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One of the more fascinating histories in the study of medieval literatures is the history of scholarly attempts to define Middle English romance as a genre.1 The polemical declarations of scholars, their dodges, embarrassments, sleights of hand, gestures of despair, have often been as compelling as the adventures of the knight himself, as he overcomes formidable opponents, negotiates unexpected setbacks, puzzles out marvels beyond the scope of his prior experience, in a convoluted and bewildering quest whose object recedes constantly below a misty horizon. And, since romance has proven itself inexhaustibly and infinitely expandable, I make no apologies for taking yet another run at the meaning of "Middle English romance" as a generic term. It will not be the last attempt, especially if it is successful, for the approach I describe here is intended not to be definitive but to be descriptive, not to provide closure but to open up further areas of exploration. At the same time, I wish to suggest a system of ideas that may serve as a guide to exploration, and to point out some implications of this approach for our understanding of medieval English literature. The framework for this approach is loosely based on the prototype theory of categorization in cognitive linguistics, and so this paper may serve as a case study for the application of prototype theory to literary genres more broadly. I have alluded already to the figure of "the knight himself," the stereotypical protagonist of medieval chivalric romance, but of course the problems that this paper addresses would not exist if the essence of this medieval genre were so easily recognizable. The definition of Middle English romance is difficult for a number of reasons. The first is that the word romance itself has had a complex history of polysemy, so that Latin romanus, pertaining to Rome, eventually generated English "romantic," with its associations of magic, escapist nostalgia, sexual adventure, and emotional intensity.2 As is well known, the texts with which scholars of Middle English romance are concerned were composed at a time when roman or romaunce could still mean a text in a Romance vernacular (such as French) but could also apply to a type of narrative in any language. [End Page 335] When the common formula "in romance as we rede" appears in a Middle English poem, it is not always clear whether "romance" refers to the language of the poem's source or to the genre of the poem itself. The second difficulty, therefore, is that not every medieval English text that calls itself a romance is what a modern scholar would like to call a romance, and not every medieval text that a modern scholar would like to call a romance actually calls itself a romance. In some cases, for example, a text identifies itself as a romance for linguistic rather than literary reasons: that is, it is based on a source in a Romance vernacular. A glance at two scholarly lists is instructive. The first occurs in a study by Reinald Hoops, listing twenty-four Middle English texts that identify themselves as romances; alongside such unsurprising items as Bevis of Hampton and Sir Perceval of Galles we find unexpected items such as the Myrour of Lewed Men, a life of Saint Gregory, and Meditations on the Life and Passions of Christ.3 The second list is that compiled by Helaine Newstead for the Manual of Writings in Middle English; it still serves as a starting point for any study of Middle English romance. Newstead's list features over a hundred items of bewildering variety. They appear in a range of verse forms, as well as in prose; they span four centuries, from the early thirteenth-century King Horn to the sixteenth-century translations of Lord Berners; their sources are Anglo-Norman, continental French, English, Latin, Italian, possibly Celtic, or simply unknown; they feature legendary and historical kings, slandered queens, local heroes, biblical figures, warrior...
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