ABSTRACT
The difficulty of being precise about the authorship and audience of the Middle English popular romances is largely due to the fact that the narratives that are conventionally brought together under this term are an extremely varied group. The study of the manuscripts in which the Middle English romances have come down to us has provided the main impulse behind the revisionist view of popular romances. About three-fifths of existing romances from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are extant in four miscellanies in which romances are anthologized with material of a strong didactic or religious cast. The entrepreneur of a bookshop would employ professional or semi-professional scribes to produce manuscripts or, more often, 'booklets' or fascicles. Anyone unpersuaded by the revisionist case faces the difficult task of producing evidence for phenomena which are by their very nature ephemeral. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
