The Exploitations of Medieval Romance

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Laura Ashe, Ivana Djordjević, Judith Elizabeth Weiss
Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 2010 - Literary Criticism - 191 pages
Important and wide-ranging studies of the ideological exploitations performed by and upon the medieval romance.

As one of the most important, influential and capacious genres of the middle ages, the romance was exploited for a variety of social and cultural reasons: to celebrate and justify war and conflict, chivalric ideologies, and national, local and regional identities; to rationalize contemporary power structures, and identify the present with the legendary past; to align individual desires and aspirations with social virtues. But the romance in turn exploitedavailable figures of value, appropriating the tropes and strategies of religious and historical writing, and cannibalizing and recreating its own materials for heightened ideological effect. The essays in this volume consider individual romances, groups of writings and the genre more widely, elucidating a variety of exploitative manoeuvres in terms of text, context, and intertext.

Contributors: Neil Cartlidge, Ivana Djordjevic, Judith Weiss, Melissa Furrow, Rosalind Field, Diane Vincent, Corinne Saunders, Arlyn Diamond, Anna Caughey, Laura Ashe

 

Contents

Promiscuous Liaisons
15
Using Misusing and Confusing
28
The Exploitation of Ideas of Pilgrimage and Sainthood
43
Chanson de geste as Romance in England
57
Patterns of Availability and Demand in Middle English
73
Reading a ChristianSaracen Debate in FifteenthCentury Middle
90
Magic and Exploitation in Medieval English
108
Gardens in Middle English Romance
125
Exploitation of Genre
139
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Limits of Chivalry
159
Index of Manuscripts
173
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About the author (2010)

LAURA ASHE is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor at Worcester College, Oxford.

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