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Uni International 300 N. Z eeb Road Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 8300274 Hudson, Harriet Elizabeth MIDDLE ENGLISH POPULAR ROMANCES The Ohio Stale University Ph.D. 1982 University Microfilms International300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 Copyright 1982 by Hudson, Harriet Elizabeth All Rights Reserved MIDDLE ENGLISH POPULAR ROMANCES DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Harriet Elizabeth Hudson, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1982 Reading Committee: Approved By Christian Zacher Lisa Kiser Daniel Barnes Department ox English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the Graduate School of The Ohio State University and the Graduate Committee of the Depart ment of English whose recommendation and grant of both a Presidential Fellowship and an Alumni Research Award gave me the leisure and means to pursue original research for this dissertation. I would also like to thank the British and Bodleian Libraries and the Fellows of Lincolns' Inn for allowing me access to their collections and assisting me in my studies. Finally, I must express deepest gratitude to my parents whose support made possible the production of this dissertation. VITA July 14, 1949......... Born - Knoxville, Tennessee 1971 .................. B.A., Queens College, Charlotte, North Carolina 1971-1973.............. Teaching Associate, English Department, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1973 .................. M.A., The Ohio State University 1974-1977............... Lecturer, English Department, The Ohio State University 1977-1980. ...... Teaching Associate, English Department, The Ohio State University 1982 .................. Lecturer, English Department, The Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English Literature Studies in Middle English Literature. Professor Christian Zacher Studies in Folklore. Professor Daniel Barnes Studies in Nineteenth Century British Literature. Professor Marlene Longenecker Studies in Modern British and American Literature. Professor John Muste TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................ ii V I T A ....................................... iii Chapter I. INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM WITH "POPULAR ROMANCE" .................. 1 II. EARLY FRENCH ROMANCES AND THEIR ENGLISH ADAPTATIONS ................ 24 III. THE MINSTRELS .................. 76 IV. MANUSCRIPTS OF MIDDLE ENGLISH ROMANCES AND THEIR AUDIENCES .... 127 V. LATE MEDIEVAL POPULAR ROMANCE: WILLIAM CAXTON AND WYNKEN DE WORDE . 169 VI. CONCLUSION....................... 216 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................. 233 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM WITH "POPULAR ROMANCE" The Middle English romances, especially those of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, have not lacked scholarly attention. But, as many have noted, it is dif ficult to compose a general description of the works because of the number and diversity of the texts. About the only term that is frequently applied to many of them in common is "popular." The romances have been so called since they first attracted scholarly attention in the eighteenth century as "popular antiquities." But "popular" has taken on new, more precise meanings since then and what was once merely a polite interest in antiquities has become the systematic study of a variety of phenomena which collectively is called popular culture. Now that this study has come of age, it is time to re-examine the "popularity" of the medieval English romances. Often the term "popular romance" has been applied very generally to narratives which are said to have appealed to "unsophisticated" or middle class audiences and to texts which are judged to be artistically inferior. Helaine 1 Newstead, in her introduction to the volume on romances in Severs' Manual, notes that the Middle English romances are generally "less sophisticated and less polished than the French, possibly in response to the audiences that they were designed to reach in fourteenth and fifteenth century England, and possibly because the authors were writers of modest literary ability."1 However, scholars do not agree as to the nature of this audience. Katheryn Hume, writing about the composition of the romances, says that those written in English before 1350 were intended to entertain minimally educated native s p e a k e r s .2 But Laura Hibbard Loomis in her study of the Auchinleck manuscript (a large volume of miscellaneous material, including sixteen romances, among them such familiar titles as Beves of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, and Sir Orfeo) suggests that this book, which dates from 1330, was designed for an audience of London civil servants who had a better than average education.3 Thus, here we discover two eminent writers on romance disagreeing about a fundamental point: the level of education of the audience of these texts. The audiences of the English romances are frequently said to have been made up of members of the middle or lower classes, with the result that "popular" is used as a kind of catch-all term to describe those narratives which are unconcerned with or show little awareness of the life style of the courtly aristocracy. For example, Gamelyn, with its outlaw theme, manifests the less-refined world and sentiments of the Robin Hood ballads, whose atmosphere is far from courtly. Other romances, like King Horn and Hc;velok the Dane (which John Halverson says "is essentially middle class ... a peasant fantasy of class ambition and resentment"), seem almost a-courtly in that they do not dwell on the manners and accoutrements of aristocratic life.^ Conversely, romances like Sir Launfal and Sir Degrevant, whose emphasis on such details is thought to reflect an outsider's vicarious fantasy about how the upper classes lived, are also called "popular." Derek Pearsall says that all Middle English romances were popular literature (excepting those in alliterative verse and the works of Chaucer), since they were composed for "lower or lower-middle-class audiences who wanted to read what they thought their social betters read."5 To return to Newstead's assessment of the romances, we should note that she attributes their lack of sophistication to their authors as well as to their audiences. To many scholars, Newstead included, "popular" connotes artistic inferiority. Loomis articulates this view in her evaluation of the Auchinleck romances, which are especially relevant to the study of medieval "popular" literature since this manuscript is one of the few examples of commercial book production from the period: 4 With the exception of this ... [Sir Orfeo] ... and a few others, most people would agree that these English romances are thoroughly con ventionalized and pedestrian in style. They must be put down to the authorship of men of generally humble literary attainments, of no literary ambition, and nearly all of whom were possessed of the same "patter" of well-worn cliches, the same stereotyped formulas of expression, the same stock phrases, the same stock rhymes, which Chaucer was to parody in such masterly fashion in Sir Thopas.6 But before we judge a work to be "artistically inferior," we ought to have access to the standards by which it was written. As John Cawelti asks in his work on contemporary forms of popular culture and art, "Is there a distinctive aesthetics of popular culture, or are the popular arts simply degenerated or naive forms of the fine arts?"? His own answer, which has gained wide acceptance, is that there is a distinctive "popular" aesthetic, or rather a plurality