Title: MELISSA FURROW. Expectations of Romance: The Reception of a Genre in Medieval England.
Abstract:Expectations of Romance: The Reception of a Genre in Medieval England presents a detailed study of the reception of Anglo-Norman and Middle English romances in England from the eleventh to the fifteen...Expectations of Romance: The Reception of a Genre in Medieval England presents a detailed study of the reception of Anglo-Norman and Middle English romances in England from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. It draws upon genre theory, psychological readings of romance texts, book history and the evidence provided by physical objects which suggest the consumption of romances. The result is a detailed and intriguing study of the ways in which medieval readers may have approached and understood these texts. Furrow opens with a detailed analysis of one aspect of material culture in the Middle Ages. She argues that the appearance of the figures of Tristan and Isolde in the Chertsey tiles—a series of pictorial tiles found at Chertsey Abbey in Surrey and probably dating from the 1270s—do not merely show that romance reading was tolerated within the monastic community, but suggest an active investment of money and, presumably, some kind of emotional commitment to the text. The lack of any photograph or illustration of the tiles within the book is somewhat frustrating but the argument itself is intriguing, pointing towards a hitherto understudied readership for the romance. Medieval monastic readings of the romance are further explored through both condemnations of the romance and a discussion of Robert Manning’s Chronicle and Handling Synne, which Furrow suggests see ‘entertainment as the hook by which one draws the uneducated towards their own improvement’ (p. 22). The chapter concludes with a discussion of Walter Map’s twelfth-century De societate Sadii et Galonis, which Furrow suggests is a romance ‘about romance’ (p. 36), explicitly weighted towards entertainment rather than didacticism yet retaining an ambivalent hope that ‘readers will turn the frivolities of the story to wisdom’ (p. 42).Read More
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-06-16
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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