Love and Loyalty in Middle English Romance

Abstract

There is no certain manuscript evidence that Chaucer wrote these lyrics, and yet their superb poise, beauty, and wit cannot but affirm that he was their author. It is not just the formal craft and elegance that persuade, but also the striking combination of haunting sadness with the humorous self-depiction of the narrator. The intersection of courtly artifice with realism, the blend of experience and authority, in many ways define Chaucer’s originality; along with writers such as Gower and Langland, Chaucer was making of English poetry a newly sophisticated literary language. Yet it is not coincidental that he places himself as following in the footsteps of the great classical writers, or that French, Italian and classical works, rather than English ones, provide his chief inspiration. The abortive Tale of Sir Thopas clearly suggests Chaucer’s mocking view of English metrical romance. In the triple roundel of “Merciles Beaute,” Chaucer draws conspicuously on the conventions of French courtly poetry. Yet in his characteristic balance of crafted courtliness with humor through the addition of the comic final lyric, perhaps we may see too Chaucer’s debt to a more mixed, English tradition. By the period in which Chaucer was writing, Middle English romances can already reflect a desire to play with and influse new life into convention, and hence a realism and social relevance that often involves a special focus on notions of trouthe or loyalty. This emphasis may particularly be seen in the ways that the romances treat love and gender relations—always a touchstone, if not the exclusive focus, of romance, but rarely the high-flown courtly subject matter we might expect. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.