by the Italian poet Jacopo Sannazzaro and, in about 1559, of the Diana by the Spanish poet and novelist Jorge de Montemayor. Both works were widely influential in translation, and each has claims to be regarded as the first pastoral romance, but in spirit Diana is the true inheritor of the romance tradition, giving it, in alliance with the pastoral, a new impetus and direction.

      Medieval romance began in the 12th century when clerks, working for aristocratic patrons, often ladies of royal birth such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughters, Marie de Champagne and Matilda, wife of Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, began to write for a leisured and refined society. Like the courtly lyric, romance was a vehicle of a new aristocratic culture which, based in France, spread to other parts of western Europe. Translations and adaptations of French romances appear early in German: the Roman d'Enéas, in a version written by Heinrich von Veldeke before 1186, and the archetypal Tristan romance in Eilhart von Oberge's Tristant of c. 1170–80. In England many French romances were adapted, sometimes very freely, into English verse and prose from the late 13th to the 15th century; but by far the most important English contribution to the development and popularization of romance was the adaptation of a number of French Arthurian romances completed by Sir Thomas Malory (Malory, Sir Thomas) in 1469–70 and published in 1485 by William Caxton under the title of Le Morte Darthur. In the Scandinavian (Scandinavian literature) countries the connection with the Angevin rulers of England led to importation of French romances in the reign (1217–63) of Haakon of Norway (Norwegian literature).

The decline of romance
      As has been seen, in the later Middle Ages the prose romances were influential in France, Italy, and Spain, as well as in England; and the advent of the printed book made them available to a still wider audience. But although they continued in vogue into the 16th century, with the spread of the ideals of the New Learning, the greater range and depth of vernacular literature, and the rise of the neoclassical critics, the essentially medieval image of the perfect knight was bound to change into that of the scholar-courtier, who, as presented by the Italian Baldassare Castiglione in his Il Cortegiano (published 1528), embodies the highest moral ideals of the Renaissance. The new Spanish romances continued to enjoy international popularity until well into the 17th century and in France gave rise to compendious sentimental romances with an adventurous, pastoral, or pseudo-historical colouring popular with Parisian salon society until c. 1660. But the French intellectual climate, especially after the beginning of the so-called classical period in the 1660s, was unfavourable to the success of romance as a “noble” genre. Before disappearing, however, the romances lent the French form of their name to such romans as Antoine Furetière's Le Roman bourgeois (1666) and Paul Scarron's Le Roman comique (1651–57). These preserved something of the outward form of romance but little of its spirit; and while they transmitted the name to the kind of narrative fiction that succeeded them, they were in no sense intermediaries between its old and its new connotations. The great critical issue dominating the thought of western Europe from about 1660 onward was that of “truth” in literature; and romance, as being “unnatural” and unreasonable, was condemned. Only in England and Germany did it find a home with poets and novelists. Thus, while Robert Boyle, the natural philosopher, in his Occasional Discourses (1666) was inveighing against gentlemen whose libraries contained nothing more substantial than “romances,” Milton, in Paradise Lost, could still invoke “what resounds/In fable or romance of Uther's son . . .”

The 18th-century romantic revival (Romanticism)
      The 18th century in both England and Germany saw a strong reaction against the rationalistic canons of French classicism—a reaction that found its positive counterpart in such romantic material as had survived from medieval times. The Gothic (Gothic novel) romances, of which Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764; dated 1765) is the most famous, are perhaps of less importance than the ideas underlying the defense of romance by Richard Hurd in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762). To Hurd, romance is not truth but a delightful and necessary holiday from common sense. This definition of romance (to which both Ariosto and Chrétien de Troyes would no doubt have subscribed) inspired on the one hand the romantic epic Oberon (1780) and on the other the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott. But influential though Scott's romantic novels may have been in every corner of Europe (including the Latin countries), it was the German and English Romantics who, with a richer theory of the imagination than Hurd's, were able to recapture something of the spirit and the structure of romance—the German Romantics by turning to their own medieval past; the English, by turning to the tradition perpetuated by Edmund Spenser and Shakespeare. In the 19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville adapted the European romance to address the distinct needs of a young American republic and literature.

Eugène Vinaver Frederick Whitehead Ed.

Additional Reading
Among older works on romance the most notable are Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1764); George Ellis, Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances, 3 vol. (1805); and Sir Walter Scott, “Essay on Romance” in the Supplement to the 1815–24 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The academic study of romance as a form of imaginative narrative may be said to have begun in 1897 with the publication of W.P. Ker, Epic and Romance (2nd ed. 1908, reprinted 1957), and of George Saintsbury, The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory. (Origins and sources): Edmond Faral, Recherches sur les sources latines des contes et romans courtois du moyen âge (1913); Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (1920, reprinted 1957); Roger S. Loomis, Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes (1949); and Jean Marx, La Légende arthurienne et le Graal (1952). (Nature and development): Fanni Bogdanow, The Romance of the Grail (1966); Eugene Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (1971); and Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery (1966). J.D. Bruce, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1928), at one time the standard work in this field, has now been largely superseded by R.S. Loomis (ed.), Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History (1959). Since 1949 the International Arthurian Society has been publishing an annual Bibliographical Bulletin covering the whole range of Arthurian literature in all languages.

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Universalium. 2010.

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