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Chivalric romance

Type of prose and verse narrative

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Popular literature also drew on themes of romance, but with ironic, satiric, or burlesque intent. Romances reworked legends, fairy tales, and history to suit the readers' and listeners' tastes, but by c. 1600 they were out of fashion, and Miguel de Cervantes famously burlesqued them in his novel Don Quixote. Still, the modern image of "medieval" is more influenced by the romance than by any other medieval genre, and the word medieval evokes knights, damsels in distress, dragons, and other romantic tropes.

Originally, romance literature was written in Old French (including Anglo-Norman), Old Occitan, and Early Franco-Provençal, and later in Old Portuguese, Old Spanish, Middle English, Old Italian (Sicilian poetry), and Middle High German. During the early 13th century, romances were increasingly written as prose. In later romances, particularly those of French origin, there is a marked tendency to emphasize themes of courtly love, such as faithfulness in adversity.

Form

Like the chansons de geste and unlike the later form of the novel, the genre of romance dealt with traditional themes. These were distinguished from earlier epics by heavy use of marvelous events, the elements of love, and the frequent use of a web of interwoven stories, rather than a simple plot centered on a single main character. The earliest forms were invariably in verse, but the 15th century saw many in prose, often retelling the older rhymed versions.

The romantic form pursued the wish-fulfillment dream where the heroes and heroines were considered representations of the ideals of the age while the villains embodied threats to their ascendancy. There is also a persistent archetype, which involved a hero's quest. This quest or journey served as the structural framework that held the narrative together. With regards to the structure, scholars recognize the similarity of the romance to folk tales. Vladimir Propp identified a basic form for this genre, which involved an order that began with initial situation, followed by departure, complication, first move, second move, and resolution. This structure is also applicable to romance narratives.

Cycles

Overwhelmingly, these were linked in some way, perhaps only in an opening frame story, with three thematic cycles of tales: these were assembled in imagination at a late date as the "Matter of Rome" (actually centered on the life and deeds of Alexander the Great conflated with the Trojan War), the "Matter of France" (Charlemagne and Roland, his principal paladin) and the "Matter of Britain" (the lives and deeds of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, within which was incorporated the quest for the Holy Grail); medieval authors explicitly described these as comprising all romances.

The three "matters" were first described in the 12th century by French poet Jean Bodel, whose epic Chanson des Saisnes ("Song of the Saxons") contains the lines:

Ne sont que III matières à nul homme atandant:
De France et de Bretaigne et de Rome la grant

Translation:

There are only three subject matters for any discerning man:
That of France, that of Britain, and that of great Rome.

In reality, a number of "non-cyclical" romances were written without any such connection; these include such romances as King Horn, Robert the Devil, Ipomadon, Emaré, Havelok the Dane,Roswall and Lillian, Le Bone Florence of Rome, and Amadas.

Indeed, some tales are found so often that scholars group them together as the "Constance cycle" or the "Crescentia cycle"—referring not to a continuity of character and setting, but to the recognizable plot.

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