Crestien’s Guillaume d’Angleterre / William of England

An edition with facing annotated translation of the 12th-century Medieval French popular romance Guillaume d’Angleterre. The claim to fame of this verse narrative is to have had its authorship attributed (falsely) to Chrétien de Troyes, the most famous of all 12th-century Medieval French narrative poets. This prototypical adventure romance and is representative of a literary genre that has recently seen a renewal of interest among medieval literary critics. An amusing tale of late twelfth-century social mobility, the romance tells of a bewildering series of adventures that befall a fictitious king who deliberately abandons his royal status to enter the ‘real’ world of knights, wolves, pirates and merchants. He and his family, dispersed by events between Bristol, Galway and Caithness, are finally re-united at Yarmouth thanks to a climactic stag hunt. The book is designed for students of French, Medieval Studies, Comparative Literature and English, and for all medieval scholars interested in having an English version of a typical medieval adventure romance. It is the first authoritative English translation of this text, and all of its critical material is new.

Marketing Love: Romance Publishers Mills & Boon and Harlequin Enterprises, 1930–1990

When Harlequin Enterprises acquired British publisher Mills & Boon in 1972, the merged firm became the world’s dominant publisher of popular romance novels. Little is known, however, about the role that innovative marketing strategies played in the growth of these two romance publishing companies, especially their use of product sampling, direct mail, product standardization, and what was known at Mills & Boon as the “personal touch.” Through research in the Mills & Boon company archive at the University of Reading, the Grescoe Archive at the University of Calgary, as well as an analysis of company histories, trade publications, interviews, and marketing techniques, this study reveals how Harlequin and Mills & Boon took a different approach to product promotion than traditional publishers. Their innovation was to incorporate consumer goods marketing strategies, familiar to other industries, that disrupted and redefined standard practices of book publishers.

From Romance to Vision: The Life of Breath in Medieval Literary Texts

Breath and breathlessness are flashpoints in medieval literary texts. Medieval medical theories, rooted in classical thought, emphasise the bodily spirits and in particular, the ways that motions of the ‘vital spirit’—closely connected with breath—cause powerful physical responses that write emotions on the body in sighs, swoons, and even death. Physiological theory was complemented by theological notions of pneuma, the Spirit of divinity and life. The movement of breath plays a key role in depictions of emotion from love to grief, and in visionary or mystical experience. This essay explores breath and breathlessness in a range of English secular and devotional literary texts: popular romance writing, the medically alert fictions of Chaucer, and visionary works including the Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich and the spiritual autobiography of Margery Kempe. In all these works, concepts of the vital spirits and the role of breath in emotion are central. The play of breath underpins and shapes depictions of romantic love, explorations of the boundary between life and death, and ideas of spiritual revelation, creating narratives of profoundly embodied, affective experience.

‘She shook her heavy tresses, and their perfume filled the place’: The Seductive Fragrance of ‘that awful sorceress’: H. Rider Haggard's femme fatale, Ayesha

This paper explores perfume, scent, and floriography as an aspect of the archetype of the femme fatale, specifically in the context of the late-Victorian Gothic and its afterlives. As an expansion of the concept of a masculine-Gothic language of flowers, this article analyses H. Rider Haggard's Ayesha, a central character within his popular romance, She, by reviewing the significance of the artificially floral in her development. Perfume and floriography in She convey not only the aura of mystically seductive danger intrinsic to the creation of the femme fatale, but also suggest the longevity, originality and power imbued in this archetype. The article argues that much of Ayesha's complexity and continued appeal rests on the idea that the Gothic and perfume significantly influence her portrayal as a femme fatale whilst allowing for her individuality.

Book Reviews

Miriam J. Abelson. Men in Place: Trans Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 264 pp. ISBN: 9781517903510. Paperback, $25. Andrew Reilly and Ben Barry, eds. Crossing Gender Boundaries: Fashion to Create, Disrupt and Transcend (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2020), 225 pp. ISBN: 9781789381146. Hardback, $106.50. Jonathan A. Allan. Men, Masculinities, and Popular Romance (London: Routledge, 2019), 176 pp. ISBN: 9780815374077. Paperback, $31.95. Andrea Waling. White Masculinity in Contemporary Australia: The Good Ol’ Aussie Bloke (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2020), 222 pp. ISBN: 9781138633285. Hardback, $124.