ABSTRACT
Well before Dorothy Everett remarked upon their “excessive” fascination with marvels, the audacity of the genre of Middle English romance had been raising critical eyebrows. It has certainly seemed a genre in need of critical discipline. The corpus of Middle English romances confronts people with an unruly jumble of redactions, variants, analogues, story-traditions. Marked by an institutional history combining textual and contextual over-abundance with critical disdain, romance has needed sorting out. Middle English romance occupies an ambivalent position relative to critical discipline and the disciplinary. On the one hand, romance has benefitted from the disciplining of editors and textual scholars: excellent editions of these diverse texts are now abundant, a real achievement for medieval studies as a discipline, one that ensures popular romance a continued readership. Motivated by the kinds of textual excesses that gave earlier critics pause, many of today's readers of romance celebrate the pleasures with renewed seriousness.
