ABSTRACT
There are sixteen Greek romances, written after 1100, which survive in whole or in part. All but one, the seventeenth-century Erotokritos, written in Crete in close proximity to the thought-world of post-Renaissance Italy, belong to the Middle Ages. In a Greek context the Middle Ages can be said to end with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, and activity in writing and copying romances in the medieval tradition ceases during the following century. All but one of these romances are in verse, and it is for this reason, as well as to emphasize the links between most of them and similar literature in the West, that I have adopted the generic term ‘romance’ rather than ‘novel’. The distinction is in any case peculiar to English and particularly inappropriate when one is dealing with Greek fiction, whether ancient or medieval, in that no Greek generic term was ever proposed for this kind of literature before the nineteenth century.
