Lucy Brookes’s Convention and the Individual in Medieval English Romance is a carefully structured and persuasive study of romance’s contribution to the emergence of literary individuality after the twelfth century. An essential read for students of romance and its conventions, the book also offers a timely and much-needed intervention in the fraught scholarly debate on medieval interiority and selfhood. Its greatest strength lies in its original and unfamiliar mode of exploring literary interiority, one that fundamentally re-evaluates how subjectivity is detected and how psychological realism is defined in medieval texts.
Brookes challenges the assumption that literary subjects are found in the “direct, vocalised, or narrated access to the minds” of characters (9). This allows her to turn on its head the critical commonplace that Middle English popular romances are less interested in subjectivity than their French counterparts because they reduce soliloquy and explicit descriptions of interiority and intention. “It is not actually realistic,” Brookes claims, “to have unrestricted access to the interior lives of others” (106). In this light, the English romances are not deficient but have found “more efficient ways of depicting the literary individual or subject” (13-14), ways that involve elements of convention—such as plot scaffolding or formulaic description—usually interpreted as limiting individuality.
Her new reading of medieval romance takes convention seriously as part of “romance’s capacity to depict compelling people” (3) rather than preventing subjectivity. Brookes argues that interiority in romance is generated by convention itself, while also insisting that the individual of romance is sporadic. Individuality emerges sporadically, in the inconsistencies, inexplicable emotional eruptions, or actions that resist narrative logic—that is, in moments that break away from convention. The individual in romance, therefore, is most visible when texts self-consciously play with and strain against their own conventions.
After an introduction that problematises the slippery notions of self, individuality, identity, personhood, and interiority and that engages critically with a vast body of scholarship on the historical emergence of the individual, the subsequent chapters focus on specific conventions. They each range widely across texts, bringing together popular and canonical romances in both English and French, a deliberate choice as the author argues that these two traditions have too long been treated separately. On top of an impressive number of romances, Brookes also refers to a wide selection of intertexts, ranging from Middle English carols and Voragine’s Golden Legend to Anselm and Abelard’s commentaries and Geoffroi de Charny’s treatise on knighthood. This diversification of sources allows her to situate medieval romance in its cultural and intellectual context and makes for a rich and enjoyable read.
In the first chapter, “Romance Telling,” Brookes looks at what she calls the successes of romance, moments where “romance [is] telling us how things should be” (15); in particular, those moments when romance tells us its protagonist is “the best.” Here, she isolates and interrogates the ubiquitous romance convention of superlative statements. Instead of passing over these assertions as commentators have often done, declaring them so conventional as to be meaningless, Brookes asks: what does it mean for every titular knight of every romance to be the best?
The chapter focuses on the romance of Amis and Amiloun, a very clever choice, as the story, by having two protagonists equal in every way, presents “an explicit provocation to the romance structure” (30): how can two people be “the best”? Brookes partly answers the question through the romance’s hagiographic features. The two brothers are Christlike in their perfection and thus exist on a higher plane akin to the “simple perfection of heaven” (36) where unity, not individuality, is the goal. The strength of the chapter lies in its detailed attention to language and grammar. Brookes shows how in the world of the romance, where “comparatives reign supreme” (36), everyone else is presented as plural and expendable but Amis and Amiloun are incomparable—individuals in their superlative unity.
After the successes of romance, Chapter 2, “Romance Showing,” focuses on moments of personal and emotional failure. The chapter offers an affectual reading of The Squire of Low Degree, Le Bone Florence de Rome, Lybeaus Desconus, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Brookes here draws on scholarship of emotion and affect that defines affect as “a force of creation, and change” (58). Her focus is on the productive power of negative affect, particularly through Sianne Ngai’s theory of “ugly feelings,” or emotion as dissent. Moments of crying or distress, she argues, “can be seen as a protest against or challenge to the generically and socially conventional nature of the narratives in which [they are] found” (55), and it is in these moments that the sporadic individual can be seen.
The chapter offers a particular focus on some romances’ conventional happy endings. An interesting example here is that of le Bone Florence de Rome, where the heroine, who suffered unimaginable torments throughout the romance, is finally vindicated and her tormentors punished. But as they are burned in front of her, Florence expresses woo. This woo, Brookes shows, creates a form of dissonance; romance protagonists do not usually feel negative emotions during their happy endings. While her emotion does not subvert the plot—endings, like characters, remain eventually “subordinate to convention”—it does register a form of protest. Such contradictory affect, a flash of interiority that cannot be contained, is what ultimately builds a “spectral sense of interiority” in many romances (86).
In the third chapter, “Plotting Romance,” Brookes tackles yet another element of romance that is not usually theorised in criticism: plot. Here she deploys a very useful image to describe the work of plot in romance. Instead of a skeleton, as plot is often described in the novel, implying a hidden, interior structure, Brookes describes plot in romance as scaffolding. “[T]he structure of romance,” she argues, “does not come from an individual protagonist’s inner reality, but rather from exterior forces” (89). This telling image reflects well how plot works in romance: it is what visibly holds the narrative together, “providing certain limitations to the scope and final shape of a given text, but also potentially obscuring what is beneath,” namely, the romance individual (89). Beginning with readings of Chrétien de Troyes, Brookes shows that romance plotting is self-conscious and metatextual from the genre’s outset. The chapter then turns to King Horn and Emaré, with references to other romances including Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, Octavian, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.
One of her main arguments in this chapter concerns character intention and motivation. The scaffold of conventional and predictable plot often makes irrelevant the question of personal motivation. In King Horn, for example, which follows an exile-and-return structure, the protagonist’s motivation—his desire to return home—is provided by the plot: “Interiority is housed, therefore, not simply in the textual figure of Horn but in the plot as a whole: it is inbuilt, in a sense, in the genre of romance” (110). Here, as elsewhere, Brookes makes the simple but original and insightful argument that what has previously been argued to impede interiority in romance—in this case conventional plot—is precisely where interiority can be found.
Chapter 4, “The Character of Romance,” makes a similar claim for romance’s use of character types and stock figures. Surrounding a single protagonist with a catalogue of flat minor characters is not, Brookes argues, “an entirely unrealistic way to portray the world” (117). Through readings of allegorical texts, including sermons and Piers Plowman, she shows that types situate the individual within a “complex social universe” (134), thereby producing realism. The chapter starts with a useful literature review of the notion of character in medieval literature and the novel, followed by a new reading of Sir Orfeo and, finally, an exploration of three different types of stock figures in romances: stewards, servants, and the loathly lady.
In this last section, Brookes shows that by paying attention to these minor characters we can discover flashes of interiority precisely when they do not act as we expect them to. Brookes thus encourages readers to resist reading romances for convention. In this way, she offers a speculative new reading of Heurodis’s abduction in Sir Orfeo. She argues that we are, as readers, so used to the conventional plots of romance that we assume that Heurodis is taken without her consent and we disregard the elements in the romance that allow for a more ambiguous reading. If we read romances according to their conventional happy endings—in this case, Heurodis is brought back to her husband and his court—we risk to “miss the glimpses of interiority, and selfhood, that do occur in these popular texts” (130).
The final chapter focuses on Malory’s Le Morte Darthur which, Brookes says, “represents something of an ‘end’ for medieval English romance” (144). It is a fitting text to end her study with, as the issue of character in the Morte has been the object of much critical debate. Brookes presents a lively picture of the debate by deep-diving into a heated back-and-forth argument between two Malory scholars: one argues that Malory’s protagonists are indeed characters who can evolve and learn from experience while the other states that his characters’ “heads have no insides” (151) and that reading them as “modern” or “like us” is entirely mistaken. Brookes agrees with neither but argues that “textual figures with some psychological depth” can be found in Malory not by searching for “personal” feelings or characters that feel like us but rather by reading for the “impersonal” (153). This form of reading leads her to claim that “in Malory, we might most clearly see character as shared between the narrative and protagonists” (173). In particular, Brookes’s close study of Lancelot shows that he emerges as a proto-novelistic character when a “split between protagonist and genre” occurs (157), that is, when we see Lancelot struggling to be Lancelot. This reading crystallises her broader argument that individuality in romance is most visible in moments of dissonance, when heroes “confront the burdens of their superlative greatness” (176) and become self-conscious of the conventional scripts they inhabit.
Convention and the Individual in Medieval English Romance is an important and learned study of romance, which engages meaningfully with its conventions as well as its wider cultural and intellectual context in order to rethink some of the genre’s key issues. Crucially, the book offers an essential and persuasive new account of individuality and interiority in medieval romance.