The king's champion: re-enacting Arthurian romance at the English coronation banquet

Recent scholarship has emphasised the extent to which historical events are reflected in medieval romance. This paper seeks to draw attention to an instance where that relationship appears to have been inverted and a romance motif was carefully recreated at a particularly important event in the historical world. From the fourteenth century onwards, a mounted knight ceremonially rode into the English coronation banquet and issued a challenge to all assembled. The visual detail of the ritual strikingly echoes that of the romance motif of the “intruder at the feast”. This motif crops up in numerous romances, and is particularly associated with Arthurian narratives where it usually serves as a catalyst for adventure, providing the court and the king with an opportunity to justify their authority and reputation. This paper analyses the precise nature of the historical ritual and explores how the romance resonances of the ceremony at the coronation feast could be used to underpin political authority and courtly identity. In doing so, it seeks to underscore the centrality of Arthurian romance to English monarchical self-imagining and the symbolic power which could be ascribed to the genre's themes and conventions.

The circulation of romances from England in late-medieval Ireland

The fifteenth century saw a striking upturn in the number of texts from foreign vernaculars that were translated into Irish. Indeed, one might go so far as to speak in terms of a ‘translation trend’ in Ireland during the mid to late fifteenth century. A notable feature of this trend is that a particularly high number of these Irish translations are of romances; contextual and textual evidence suggests that the original exemplars for many of these translated texts appear to have come from England, though not all of them were necessarily in English. Irish translations of eight romances have survived to the present day: Guy of Warwick; Bevis of Hampton; La Queste de Saint Graal; Fierabras; Caxton’s Recuyell of the Histories of Troie; William of Palerne; the Seven Sages of Rome; and Octavian. This paper addresses two aspects of these texts of particular relevance to romance scholars who do not work within the sphere of Celtic studies. Firstly, it argues that certain aspects of the dissemination and reception of romance in Ireland are quite distinctive. Manuscript and textual evidence suggests that the religious orders, particularly the Franciscans, seem to have played a role in the importation and translation of these narratives. Secondly, examination of the Irish versions of romance tends to bear out an observation made by Flower many years ago, but not pursued by subsequent scholars: ‘texts of an unusual kind were current in Ireland, and it may be that interesting discoveries are to be made here’. Certain narrative features of several of these Irish translations diverge from all the surviving versions of the relevant romance in other languages and may witness to a variant exemplar that has since been lost from its own linguistic corpus.

Medieval romance, English

Annotated bibliography of romance from medieval England. It focuses on medieval romances in various languages written in England or translated into English before 1500.

Os romances gráficos: inspiração literária, observações sociais e a estética de Posy Simmonds

Pós-graduação em História - FCLAS

Análise de similaridades e diferenças no uso de marcadores de reformulação e frases lexicais, em um corpus paralelo, constituído de contos e romances de Claice Lispector, e as respectivas traduções para o inglês e italiano

Pós-graduação em Estudos Linguísticos - IBILCE

Lectures on English poets.

Bound in brown cloth; brown leather backstrip, stamped in gold.

La Calprenède's romances and the restoration drama.

"Reprinted from the University of Nevada studies, vol. II, no. 3 (1910), and vol. III, no. 2 (1911)."

The life work of Henri René Guy de Maupassant, embracing romance, travel, comedy and verse, for the first time complete in English.

Library has number 378.

Poems, chiefly lyrical : from romances and prose-tracts of the Elizabethan Age, with chosen poems of Nicholas Breton /

"780 copies of this edition printed for England and America ..."

Illustrations of northern antiquities, from the earlier Tentonie and Scandinavian romances; being an abstract of the Book of heroes, and Nibelungen lay; with translation of metrical tales, from the Old German, Danish, Swedish, and Icelandie languages; with notes and dissertations.

Abstract of the Eyrbiggiasaga; being the early annals of that district of Iecland lying around the promontory called Snæfells, by W. S. [i.e. Sir Walter Scott] Glossary, by R. Jamieson.

King Arthur: stories from Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur retold in modern English by Mary MacLeod.

Mode of access: Internet.

An alphabet of tales : an English 15th century translation of the Alphabetum narrationum of Étienne de Besançon /

Formerly attributed to Étienne de Besançon but apparently the work was not composed until some years after his death in 1292; more probably by Arnoldus of Liége. cf. Catalogue of romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the Brit. Museum, v. 3, p. 423-438; The Library, Jan. 1905, p. 94-101.

Treason and trial : consuetudines and law in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and the lais of Marie de France

Treason, in the romances of Chrdtien de Troyes and the lais of Marie de France, is explored more often as afin' amor problem than as a legal issue with its concomitant sociopolitical ramifications. It is precisely the historical function of literature within the ambit of court culture that appears to have shaped the legal context of the poems of Chrdtien de Troyes and the lais of Marie de France. Counterpoising the literary treatment of treason in Le Chevalier au Lion and Lanval with actions and definitions of treachery by contemporary, twelfth-century chronicle and customary law sources reveals that the conceptualized, fictional world of Chrdtien's Yvain closely reflects the workings of the Capetian society Chretien experienced. Marie's Lanval reflects as well the historical impressions of the Angevin court with which she had familiarity, a court whose concept of treason leaned more toward the maiestas concept found in Roman jurisprudence tradition.