Shedding light on British Medieval Romance, this volume is part of the Studies in Medieval Romance series, and it developed out of the fourteenth biennial 'Romance in Medieval Britain' conference held at the University of Bristol in 2014. The eleven chapters explore textual materiality and verse as key methods of transmission for late British romance texts dating from the early fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Most chapters consider manuscript texts, but a few extend the focus into sixteenth-century print.
Although we have extensive scholarly discussions of prosody in Chaucer and Gower, and although, more recently, intense studies of late medieval alliterative verse have emerged, scholarly attention to the sounds, verse forms, and metres within Middle English metrical romance has been slight. This volume significantly furthers discussion of verse forms and metres, as well as sound, memory, and orality in British romance. In his chapter, "The Singing of Middle English Romance: Stanza Forms andContrafacta," Ad Putter explores the singing that likely constituted many romance readings and performances, and he argues that music would thus play an important role in transmission. Specific references to singing (or hearing narratives sung) within romance narratives have long been recognized, but Putter finds specific verse and stanzaic features in Sir Tristrem, King Horn and Bevis of Hampton that share elements with both ballads and short popular songs. The Tristrem-stanza, a form shared with other genres (including political poems, carols, ABCs, and set pieces within dramatic plays), also suggests the versatility of a song form easily held in memory and transferred across venues. The substantial musical evidence from Anglo-Norman romance contexts is particularly useful forHorn and Bevis and helps Putter argue that we should "put minstrels and the musical performance of medieval romance back in the frame" of our discussions and inquiry (71). His chapter carefully examines rhymes, stanzaic verse forms, bobs, and other sound-features of romances, reminding us to consider and to look/listen for the "lost soundscape of medieval romance" (72).
A number of essays in the collection focus on versification and prosody. Derek Pearsall's essay, "The Metre of the Tale of Gamelyn," traces various verse forms that impacted Early Middle English Romance: those from Latin, Anglo-Norman, French, as well as Old English, each tradition with a different formal representation of verse and metre. Middle English poetic lines, he reminds us, could be formed from syllabic, accentual-syllabic, or accentual verse, from rhyming verse as well as alliterative models. Pearsall claims that the resulting challenges of performing or scanning many Middle English romance lines arise precisely from the melding of rich verse traditions. He also argues convincingly for the presence of sophistication and purposeful metric experimentation in popular romance that readers have often overlooked. Thorlac Turville-Petre's essay, "Is Cheuelere Assigne an Alliterative Poem?" examines the fifteenth-century Cheuelere Assigne from BL MS Cotton Caligula A, ii and claims that its metre reflects a Northeast Midlands origin, but that it has been adapted to the expectations and dialects of southern English speakers. Rigorously analyzing specific words and metric features of the text, Turville-Petre successfully demonstrates that the adaptation of one regional aesthetic practice to another may well account for some of the verse and metric irregularity found in the Middle English Cheuelere Assigne.
In "Rhyme Royal and Romance," Elizabeth Robertson foregrounds the rhyme royal stanza and considers how rarely it occurs in Middle English romance. Although Robertson admires Chaucer's use of this complex verse form in Troilus and Criseyde as well as in the Man of Law's Tale, she claims that rhyme royal's syntactical challenges and its heavy rhyming couplet stanza closures hobble the forward-moving, action-focused aims of Middle English romance narrative. This works well in Chaucerian narrative where it pushes romance toward philosophy in the case ofTroilus and Criseyde, and toward the saint's life in the case of the Man of Law's Tale. Robertson notes, "Like the Spenserian stanza and the sonnet the rhyme-royal stanza anticipates, the pattern is well-suited for the development of an idea" (58). It creates a more bounded poetic space that focuses attention and thought, a space that overtly celebrates poetic skill. So while it occurs in religious verse, dream visions, saints' lives, and philosophical debate poems, it is rarely chosen to deliver romance narrative. Although Robertson's chapter focuses heavily on Chaucer, she argues that John Metham's mid-fifteenth-century romance,Amoryus and Cleopes, brilliantly deploys the form for self-reflection and for expansive abstract thought, thereby anticipating the sonnets of Surrey and Shakespeare.
Focusing on specific linguistic structures found within the poetic lines of several romances, Donka Minkova looks for potential links between linguistic features and genre, and linguistic features and audience, in her essay "Language Tests for the Identification of Middle English Genre." She examines adjective-noun phrases and predicate adjectives, finding that texts thought to originate in, or retain features of, traditional oral culture do not differ significantly (in terms of adjectival use) from those thought to reflect more literary, scribal culture. Her data is based on linguistic features found in popular romances, like Sir Orfeo and The King of Tars, but also within the elite poetry of Chaucer and the Gawain Poet. Minkova suggests more common adjectives typically are not located on a heavy beat (or stress); so when adjectives do fall on the stress, they deserve careful consideration. Finally, since recent linguistic research has found that the presence of predicate adjectives may signal more intimate and informal discourse in Middle English, Minkova claims this linguistic feature in medieval romance deserves further study.
Nicholas Myklebust addresses "The Problem of John Metham's Prosody," defending Metham's 1449 Amoryus and Cleopes by locating in it, not a failed attempt to perform or extend Chaucer's decasyllabic verse, but the construction of a daring and innovative poetic form that lacks the more uniform features typical of Chaucerian verse and its fifteenth-century devotees. Because Chaucer's prosody so dominates our understanding and discussion of fifteenth-century poetry, writers who do not imitate Chaucer have been often dismissed. Myklebust claims that Lancastrian poets--like Osbern Bokenham, George Ashby, John Metham, and others--should be understood as attempting to "self-authorize" and explore non-Chaucerian verse forms. The argument faces considerable scholarly skepticism, but that is precisely its strength, for, as Myklebust asserts, "Metham's romance serves no formal master and fits neatly into no formal category." He continues, "Indeed, the poem's difficulty lies in its form...specifically, in its prosody, which is neither fixed nor formless," but rather hints at patterns as well as disrupts them (151). Because Metham's poetic lines range in length from eight to nineteen syllables and consist of four to eight beats (stresses), they prevent readers or performers from relying on predictable prosodic patterns. This, along with a rhyme scheme often based on rhyme royal but straying now away, now back toward it, leads Myklebust to argue that Metham's verse is "organic" and "agile" in its refusal of the "clockwork stiffness" of Chaucer's decasyllables (164). To my mind, this claim oversimplifies Chaucerian verse and its rhythmic and auditory play, strain, and dance. However, Myklebust's intricate reading of Metham locates subtle poetic contours and complex verse designs. Furthermore, he undertakes calculations of syllabic and metric patterns that effectively point to the hybrid, experimental, sometimes excessive, potentially ironic, and sophisticated play in Metham's verses, thus offering a fresh and vigorous reassessment.
Essays that focus on manuscript and print culture include one by Rhiannon Purdie that locates evidence of "memorial transmission" in two sixteenth-century copies of the Scottish King Orphius located close to one another in both time and space. Her essay, "King Orphius and Sir Orfeo, Scotland and England, Memory and Manuscript," carefully compares lines, word-choices, and narrative details in the Middle EnglishOrfeo and in two sixteenth-century Scottish variants. Although scholars have tended to discount memorial transmission in favor of scribal transmission, particularly after the rise of print, Purdie presents evidence that establishes the potential of oral performance and memory to shape even print romance narrative. Also working with Sir Orfeo, although in its Middle English manuscript context, Michelle De Groot explores ways the "miscellany" context may shape reader response. In her chapter, "Compiling Sacred and Secular: Sir Orfeo and the Otherworlds of Medieval Miscellanies," she acknowledges that readers expected to "return to [a manuscript] many times throughout their lives," and so "multiple interpretations and responses would have arisen both to each poem and to the book as a whole" (196). Consequently, she notes, each miscellany may encourage multiple interpretations, depending on external context but also on internal features--the various potential juxtapositionings of individual texts within the compilation. Her essay focuses on the three manuscripts that contain Sir Orfeo (the Auchinleck, NLS Advocates' MS 19.2.1; Bodley MS Ashmole 61; and BL MS Harley 3810), finding that religious material in the compilations potentially shape readings of the secular romance. Orfeo's attention to both the natural and supernatural, the earthly and unearthly afterlife shares concerns found in religious texts like Saint Patrick's Purgatory, The Harrowing of Hell, penitential psalms, and short devotional poems, the kinds of short religious texts common to miscellanies. The confusion, grief, and uncertainty about how to discern good from evil in the Orfeonarrative may take on a more religious valence when read alongside traditional Christian material. Rather than separating secular romance from devotional narrative, De Groot argues that the texts, in context and juxtaposed with one another, "blur the boundary between these categories," demonstrating "that these spheres of discourse are deeply intertwined" and "multivocal" (208).
Romance and its early English print history is the focus of Jordi Sánchez-Martí's essay, "The Printed Transmission of Medieval Romance from William Caxton to Wynkyn de Worde, 1473-1535." Sánchez-Martí reminds us that Caxton "pioneered the publication of romances [in Northwest Europe], since his editions of Lefèvre's Recueil, both in English and in French, are the first to appear in the region encompassing France, the Low Countries, and Britain" (175). Caxton's printed Morte Darthur(1485) also predates the French printing of lengthy Arthurian prose romance by three years. But notably, he eschewed printing native English verse romance, preferring his own translations from French prose; however, none of his translations were reprinted in his own lifetime--they simply did not achieve wide readership or demand. Wynkyn de Worde's subsequent acquisition of Caxton's press refocused the business so it met the needs of a larger and socially more diverse audience. When de Worde reprinted Malory's Morte in 1498, he revised Caxton's preface, making it more inviting to readers beyond the nobility. He also began printing quartos in 1505, following a Continental shift to that less expensive format. From 1498-1535, de Worde published some eighteen editions of verse romances and twenty of prose. Understanding the English audience perhaps better than Caxton did, he almost always printed romances that had English manuscript antecedents, even if they also circulated on, or were originally sourced from, the Continent. Like Caxton, de Worde found metrical romances far more popular with the English audiences than prose; and eventually his press suspended prose romance printing, even though it continued to produce romances in verse after 1518.
Rebecca Lyons's chapter, "The Woodville Women, Eleanor Haute, and the British Library Royal MS 14 E III," examines a manuscript compiled in northern France in the early fourteenth-century, later owned by Charles V and Charles VI of France, and subsequently in the possession of John, Duke of Bedford. Passing through a few more hands, it is given to Eleanor Haute (1482) who signed it, and who in turn, may have given it to Elizabeth Woodville, Queen and wife of Edward IV. Inscriptions in the manuscript include E. Wydevyll (understood to be Elizabeth Woodville, the Queen), two of her daughters (Elizabeth of York and Cecily), and her sister, Joan (Jane) Grey. Lyons considers the family signatures were likely inscribed when the four women sought sanctuary at Westminster (May 1483-January 1484) in fear of Richard III. This context may explain Elizabeth's and Cecily's signatory declaration; for each signs her name, followed by the phrase "the Kingys dowther," perhaps as an act of royal self-assertion at a time Richard had declared them bastards, or potentially as a statement of resistance to Richard III's usurpation. Although the signatures in the manuscript are the main focus for the essay, Lyons analysis also considers the romances within the manuscript--the grail Estoire, the Queste, and the Mort Artu--to have offered the women comfort and consolation.
Reflecting the growing literate populations of bourgeois readers, popular Middle English romances are most often found in delicate, inexpensive and visually unremarkable codices and early printed books, but a few are present in deluxe bespoke manuscripts, created for wealthy patrons, including some with illustrations, like the Auchinleck, Bodley MS 264, BL MS Harley 326, and the Pierpont Morgan Library MS 876. These texts are the focus of Carol Meale's chapter, "Deluxe Copies of Medieval English Romance: Scribes and Book Artists." And these are exceptional codices, for only five percent of the manuscripts containing Middle English romances include illustrations. Excluding the problematic images in the Gawain manuscript, Meale explores patronage and production, ownership and readership issues as well as the illustrations in these four codices. (The essay is generously accompanied by nine reproduced manuscript images that greatly assist her argument.) Meale claims that the early fourteenth-century Auchinleck was likely produced by scribes and artists not typically engaged in constructing secular literary manuscripts. But with increased trade, literacy, and wealth in London, by the time Harley 326 was produced, 140 years after the Auchinleck, "pictorial images in copies of romance became commonplace," particularly in the woodcuts of printed romance narratives (114).
Each essay within this volume offers thoughtful readings of an important feature of British romance: manuscript production or provenance, the transmission of aesthetic forms or narratives, or the performance of sound, prosody, and verse. Some chapters may have special appeal to scholars in manuscript studies, others will hold importance for early print studies, and still others offer insights for scholars reconsidering formalism and late medieval poetry. All chapters enhance our understanding of romance and its late medieval material and poetic transmissions.