Description
Book SynopsisNew 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.
Table of ContentsList 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
