Introduction

In her magisterial study of English romance Professor Helen Cooper maintains ‘that whilst romance motifs remain superficially the same, sometimes even down to verbal detail, the usage and understanding of them changes over time, rather in the way that a word may change meaning’.1 This is of course quite correct, but in order to understand the evolution of romance we must understand its medieval form and in order to do that we must understand genre. This is where my own study differs from current scholarly attitudes to romance, including that of Cooper. Cooper is concerned to chart the historical meaning and variation of romance themes in the Middle Ages and Renaissance and to show Renaissance adaptations of medieval romance narratives and motifs; both she and others are wary of definition. My own concern, in contrast, is specifically with medieval romance and, more particularly, with how to decide which of its various motifs and conventions are merely commonplace and which are essential to the genre: I will establish how to define the genre rather than chart the history of its motifs. Dorothy Everett argued a half-century ago that we can and should attempt as concrete a definition of romance as possible,2 and although genres can be complex and often curious entities we nonetheless need to understand how genre itself operates in order to maximize our appreciation and understanding and teaching of any work of art. This holds true for all genres but it is especially true of medieval romance. Accordingly, one of the central tenets of this book is that genre and genre study are crucial to the meaning and interpretation of any work of art, not least because it is impossible fully to appreciate or understand a work of art – literary or otherwise – without first understanding its generic features.