ROMANCE

literary form, usually characterized by its treatment of chivalry, that came into being in France in the mid-12th century. It had antecedents in many prose works from classical antiquity (the so-called Greek romances), but as a distinctive genre it was developed in the context of the aristocratic courts of such patrons as Eleanor of Aquitaine. The Old French word romanz originally meant the speech of the people, or the vulgar tongue, from a popular Latin word, Romanice, meaning written in the vernacular, in contrast with the written form of literary Latin. Its meaning then shifted from the language in which the work was written to the work itself. Thus, an adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1137), made by Wace of Jersey in 1155, was known as Li Romanz de Brut, while an anonymous adaptation (of slightly later date) of Virgil's Aeneid was known as Li Romanz d'Enas; it is difficult to tell whether in such cases li romanz still meant the French version or had already come to mean the story. It soon specialized in the latter sense, however, and was applied to narrative compositions similar in character to those imitated from Latin sources but totally different in origin; and, as the nature of these compositions changed, the word itself acquired an increasingly wide spectrum of meanings. In modern French a roman is just a novel, whatever its content and structure; while in modern English the word romance (derived from Old French romanz) can mean either a medieval narrative composition or a love affair, or, again, a story about a love affair, generally one of a rather idyllic or idealized type, sometimes marked by strange or unexpected incidents and developments; and to romance has come to mean to make up a story that has no connection with reality. For a proper understanding of these changes it is essential to know something of the history of the literary form to which, since the Middle Ages, the term has been applied. The account that follows is intended to elucidate historically some of the ways in which the word is used in English and in other European languages. literary form, usually characterized by its treatment of chivalry, that came into being in France in the mid-12th century. It had antecedents in many prose works from classical antiquity (the so-called Greek romances), but as a distinctive genre it was developed in the context of the aristocratic courts of such patrons as Eleanor of Aquitaine. The romance enjoyed its heyday in France and Germany between the mid-12th and mid-13th century in the works of such masters as Chrtien de Troyes, Benot de Sainte-Maure, and Gottfried von Strassburg. By the time it reached England in about 1250, it was already beginning to show signs of a decline from its original form. The staple subject matter of romance is chivalric adventure. Love stories and religious allegories can often be found interwoven with this material, but they are not essential to it. The majority of romances drew their plots from three basic areas: classical history and legend, the adventures of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (certainly the most significant group), and the doings of Charlemagne and his knights. To these must be added a number of romances concerned specifically with the deeds of English heroes such as Havelock the Dane and Richard Coeur de Lion and a number of other romances, such as Sir Orfeo and Floire et Blancheflor, that belong to no particular cycle. Among the earlier romances were those that took their subjects from classical antiquity. These include the Roman de Thbes and the Roman d'Enas, both adapted from the work of Latin poets. Benot de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, which tells the story of Troy, is notable in this group for containing the first literary treatment of the narrative of Troilus and Cressida, later developed by Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. Also popular were stories based on the life of Alexander the Great, amongst them the Roman d'Alexandre and the later King Alisaunder. The most celebrated romances of the Arthurian cycle were those written in the second half of the 12th century by Chrtien de Troyes. It was he who in Perceval ou li Conte du Graal introduced the theme of the Holy Grail into European literature. The French Arthurian romances were of particular importance for English literature, since they provided the material that Sir Thomas Malory later adapted in Le Morte Darthur (first printed 1485). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written in the mid-14th century and regarded as one of the most beautiful English poems of the Middle Ages, also belongs in this group. Into the third category fall a number of lesser romances about such figures as Roland and Sir Ferumbras, who fought in the campaigns of Charlemagne. It is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the romance that it was written in the vernacular rather than in Latin; this indeed is the original meaning of the Old French word romanz. There are examples of the genre in both verse and prose, though in general prose romances tend to belong to the later period. From the start, these works share a taste for the exotic, the remote, and the miraculous. Descriptive detail is lavish, and love stories on the whole end happilyTristan und Isolde, written by Gottfried von Strassburg in the early 13th century, being a notable exception. Overall, it can be said that by comparison with the epic form of the chanson de geste (Song of deeds), which it superseded, the romance shows a general sophistication of narrative method and psychological insight. In later centuries the romance underwent various transformations. The continued popularity of one form of it, the prose romance of 15th- and 16th-century Spain, is attested by Cervantes' satire in Don Quixote. Although the chivalric ideal of the perfect knight was essentially medieval, lingering echoes of romance can be found in the changing connotations of the word itself. So, at the end of the 18th century the Romantic movements in England and Germany were in some respects an attempt to turn back to the spirit of medieval romance in reaction against the prevailing philosophies of the time. And even today, in the popular romantic novel, there can be detected a debased survival of some of the original values. Additional reading Among older works on romance the most notable are Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1764); George Ellis, Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances, 3 vol. (1805); and Sir Walter Scott, Essay on Romance in the Supplement to the 181524 edition of the Encyclopdia Britannica. The academic study of romance as a form of imaginative narrative may be said to have begun in 1897 with the publication of W.P. Ker, Epic and Romance (2nd ed. 1908, reprinted 1957), and of George Saintsbury, The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory. (Origins and sources): Edmond Faral, Recherches sur les sources latines des contes et romans courtois du moyen ge (1913); Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (1920, reprinted 1957); Roger S. Loomis, Arthurian Tradition and Chrtien de Troyes (1949); and Jean Marx, La Lgende arthurienne et le Graal (1952). (Nature and development): Fanni Bogdanow, The Romance of the Grail (1966); Eugene Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (1971); and Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery (1966). J.D. Bruce, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1928), at one time the standard work in this field, has now been largely superseded by R.S. Loomis (ed.), Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History (1959). Since 1949 the International Arthurian Society has been publishing an annual Bibliographical Bulletin covering the whole range of Arthurian literature in all languages.