Teaching and Studying the Middle English Romance: New Directions, Affiliations, and Pleasures of the Text

This article surveys recent scholarship on Middle English romances, observing that outside Malory, Chaucer, and the Gawain-poet, most romances remain little-known. To be sure, the corpus and development of Middle English romance are unwieldy and complicated, compared to that of Old French romance. New work on the romances, however, redefines the relationships between Middle English romance and its French sources, explores the aesthetic values of Middle English romances, and offers new approaches to teaching Middle English romances beyond the few most famous ones. Moreover, theoretical approaches to medieval romance encourage discussions across traditional period boundaries; medievalists also have special skills to contribute to scholarship. Current work on medieval English romance focuses on its aesthetic as well as cultural properties, bringing both into play in the classroom as well as in scholarship.