Romance
In the Renaissance context, a fictional narrative in prose (no longer in verse) that could (in a very broad sense!) be termed the predecessor of the modern novel.
The genre had become popular in the Middle Ages, when the chivalric romance developed in twelfth-century France and spread to other literatures. (In fact, the term "romance" originally referred to any work written in French, which descended from Latin and is thus a Romance language.)
The themes of chivalric romances were often knightly endeavours; the legend of King Arthur and the adventures of the Round Table were retold in many versions. The mediaeval "romance is distinguished from the epic in that it 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 writers shifted the thematic 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).
M. H. Abrams: A Glossary of Literary Terms. Seventh Edition. New York et al.: Harcourt Brace, 1999.