This book is an attempt to remedy this by making some of these romances available to the student or lay reader who lacks specialized knowledge of Middle English, with the hope that a clearer understanding of the poems will encourage not only enjoyment but also further study.Īfter centuries of being dismissed “a wit-besotting trash of books” written by “literary hacks”, the Middle English romances have only recently been recognized as intelligent and evocative texts helping to illuminate medieval insular culture. Where the romances have been printed, they have normally been reproduced as critical editions in their original language, or translated into heavily abridged children’s versions, but few have been published as scholarly close line translations with notes.
Whatever Chaucer and his contemporaries thought of romances, they would have needed some personal familiarity with the stories and texts for comic tales such as Sir Thopas to be understood.Ī century ago, _Beowulf_ faced the same problem that the Middle English romances still face: no modern translations were published because few had heard of the poem– because there were no modern translations published. But the romances evidently enjoyed popularity among all English classes, and the genre itself continued to flourish and evolve down to present-day novels and movies. Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas has been assumed to be a satire of the romances’ clichéd formulas and unskilled authors. Yet the genre of Middle English romance has only recently begun to attain critical respectability, dismissed as “vayn carpynge” in its own age and generally treated by twentieth-century critics as a junk-food form of medieval literature. They are not only fun but indicate a great deal about the ideals and values of the society they were written in. The popular romances of medieval England are fantasy stories of love at first sight brave knights seeking adventure evil stewards passionate, lusty women hand-to-hand combat angry dragons and miracles.
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