Melissa Furrow. Expectations of Romance. The Reception of a Genre in Medieval England; The Exploitations of Medieval Romance. Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts

Abstract

The series Studies in Medieval Romance, which started in 2003 with Carol Heffernan’s The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance, publishes monographs, conference volumes and thematically focussed collections of essays. To date it comprises some fifteen volumes. The three books under consideration have been published in close succession and provide a good overview of the current state of research in the field. I will begin with the earliest of the three volumes and proceed in chronological order. Melissa Furrow’s monograph is the product of an engagement with the topic that lasted more than a decade, during which time she published preliminary versions of her research as articles and papers. Yet it would be wrong to think that the current volume was merely a (re-)collection of those individual essays. It is a well-structured, in-depth study of how the first readers of medieval romances responded to these texts. The opening chapter (1–42), though starting with a reasoned discussion of the problems of terminology and a short presentation of the most important studies in the field, does not tackle the thorny question of ‘What is a romance?’ (which is dealt with in chapter 2), but gives the reader a guided tour of the various medieval responses to romances. Furrow, in the tradition of New Historicism, takes the tiles used to pave the chapterhouse of the Benedictine Abbey of Chertsey as the starting point for her exploration of how medieval audiences reacted to romances. The chapterhouse tiles pose something of a puzzle to scholars since they depict scenes and protagonists from Tristram and Isolde – material that seems hardly fit for a monastic environment. In order to try and find an answer to this puzzle, Furrow changes track (or rather medium) and analyses a wide variety of comments made by medieval authors, poets, chroniclers, theologians etc. on the use or misuse and the qualities of romances. The evidence quoted suggests a division into two camps – one that sees romances as frivolous distractions leading readers into sin, the other defending them as texts providing models of exemplary behaviour or, at least, some much-needed relaxation of the mind. Both, however, ostensibly agree on the utilitarian framework as relevant for the evaluation of romances – thus the function of the ‘relaxation of the mind’ is no virtue per se but derives its value from the fact that it helps to refresh the reader’s mind in order to continue all the better with his ‘serious work’ afterwards. Yet Furrow also identifies a more hidden dimension, “a hint that frivolities and lies, ornament and fiction, have their own attraction that cannot be fully acknowledged or explained” (42). The second chapter (43–94), as announced, tries to tackle the term ‘romance’ itself. It is in its medieval use vague and highly generalized, which is reflected in the modern critics’ inability to agree on a universally accepted definition or even description of the genre. Furrow, in response to Jameson’s structuralist view of genres and Jauss’s concept of horizons of expectations, proposes a more flexible approach that does not lay claim to universal validity. She correctly points out that systems of genre shift with time, place and language. Thus, a 14th-century English translation of a 12th-century French romance has a different genre-affiliation, even though the text may remain the same. The new concept Furrow proposes is more