Inverse Relationship of Orally-Based Noetic Processing and Skeuomorphic Formulaicity in the Middle English «Matter of England» Verse Romances

The Middle English verse romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries have frequently been referenced as exemplifying the formulaicity associated with orality in medieval transitional texts. This is as true when counting formulae of the Parry-Lord variety according their theory of oral-formulaic composition as it is when counting the more flexibly defined formulaic expressions of the sort permitted under the theory of oral traditionalism. Both methods, however, probably give an inflated view of the extent to which orally-based thinking was involved in composition of the romances, since they focus exclusively on the formulaic surface-structure expressions which do not always accurately reflect deep-structure ideas or frames of thought. The present concise examination of the Matter of England romances – a subset of the Middle English verse romances spanning the lifetime of the genre – suggests that, contrary to what one might expect, the number, length and complexity of such formulaic expressions actually appear to increase as evidence of purely orally-based thought declines. This finding is realized by briefly measuring the extent to which each romance instantiates Walter Ong’s nine psychodynamic characteristics of orally based thought and expression, five of which concern the deep-structure frames of the former with the remaining four concerned with the surface-structure scripts of the latter. It then concludes by proposing that the much-vaunted residual traces of orality in the formulaic expressions are not so much true reflections of orally-based thinking as they are contrived literary “skeuomorphs” masquerading as such in order to lend the tales credibility and authenticity.

The Eufemiaviser and the Reception of Courtly Culture in Late Medieval Denmark – Die dänischen Eufemiaviser und die Rezeption höfischer Kultur im spätmittelalterlichen Dänemark

This book presents texts which are a unique testimony in Danish literature between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period: the so-called Eufemiaviser (Eufemia poems), courtly verse romances, translated into Danish via Old French and Old Swedish sources in the later part of the 15th century. These texts have hardly been studied in Scandinavian research so far.

A Taste for Trifles

Chapter 3 focuses on how printers began to develop readers’ taste for cheap, entertaining pamphlets that frequently featured scurrilous humour or sensational episodes of a violent or sexual nature. It begins with Caxton’s prose romances and the way in which Caxton justified their reading by underlining their exemplarity. It then goes on to consider how, after Caxton’s death, the intervention of a Dutch printer, Gheraert Leeu, resulted in an increasing emphasis on the recreational pleasure to be had from reading romances rather than their moral function. It explores how de Worde built on this by first printing verse romances and then gests, but suggests it was another Antwerp printer, Jan van Doesborch, who exploited readers’ interest in the sensational to the utmost. The chapter ends by considering why a flourishing market in romances, jests, and bawdy fiction—for what were sometimes termed ‘nouelles’ and ‘tryfellys’—disappeared in the mid-1530s.

‘The Faery Ground for Romance and Poetry’

This chapter proposes that Scott’s romances appropriated elements of the Pennantian travel account, the exhaustion of which he had himself proclaimed in a devastating review of Sir John Carr’s Caledonian Sketches in 1809. At the same moment, he was busy inventing the textual conditions for the next wave of Highland tourism, based on the massive success of The Lady of the Lake and The Lord of the Isles, and his Highland novels Waverley and Rob Roy. The chapter explores the relations between Scott’s travel writing on the Highlands (especially his 1814 Pharos cruise) and the development of these verse romances and novels: his romantic ‘Highlandism’ cast a long shadow over the nineteenth century, especially his successful stage-managing of King George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822. This coincided with public controversy about sheep clearances on the Sutherland estates and elsewhere, and Scott’s own cautious refusal to be drawn into the political fray.

Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden. Tristan and Isolde: Medieval Illustrations of the Verse Romances. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2016. 462 pp., 538 Ill.

Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden’s prodigious volume on illustrations of the Tristan materials fills a gap in research on the Tristan illustrations by providing a single, authoritative resource for them. As the author explains, its purpose is quite simply “to list all the extant manuscripts, artefacts, and objets d’art, and to describe all the scenes depicted on them” (3). Building upon previous studies of illustrations by literary critics and art historians over the past century, including works by Hella Frühmorgen-Voss, Norbert H. Ott, and Robert Sherman and Laura Hibbard Loomis, as well as the exhibition of Arthurian art and literature in Leuven at the XVth Congress of the International Arthurian Society in 1987, Van D’Elden collected over 500 images from the broad span of Tristan sources, identifying them according to the manuscripts or objects which they adorn, as well as categorizing them by the specific scenes in the Tristan materials they depict. Van D’Elden’s efforts to organize and catalogue over 500 items, reproduced clearly and cleanly in fine detail, will serve as a valuable contribution for decades to come to our cross-disciplinary understanding of Tristan, one of the most important tales of the European Middle Ages.

Out of Romanticism: Byron and Romance

This essay considers Romance as a genre not only etymologically related to the literary epoch of Romanticism, but as forming a locus for Romantic interconnectedness. The central contention is that through his writing of and correspondence about the Romantic genre, Byron’s position as a writer central to the Romantic impulse can be ascertained. This essay seeks neither to fully equate Byron’s verse Romances with those of Coleridge, Scott or Moore, instead it tries to more fully articulate the centrality of Byron’s place as a writer of Romance within the Romantic canon than has been previously recognised. The essay is based on the premise that Byron’s poetry evidences the practice of genre hybridisation that was familiar to him through his readings of Goethe and A.W. Schlegel.