ABSTRACT
Medieval romance as a genre was separate from epic or allegory, though it had elements of both. It allowed a casual interplay between history and miracle. The medieval romance writers suggest the infinity which everywhere touches upon the world they display without resort to the fully sustained fourfold system of medieval allegory: the literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical levels. Some of the characteristics of medieval romance are those commonly found in oral literature, and we know that many romances were never written down and so have perished. The strong emblematic power of the romance genre tended to protect unskilled practitioners. The suspicion that the romance world is essentially a lie – not only because it is unhistorical but because it is not equivalent to the actual world and not realizable within it – underlies much renaissance and post-renaissance criticism of the form.
