Mini-documentary: The Romance of the Middle Ages

Man is speaking of men that Romance is reader, that were some team Dochty and Derder, that wheel that God him leaf lent, that Nubin Dedd and Hennes went, of Bevis, Gie and of Gawain, of King Richard and of Owain, of Tristram and of Percival, of Roland, Rhys and Aglavale. Welcome to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. We're down here in the library's book stacks, one of the great storehouses of learning of the world, and the books on these shelves can tell stories about history, about science and culture. But the particular story that we're going to tell today is that of Medieval Romance. Romances are hard to define. They draw on stories from Scandinavia, the sagas, from Middle Eastern folk tales, from chronicles and from history. Most of all, they create narratives that satisfy our desire to tell stories about ourselves, and the shape of those stories has influenced literature from the Middle Ages right through to the present day. In the hundred or so years after the Norman Conquest in 1066, stories that explored people's sense of identity and loyalties were very popular. These could be chronicles or histories, or epic poems such as the famous Song of Roland from the mid-1100s. Romances developed alongside these other forms of composition and share many of their concerns. The Song of Roland is extremely important to French culture. It's the founding text of French literary history. It's the first complete epic poem in Old French and is the most frequently edited text that we have in Old French. This particular manuscript was written in England in the 12th century, some say towards 1130, others towards 1170. The particular opening we have here is at a climactic point in the battle where Roland, the hero of Ansevaux, calls with his horn to Charlemagne to come in and take over now the rearguard is basically defeated. The Song of Roland is related to romance in that the materials that form its story are developed in romance as much as they are in epic. So the story of Charlemagne appears in later English romances, also in the 15th century in French and prose romances. It's also worth saying that the epic and the romance aren't discrete forms. One didn't stop and then the other start. They're both just different modes for expressing similar themes of politics, ideology, religion and chivalry. By the late Middle Ages romance had permeated medieval culture. It survives in all kinds of books, in grand narrative cycles about King Arthur and the Holy Grail, in the but also in their coats of arms and chivalric emblems. It also survives in personal manuscripts and gifts such as this manuscript here, M. S. Ashmore 45, which has a little dedication scene showing a lover giving a book to his beloved. At the bottom of the page there's an inscription with her name, Maid Maria. The characteristic story patterns and imagery of romance also work their way into other kinds of writing. Here for example we have a copy of the great French poem The Romance of the Rose, which caused huge controversy and debate throughout the later Middle Ages. The Romance of the Rose parodies romance conventions and sets them alongside philosophy, satire, comedy and other kinds of writing. On this page here there's a wonderful picture of the God of Love besieging the castle built by jealousy to protect the rose, which is the object of desire for the poem's speaker. Romances were composed, translated and copied throughout Britain in the Middle Ages. One magnificent book which contains romances in Welsh, amongst many other texts, is the Red Book of Caraghast, which now belongs to Jesus College in Oxford. The Red Book of Caraghast is the largest single collection of medieval Welsh literature that has survived to this day. The three romances in this manuscript are Paredir, Owain and Geraint. The Romance of Owain is important partly in relationship to the great 12th century French poet Chrétien de Troyes, and scholars have always been interested in the relationship between the two. It's a story about a young man, Owain, son of Irian, who is part of Arthur's court and he sets out from Arthur's court into the unknown, as it were, and there he goes through a series of adventures, meeting strange people and also lovely girls. A lot of it is very courtly, but there's this very interesting element in which he's brought into association with a lan, and Owain and his lan becomes a central feature of the romance, whereas in native Welsh tradition it's Owain and his ravens which is critical. In the 1470s William Caxton set up a printing business in Westminster, and amongst the earliest books that we know that he printed there was a copy of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which of course contains several romances including the Wife of Bath's Tale, the Knight's Tale and the Franklin's Tale. But even before coming back to England, Caxton had worked on romance books on the continent and we're very lucky that here we have a copy of a book called The Rasul of the Histories of Troy, which is the first book ever published in the English language. You can see here how early printed books were actually made in a way to mimic what manuscripts looked like. Once printing came along manuscript culture still thrived, it didn't go away, and here we have a nice example of a manuscript that's actually copied from a printed book. It was copied by a man called Edward Bannister and he's also had the illustrations added to the manuscript too and coloured in. The end of the Middle Ages was not the end of medieval romance. Romances from Britain and the right through the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Most tellingly, the structures and language of old romances were at the heart of some of the most innovative works of the early modern period, including romances like Ariosto's Orlando Furioso in Italy, Don Quixote in Spanish and in England the works of Shakespeare and Spencer. Many of the playwrights working in early modern London were avid readers of romances. One such was Shakespeare who read Thomas Lodge's very well-known and widely read romance Rosalind that was published several times during the 1590s. Rosalind is the source for Shakespeare's play As You Like It. One of the things for which Shakespeare is well-known is mingling clowns and kings and Pastoral gives him a wonderful opportunity for doing that. He has borrowed from Lodge's romance Rosalind a plot of two girls who fall in love with two brothers but behind that plot lies an outlaw story from the medieval romance Gamelin which is found in manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. Gamelin dates from the 14th century and is deeply concerned with some of the aspects that you still find in early modern Pastoral such as localism, antiquarianism and a fascination with outlawry and the operations of the legal system. Shakespeare's plays in the printed editions of Chaucer were one route by which romance was transferred into the early modern period. Another was provided by the diversification of the formats in which romance started to appear. Here we have an 18th century chapbook of the romance of Guy of Warwick. The main characteristic of the chapbook is that it boils down the essential events of a romance into a much shorter narrative. It will concentrate on the outcomes of battles, sudden defeats of monsters and happy endings. Because this is a stripped down kind of narrative it was therefore could be printed in a much shorter and cheaper format and it therefore allowed a less sophisticated audience access to the stories that had entertained educated readers for many hundreds of years before. By the beginning of the 19th century interest in the ballad tradition, in folk stories and in gothic literature led to a large surge of interest in all things medieval. The author Walter Scott was one great example of someone who used medieval plots and a nostalgia about the middle ages in both his poetry and in his very popular novels such as Ivanhoe. Here on the table we've got another example of a great 19th century medievalist if you like, William Morris. This book is Morris's romance The Well at the World's End. It was published in 1896 at his own Kelmscott Press using handmade paper, hand-cut type and with illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite artist. You can see here how this book is really made to look like a medieval manuscript. The layout, the text and the way that it's been put together are all supposed to evoke the middle ages and particularly that sense of romance and chivalry. Elsewhere on the table we have some examples of how medieval romance has come down to us. This book, an edition of the great medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, partly by J.R.R. Tolkien, was owned by C.S. Lewis. Lewis clearly used this book a lot and in his tiny handwriting he's written notes about the difficult vocabulary of the poem and a little picture of a knight with armour which goes along with what's happening in the poem at this particular moment. Another kind of interest in medieval romance and the middle ages was through antiquarianism and amateur collecting. Over here there's an extraordinary book which belonged to someone called Colonel Moss who was a great collector of early modern books and had a great interest in binding and printing. Here Moss discovered some fragments of medieval romances inside the bindings of early modern books and he's extracted them and stuck them into his own album. And finally we have a copy of the script for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the 1970s film which brilliantly parodies medieval romance in the Knights of the Round Table, in the bloody violence and in the comedy of many of those texts. This copy belongs to Terry Jones who was the co-director of the film and it includes Jones's own little notes and comments and new bits of dialogue and ideas about how to film the shots. As these examples show medieval romance is still really important to the narratives that we tell ourselves and not only in fantasy fiction and in children's literature but also through films, through television drama, in toys and in digital gaming. For all of these reasons and in all of these forms romance is still at the heart of the stories that we live by.