Skip to product information
1 of 1

Cultural Translations in Medieval Romance

Regular price $130.00
Regular price $130.00 Sale price $130.00
Sold out
New approaches to this most fluid of medieval genres, considering in particular its reception and transmission.Romance was the most popular secular literature of the Middle Ages, and has been under...
Read More
  • 14 January 2022
View Product Details
New approaches to this most fluid of medieval genres, considering in particular its reception and transmission.


Romance was the most popular secular literature of the Middle Ages, and has been understood most productively as a genre that continually refashioned itself. The essays collected in this volume explore the subject of translation, both linguistic and cultural, in relation to the composition, reception, and dissemination of romance across the languages of late medieval Britain, Ireland, and Iceland. In taking this multilingual approach, this volume proposes a re-centring, and extension, of our understanding of the corpus of medieval Insular romance, which although long considered extra-canonical, has over the previous decades acquired something approaching its own canon - a canon which we might now begin to unsettle, and of which we might ask new questions.

The topics of the essays gathered here range from Dafydd ap Gwilym and Walter Map to Melusine and English Trojan narratives, and address topics from women and merchants to werewolves and marvels. Together, they position the study of romance in translation in relation to cross-border and cross-linguistic transmission and reception; and alongside the generic re-imaginings of romance, both early and late, that implicate romance in new linguistic, cultural, and social networks. The volume also shows how, even where linguistic translation is not involved, we can understand the ways in which romance moved across cultural and social boundaries and incorporated elements of different genres into its own capacious and malleable frame as types of translatio - in terms of learning, or power, or both.
files/i.png Icon
Price: $130.00
Pages: 282
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Imprint: D.S.Brewer
Publication Date: 14 January 2022
Trim Size: 9.21 X 6.14 in
ISBN: 9781843846208
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: LITERARY CRITICISM / Medieval, Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval, HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / General, European history
REVIEWS Icon
The thirteen essays in this collection are a testament to the critical distance travelled by medieval romance scholars in recent decades. The volume calls for a reconfiguration of critical approaches to romance on several fronts, thereby offering a timely and valuable contribution to wider efforts to challenge certain scholarly preconceptions that have become deeply ingrained in the field.
List of Contributors
List of Abbreviations


Introduction: Insular Romance in Translation: New Approaches
Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch

1. Romantic Wales: Imagining Wales in Medieval Insular Romance
Helen Fulton

2. 'Something remains which is not open to my understanding': Enigmatic Marvels in Welsh Otherworld Narratives and Latin Arthurian Romance
Jessica J. Lockhart

3. The Supernatural Company in Cultural Translation: Dafydd ap Gwilym and the Roman De La Rose Tradition
Victoria Flood

4. Women and Werewolves: William of Palerne in Three Cultures
Helen Cooper

5. 'Better a valiant squire than a cowardly knight': Gender in Guruns strengleikr (The Lay of Gurun)
Carl Phelpstead

6. 'Vinegar upon Nitre'? Walter Map's Romance of 'Sadius and Galo'
Neil Cartlidge

7. The Three Barriers to Closure in Hue de Rotelande's Ipomedon and the Middle English Translations
Rebecca Newby

8. Trojan Trash? The Seege or Batayle of Troye and the Learning of 'Popular' Romance
Venetia Bridges

9. Poaching Romance: Fan Fiction Theory and Shared Medieval Narratives
Cory James Rushton

10. Between Epic and Romance: The Matter of England and the Chansons de Geste
Aisling Byrne

11. Geographies of Loss: Cilician Armenia and the Prose Romance of Melusine
Jan Shaw

12. 'All this will not comfort me': Romancing the Ballad in The Squire of Low Degree
Laura Ashe

13. Merchants in Shining Armour: Chivalrous Interventions and Social Mobility in Late Middle English Romance
Megan G. Leitch

Index