As a literary genre, the chivalric romance is a type of prose and verse narrative that was popular in the noble courts of high medieval and early modern Europe. These were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often featuring a chivalric knight-errant portrayed as having heroic qualities, who goes on a quest. It developed further from the epics over time; in particular, "the emphasis on love and courtly manners distinguishes it from the chanson de geste and other kinds of epic, in which masculine military heroism predominates."
Popular literature also drew on themes of romance, but with ironic, satiric, or burlesque intent. Romances reworked legends, fairy tales, and history to suit the readers' and listeners' tastes, but by they were out of fashion, and Miguel de Cervantes famously burlesqued them in his novel Don Quixote. Still, the modern image of "medieval" is more influenced by the romance than by any other medieval genre, and the word medieval evokes knights, damsels in distress, dragons, and other romantic tropes.
Originally, romance literature was written in Old French (including Anglo-Norman), Old Occitan, and Early Franco-Provençal, and later in Old Portuguese, Old Spanish, Middle English, Old Italian (Sicilian poetry), and Middle High German. During the early 13th century, romances were increasingly written as prose. In later romances, particularly those of French origin, there is a marked tendency to emphasize themes of courtly love, such as faithfulness in adversity.
Form Like the chansons de geste and unlike the later form of the novel, the genre of romance dealt with traditional themes. These were distinguished from earlier epics by heavy use of marvelous events, the elements of love, and the frequent use of a web of interwoven stories, rather than a simple plot centered on a single main character. The earliest forms were invariably in verse, but the 15th century saw many in prose, often retelling the older rhymed versions.
The romantic form pursued the wish-fulfillment dream where the heroes and heroines were considered representations of the ideals of the age while the villains embodied threats to their ascendancy. There is also a persistent archetype, which involved a hero's quest. This quest or journey served as the structural framework that held the narrative together. With regards to the structure, scholars recognize the similarity of the romance to folk tales. Vladimir Propp identified a basic form for this genre, which involved an order that began with initial situation, followed by departure, complication, first move, second move, and resolution. This structure is also applicable to romance narratives.
Cycles
Overwhelmingly, these were linked in some way, perhaps only in an opening frame story, with three thematic cycles of tales: these were assembled in imagination at a late date as the "Matter of Rome" (actually centered on the life and deeds of Alexander the Great conflated with the Trojan War), the "Matter of France" (Charlemagne and Roland, his principal paladin) and the "Matter of Britain" (the lives and deeds of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, within which was incorporated the quest for the Holy Grail); medieval authors explicitly described these as comprising all romances.
The three "matters" were first described in the 12th century by French poet Jean Bodel, whose epic ("Song of the Saxons") contains the lines:
In reality, a number of "non-cyclical" romances were written without any such connection; these include such romances as King Horn, Robert the Devil, Ipomadon,Purdie, Rhiannon. 2001. Ipomadon. Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society. Emaré, Havelok the Dane,Roswall and Lillian, Le Bone Florence of Rome, and Amadas.
Indeed, some tales are found so often that scholars group them together as the "Constance cycle" or the "Crescentia cycle"—referring not to a continuity of character and setting, but to the recognizable plot.
Sources Many influences are clear in the forms of chivalric romance.
Folklore and folktales The earliest medieval romances dealt heavily with themes from folklore, which diminished over time, though remaining a presence. Many early tales had the knight, such as Sir Launfal, meet with fairy ladies, and Huon of Bordeaux is aided by King Oberon, but these fairy characters were transformed, more and more often, into wizards and enchantresses. Morgan le Fay never loses her name, but in Le Morte d'Arthur, she studies magic rather than being inherently magical. Similarly, knights lose magical abilities. Still, fairies never completely vanished from the tradition. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late tale, but the Green Knight himself is an otherworldly being.
Despite the position, both advocated and depicted in fiction, of fairies as demons and working with witches in the Reformation and post-Reformation eraRonald Hutton, The Witch, p237 , romances continued to portray positive depictions of fairies.Ronald Hutton, The Witch, p240
Early persecuted heroines were often driven from their husbands' homes by the persecutions of their mothers-in-law, whose motives are seldom delineated, and whose accusations are of the heroines' having borne monstrous children, committed infanticide, or practiced witchcraft — all of which appear in such fairy tales as The Girl Without Hands and many others. As time progressed, a new persecutor appeared: a courtier who was rejected by the woman or whose ambition requires her removal, and who accuses her of adultery or high treason, motifs not duplicated in fairy tales. While he never eliminates the mother-in-law, many romances such as Valentine and Orson have later variants that change from the mother-in-law to the courtier, whereas a more recent version never goes back.
The motif of a heroine forced to flee her father's kingdom because of his attempt to marry her is common in fairy tales. The commonest variants are found in such tales as Allerleirauh, The She-Bear, Donkeyskin, and The King who Wished to Marry His Daughter,Maria Tatar, p 213, The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, which end, Cinderella style, with three balls and the heroine's marriage. It also appears in variants of "The Girl Without Hands" with the Calumniated Wife occurring after her marriage.Margaret Schlauch, Chaucer's Constance and Accused Queens, New York: Gordian Press 1969 p 64 Only this second form appears in chivalric romance: Nicholas Trivet's Chronique Anglo-Normane, the source of both Chaucer's The Man of Law's Tale and John Gower's variant in Confessio Amantis,Laura A. Hibbard, Medieval Romance in England p24-5 New York Burt Franklin,1963 and in Emaré.Emaré: Introduction, Edited by Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, Originally Published in The Middle English Breton Lays, Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995
Religious practices The Arthurian cycle as a medieval work has also been noted to contain many magical or supernatural references. Drawing from many different sources, some notable allusions include elements of Christianity as well as elements of Celtic legends (an example being the multiple references to the Holy Grail).
Medieval epic The Medieval romance developed out of the medieval epic, in particular the Matter of France developing out of such tales as the Chanson de Geste, with intermediate forms where the feudal bonds of loyalty had giants, or a magical horn, added to the plot. The epics of Charlemagne, unlike such ones as Beowulf, already had feudalism rather than the tribal loyalties; this was to continue in romances.
Contemporary society The romance form is distinguished from the earlier epics of the Middle Ages by the changes of the 12th century, which introduced courtly and chivalrous themes into the works. This occurred regardless of congruity to the source material; Alexander the Great featured as a fully feudal king. Chivalry was treated as continuous from Roman times. This extended even to such details as clothing; when in the Seven Sages of Rome, the son of an (unnamed) emperor of Rome wears the clothing of a sober Italian citizen, and when his stepmother attempts to seduce him, her clothing is described in medieval terminology. When Priam sends Paris to Greece in a 14th-century work, Priam is dressed in the mold of Charlemagne, and Paris is dressed demurely, but in Greece, he adopts the flashier style, with multicolored clothing and fashionable shoes, cut in lattice-work—signs of a seducer in the era.
Historical figures reappeared, reworked, in romance. The entire Matter of France derived from known figures, and suffered somewhat because their descendants had an interest in the tales that were told of their ancestors, unlike the Matter of Britain. Richard Coeur de Lion reappeared in romance, endowed with a fairy mother who arrived in a ship with silk sails and departed when forced to behold the sacrament, bare-handed combat with a lion, magical rings, and prophetic dreams. Hereward the Wake's early life appeared in chronicles as the embellished, romantic adventures of an exile, complete with rescuing princesses and wrestling with bears. Fulk Fitzwarin, an outlaw in King John's day, has his historical background a minor thread in the episodic stream of romantic adventures.
Classical origins Some romances, such as Apollonius of Tyre, show classical pagan origins. Tales of the Matter of Rome in particular may be derived from such works as the Alexander Romance. Ovid was used as a source for tales of Jason and Medea, which were cast in romance in a more fairy-tale-like form, probably closer to the older forms than Ovid's rhetoric. It also drew upon the traditions of magic that were attributed to such figures as Virgil.
Less directly, the folkloric connections between fairies and the dead drew on classical myths.Ronald Hutton, The Witch, Sir Orfeo retells the tale of Orpheus as King Orfeo rescuing his queen from the king of Fairy. Arthur of Little Britain states that Prosperine is the "Queen of Fayryre".
Courtly love The new courtly love was not one of the original elements of the genre, but quickly became very important when introduced.
It was introduced to the romance by Chrétien de Troyes, combining it with the Matter of Britain, new to French poets. In Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart (unlike his earlier Erec and Enide), the behavior of Lancelot conforms to the courtly love ideal; it also, though still full of adventure, devotes an unprecedented amount of time to dealing with the psychological aspects of the love. By the end of the 14th century, counter to the earliest formulations, many French and English romances combined courtly love, with love sickness and devotion on the man's part, with the couple's subsequent marriage; this featured in Sir Degrevant, Sir Torrent of Portyngale, Sir Eglamour, and William of Palerne. Ipomadon even explicitly describes the married couple as lovers, and the plot of Sir Otuel was altered, to allow him to marry Belyssant. Similarly, Iberian romances of the 14th century praised monogamy and marriage in such tales as Tirant lo Blanc and Amadís de Gaula.
Early forms