Romance

A medieval literary genre whose trademark ingredients are "wandering knights on quests, fair maidens, magic and dragons" (Hopkins 65). The Renaissance prose romance is distantly related with the modern novel (in the sense that both are forms of narrative fiction), but the poetological and cultural conditions of the two genres are very different.

History

Middle Ages

The chivalric romance developed in twelfth-century France and soon became popular in other countries. (The term "romance" originally referred to any work written in French, which descended from Latin and is thus a Romance language.) Knights' adventures were the standard theme of chivalric romances; the legend of King Arthur and the knighst of the Round Table were told in many versions. Unlike an epic, a romance "does not represent a heroic age of tribal wars, but a courtly and chivalric age, often one of highly developed manners and civility" (Abrams 35).

English Renaissance

English Renaissance writers shifted the focus from (ritualised) courtly love to less artificial love models: "Long narrative romances in prose were written by Greek writers as early as the second and third centuries A.D. Typically they dealt with separated lovers who, after perilous adventures and hairbreadth escapes, are happily reunited at the end. [...] Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde (the model for Shakespeare's As You Like It) and Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia were Elizabethan continuations of the pastoral romance of the ancient Greeks" (Abrams 190).

In the Restoration period romances were still widely read (especially translations of French romances by Scudéry or d'Urfé), but were gradually replaced in popularity by the new genre of the novel.

Sources

• Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed. New York et al.: Harcourt Brace, 1999.
• Hopkins, Lisa and Matthew Steggle. Renaissance Literature and Culture. London: Continuum, 2006.