ABSTRACT
Critical responses to medieval romance have reflected its diversity and disparate quality: analyses have placed the genre alternatively as mimetic and symbolic, and have ranged from the sociohistorical to the psychoanalytical. Erich Auerbach, in his monumental study Mimesis, points to the archetypal and symbolic nature of the quest motif while addressing its mimetic relationship to ‘class ethics’, and a specific courtly agenda. 1 The mimetic perspective is adopted in Insular Romance by Susan Crane, who isolates the political structures of class and nationhood in romance narrative; 2 similarly, Lee C. Ramsay in Chivalric Romance points to the social themes of kingship and marriage. 3 The notion of chivalry has been minutely analysed, in particular by French writers such as Georges Duby, who explores the growth of the chivalric class in twelfth-century France. For Duby, romance narratives reflect the need to construct a genealogy and an authoritative chivalric identity, the marvellous landscapes of romance becoming a vehicle for the fantasy of the jeune chevalier in search of his fortune. 4 More recently, studies such as R. Howard Bloch’s Medieval Misogyny 5 or Jean-Charles Huchet’s L’Amour discourtois 6 expose the underlying patriarchal structures of medieval narratives, focusing in particular on the treatment of women in the lyrics of the troubadours, but referring outwards to romance.
