Pulp fictions of medieval England: Essays in popular romance

A polemical introduction

Nicola McDonald

The Middle English romances have been called the ‘ugly ducklings of medieval English studies’.¹ In a discipline that contests even the most basic definition of the genre, romance’s low prestige is one of the few critical certainties. Despite its status as medieval England’s most popular secular genre (more than one hundred romances are extant), the origin of the modern novel (still the most significant literary form), the ancestor of almost all contemporary popular fiction (in print and on screen) and the most audacious and compendious testimony to the imaginary world of the Middle Ages, Middle English popular romance remains, with rare exceptions, under read and under studied. Popular romance is the pulp fiction of medieval England, the ‘principal secular literature of entertainment’ for an enormously diverse audience that endures for over two hundred and fifty years.² It is fast-paced and formulaic; it markets itself unabashedly as genre fiction; it is comparatively cheap and, in performance, ephemeral; it has a sensationalist taste for sex and violence; and it seems content to reproduce the easy certainties of sexist, racist and other bigoted ideologies. But this is not a reason to dismiss it. On the contrary, popular romance provides us with a unique opportunity to explore the complex workings of the medieval imaginary and the world outside the text that feeds and supports it.

The purpose of this collection of essays, all specially commissioned for this volume, is to demonstrate that popular romance not only merits and rewards serious critical attention, but that we ignore it to the detriment of our understanding of the complex and conflicted world of medieval England. Each essay concentrates on a single Middle English popular romance that has so far received little critical attention; together they exemplify, but by no means exhaust, both the richness of the primary material and the range of critical analysis that the genre invites. Contributors have been asked to provide relevant introductory material (including date of composition, extant manuscripts, and a plot summary) in order to make these neglected texts accessible to a non-specialist audience, but the focus of the essay is a sustained argument that demonstrates that the romances invite innovative, exacting and theoretically charged analysis. Readers will notice that the essays do not support a single, homogeneous reading of popular romance; in other words, this volume’s authors work with assumptions and come to conclusions, about issues as fundamental as the genre’s aesthetic codes, its political and cultural ideologies, its historical consciousness, that are different and sometimes opposed. This is a sign of healthy scholarship and of the vitality of the field of inquiry.

As an introduction to the ten essays that comprise this book, I provide neither a historical overview of the genre (authorship, audience, manuscripts) nor a survey of the different theoretical approaches that help elucidate the workings of popular culture; both of these have recently received admirable treatment elsewhere.³ Instead, I offer a short polemical essay that confronts head-on the paradox that informs and ultimately circumscribes all of our thinking about Middle English popular romance. ‘Popular’ in its capacity to attract a large and heterogeneous medieval audience, as well as in its ability to provide that audience with enormous enjoyment, romance’s popularity is likewise what excludes it from serious and sustained academic consideration: judged low-class, on account of its non-aristocratic audience, its reliance on stereotypes, formulae and conventional plot structures, and its particular brand of unadulterated good fun, criticism repeatedly dismisses these narratives as unworthy of the kind of close reading, as well as historically and theoretically informed analysis, that we regularly afford so-called elite medieval English art (in particular, but not limited to, Chaucer, Langland and the Gawain-poet). There are of course exceptions to the general trends I identify below; not all readers vilify popular romance, its readers or its aesthetic, but the tenacity with which the received denigration of romance, much of it traceable to outdated standards of aesthetic judgement and intellectual elitism, not only holds but continues to shape the field of inquiry, is nothing short of remarkable. The introduction is divided into two sections that tackle in turn what I think is at stake in our appreciation and enjoyment of these inescapably popular narratives: romance’s status as a socially and aesthetically degenerate form of fiction and its capacity to generate textual pleasure. Not everyone will agree with it, but if it stimulates debate about popular romance it will have more than served its purpose.

Dangerous recreations

Medieval romance shares with other incendiary fictions a reputation for subverting social and moral order: indecent, unorthodox, criminal; and like these works its consumption has been policed. Romance, so its censors insist, perverts the mind; it incites illicit thought, obscene behaviour, and a propensity for violent action. Reviled by the medieval church as ‘vayn carpynge’, foolish and corrupting lies, and dismissed by men with literary pretensions (like Harry Bailey) as ‘nat woorth a toord’, romance becomes, in the centuries following its invention, the subject of energetic condemnation, a byword for moral degeneracy, religious heresy, political tyranny and everything that’s bad about fiction.⁴ John Florio (translating Montaigne) judges the whole corpus ‘a wit-besotting trash of bookes’, while the antiquarian Thomas Percy, at once apologist and bowdleriser, admits that they ‘would do hurt’ to ‘common Readers’. Juan Luis Vives, the Spanish humanist and friend of Sir Thomas More, in a sweeping prohibition of romance, outlines its dangers more precisely: ‘they make them [men and women] wylye and craftye, they kindle and styr up couetousnes, inflame angre, and all beastly and filthy desyre’. England’s Roger Ascham likewise warns of social mayhem: ‘a man by redinge [romance], shulde be led to none other ends, but only manslaughter and baudrye’. James Beattie concurs: ‘Romances are a dangerous recreation’, they ‘corrupt the heart’, ‘stimulate the passions’ and fill the mind with ‘criminal propensities’.⁵ These critics (medieval ecclesiast, early humanist, eighteenth-century antiquarian and beyond), whether moralists, educators or simply middle-class men determined on social advancement, are keen to protect readers from the kind of depravity that texts like Guy of Warwick, Libeaus Desconus or Ipomadon necessarily engender. The outrage and invective that romance inspires – from men who are bound neither by country nor century – is barely distinguishable from the rhetoric of interdiction that continues to characterise the pro-censorship lobby today.

The early critics of romance, insistent on the genre’s disruptive potential, have been treated by modern scholarship with a mixture of disdain and humorous detachment.⁶ Given its diminished modern status, we simply cannot believe that medieval romance bears worrying about; it no longer attracts enough attention to merit public disapprobation, be it moral, political or cultural, let alone to excite the censors. Relegated along with most other medieval English literature, by the relative obscurity of its language, to an almost exclusively academic audience, its consumption is policed only by critical fashion. And for a long time now, romance – at least Middle English popular romance – has been unfashionable. I recall romance’s history of censorship not only because it testifies to the enormous popularity of these narratives, (whether in the original Middle English or in modernised and abridged versions) from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, nor simply because it demonstrates their inherent unorthodoxy (a point to which I will return below), but because, despite differences in tone and rhetoric, it is animated by the same assumptions and anxieties that determine popular romance’s degraded academic status.

Scholars long ago remarked that the objections voiced by the humanists, as well as eighteenth-century men of taste and others like them, are based primarily on romance’s distance from the newly discovered and celebrated forms of classical poetry. As such they are more indicative of post-medieval prejudice, about everything from social class to Catholicism, than anything inherent in the medieval genre. And it is precisely these inherited distinctions that we, informed by the insights of post-structuralist thought, have learned to interrogate. Yet, popular romance has hardly benefited from the collapse of the traditional hierarchies of aesthetic (and with it academic) judgement. There must be many reasons why. The slowness with which medieval English studies has responded to developments in contemporary critical thought is undoubtedly a key factor; but, given that the recent surge in theoretically informed medieval research remains unmatched in romance scholarship, it cannot be the only one. I want to propose that the problem with popular romance is not, contrary to expectation, its opponents (whose invective invites rebuttal) but rather its friends.

Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert have already suggested that ‘embarrassment’ explains the ‘predominance in romance studies of scholarship on manuscripts, editorial problems, and textual history’; this kind of work does not demand aesthetic judgement and so is never required to confront the texts’ reputation as ‘poetic disasters’.⁷ Implicit in Putter and Gilbert’s comment is the sense that, despite its evident industry, such scholarship has simultaneously done the genre a disservice. I think they’re right; but I want to propose that romance scholarship is informed by something that is more damaging than a sin of omission. From its inception, scholarship on the Middle English popular romances has been characterised by a thinly – if at all – veiled repugnance to the romances themselves, not only to their poetic form but their subject matter and the medieval audience who is imagined to enjoy them. As Arthur Johnston has demonstrated, it is in the middle of the eighteenth century, with the publication of the first modern editions, that the study of Middle English romance is born; more recent analysis by John Ganim, Nick Groom and David Matthews has exposed the ideologies latent in much of that early work and I build on their insights.⁸ Thomas Percy, antiquarian and arriviste, and his spectacularly successful Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, published first in 1765, signals the start of modern abuses of romance. The ‘seminal, epoch-making’ work of English Romanticism, Percy’s Reliques – along with his infamous Folio manuscript and the attention they both excited – has made an indelible mark on the way popular romance continues to be read.⁹

Four years after the publication of the Reliques, a three-volume work comprising mainly Middle English ballads and a set of four critical essays including one ‘On the ancient metrical romances’, Percy recorded on the inside cover of his Folio manuscript the following account of its discovery:

Northumberland House, November 7th, 1769.

This very curious Old Manuscript in its present mutilated state, but unbound and sadly torn &c., I rescued from destruction, and begged at the hands of my worthy friend Humphrey Pitt Esq. … I saw it lying dirty on the floor under a Bureau in the Parlour: being used by the maids to light the fire. It was afterwards sent, most unfortunately, to an ignorant Bookbinder, who pared the margin, when I put it into Boards in order to lend it to Dr. Johnson.¹⁰

The son of a provincial grocer and born Thomas Piercy, the editor of the Reliques, armed with a self-fashioned aristocratic pedigree and the patronage of his wealthy namesake, was by 1769 well advanced in what was to be, thanks to the Reliques’ popular success, a starry church career.¹¹ Whether or not Percy’s narrative is true – it bears striking resemblance to a number of stories concerning the rescue of early manuscripts circulating at the time – is irrelevant; what is more significant is how, at a distance of more than ten years from its acquisition, he constructs his relationship to the source of his hard-earned success. The Folio, an artefact that Percy jealously guarded like a personal fetish, is mutilated and dirty, abused by serving women and damaged by a tradesman. Its physical and social dereliction opposes, and is used to confirm, Percy’s own social and intellectual status, on a par with the titled Northumberlands (with whom he shares the estate) and the celebrated Dr Johnson (with whom he fraternises). Percy’s embarrassment with his medieval relic and with the volumes of poetry that issued from it and the other dilapidated manuscripts he consulted, something he excuses in a later letter to John Pinkerton as the ‘follies’ of ‘my youth’,¹² was to become so intense that by the time he was confirmed as Lord Bishop of Dromore he refused to sign his name to the Reliques’ fourth edition; a nephew, conveniently called Thomas Percy, stepped into the breach. What Percy’s narratives (the stories he inscribes on his manuscript and in the trajectory of his own career) demonstrate is the tenacity with which the taint of the popular clings to these medieval texts: the brutish and illiterate medieval that is imagined to engender romance (Percy calls it ‘gross and ignorant’¹³) is neatly replaced with a no less repugnant, but more reflective of eighteenth-century preoccupations, world of service, trade and dirt. Percy, like later romance amateurs (and later still professionals), is required to establish a distance between himself and the medieval texts in order not to be tarred with the same brush. Ironically, the very success of the Reliques with an ever-widening eighteenth-century audience reinforces its inherent vulgarity and simultaneously threatens Percy’s social, and intellectual, integrity. When Vicesimus Knox congratulates Percy on rescuing this popular poetry ‘from the hands of the vulgar’ and obtaining for it ‘a place in the collection of the man of taste’, he means it literally:¹⁴ Percy effectively snatches the Folio from the maids and enshrines it (the religious connotations of Reliques are doubtless purposeful) in the best way an eighteenth-century aspirant gentleman knows how. Percy’s Reliques, packed full with the ‘barbarous productions’ of ‘unpolished ages’ as its Dedication promises, excites its editor and the public more because of its grotesque curiosities than in spite of them.¹⁵

Certainly, I am being hard on Percy; he is neither unique, nor uniquely at fault. The Reliques, and with it Percy’s ideas about romance, reflect its editor’s personal anxieties and aspirations, but it is equally the product of an eighteenth-century antiquarian culture that exploits the past, as well as other peoples and cultures, as a confirmation of its own superiority and achievement. The printing and publication of the Reliques, a process that took three years and that saw Percy publish work on Chinese, runic and Hebrew poetry and fantasise about an international volume comprising, in addition, ancient Arabic, Indian, Peruvian, Lapp, Scottish and Greenland poetry,¹⁶ is coincident both with England’s emergence, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, as Europe’s dominant colonial and commercial power and with a domestic rage for primitive poetry that cannot be disinterested. Percy drew inspiration from, but also fuelled, English fascination with the primitive.¹⁷ Along with men like Thomas Warton and Richard Hurd, both of whom read romance (although Hurd reads very little) as a function of their interest in Spenser, Percy promotes the Middle Ages as an age of romance, wild with imagination but, in perfect antithesis to his own eminently tasteful time, irredeemably barbarous; at the same time he promotes himself as someone able to know the difference. Where Percy encapsulates all of the ambivalence that distinguishes eighteenth-century readings of romance, his real importance for later scholarship – despite the fact he never completed his own proposed edition of the romances – lies in the longevity of his influence on those who continue to champion the genre.

Four editions of the Reliques were printed in Percy’s lifetime, at least twenty-three in the nineteenth century, and the volumes continue to be reprinted (picked up by Everyman in 1906) well into the twentieth century.¹⁸ But Percy’s influence on the culture of reading Middle English romance is finally too amorphous to support any simple narrative of direct literary descent. Percy’s judgements on romance, its authors and audiences, and the assumptions they entail – evident in his published work as well as his copious correspondence (Warton’s opinion of romance, for instance, as espoused in his History of English Poetry, is enormously indebted to his exchanges with Percy) – are elaborated and modified by subsequent generations of readers in a web of intertextual relationships that cannot be rationalised. George Ellis’ three-volume Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances – important for being the first published anthology of romance, a mix of prose summary and illustrative quotation – bears Percy’s imprint everywhere, nowhere more so than in the invidious relationship between the reader and the romances that Ellis finds necessary, time and again, to reiterate.¹⁹ He mocks their long-winded plots, ludicrous emotions and general absurdity, retelling romances like Guy of Warwick and Amis and Amiloun, with the kind of smug irony that is designed only to assert his, and his reader’s, superiority over the imagined and denigrated medieval. Ellis, a comfortably off gentleman and sometime diplomat who fraternises with ‘princes wits [and] fine ladies’, has none of Percy’s social anxiety;²⁰ he uses the romances instead as a butt for his wit, a testament to a kind of social elegance that is best expressed in droll conversation and barbed quips. When Southey remarks that there is ‘something in his manners’ that shows it is ‘a condescension in him’ to edit his Specimens, he inadvertently identifies an attitude that is characteristic of all conventional scholarship on the popular romances.²¹

Whether we are talking about the work of Walter Scott (whose recollection of reading Percy as a boy in the mid 1780s confirms the logic that identifies romance with childish intellects) or W. R. J. Barron (whose 1987 English Medieval Romance, a volume that treats English romance as derivative and finally second-rate, remains the most comprehensive modern analysis of these narratives), popular romance is invariably positioned against something that is judged to be superior; what that something is – epic, French romance or simply good taste – changes in accordance with prevailing prejudice and fashion, but the direction of comparison, whereby popular romance is denigrated, never varies. Scott, so often classed among romance’s more persuasive advocates, posits in his essay on ‘Romance’, written for the first supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1824), that romance is precisely everything that epic – distinguished by its ‘due proportion’, ‘force’, ‘precision’, ‘taste’ and ‘genius’ as ‘art’ – is not: ‘when a story languishes in tedious and minute details’ and relies for its interest on ‘wild excursions of unbridled fancy’ rather than ‘the skill of the poet’, then its author is ‘no more than a humble romancer’. Scott here mimics the rhetoric of neo-classical distinction, but his particular prejudice, inseparable from his social aspirations (like Percy he is a man on the make), comes into focus when he imagines the medieval audience ‘circumscribed in knowledge’ and ‘limited in conversational powers’: ‘to prevent those pauses of discourse which sometimes fall heavily on a company’, a poet-minstrel is employed, he argues, to supply ‘an agreeable train of ideas to those guests who had few of their own’.²² From Scott we learn less about medieval romance than about the imperative of polite conversation that exercises the nineteenth-century host, just as later we learn more from W. P. Ker about Victorian antipathies toward the world of manufacturing: ‘hot, dusty and fatigued’, romance has ‘come through the mills’ of men ‘who know their business, and have an eye to their profits’.²³

So far, I have demonstrated only that invidious distinction, reflective of an overt discomfort with the low social status of popular literature, real or imagined, is the hallmark of early (by which I mean pre-twentieth-century) scholarship on the popular romances. Men like Percy, Scott, and even Ker, who write in an idiom markedly different from our own, are easy targets for modern scholars keen to demonstrate the superiority of their own brand of criticism. But criticism, even when couched in the familiar terms of a shared professional discourse, is of course never free of its authors’ preoccupations and assumptions. What is so remarkable about the modern treatment of popular romance, especially in the work of the genre’s putative (and influential) friends, is its duplication of the interests, and prejudices, of its antecedents. Pearsall’s scathing denunciation of the romances – ‘it is … difficult to understand why poems that are so bad according to almost every criteria of literary value should have held such a central position in the literary culture of their own period’²⁴ – not only replicates eighteenth-century aesthetic assumptions about popular romance, but the social prejudice that fuels those assumptions. Aesthetic judgement is here indistinguishable from a preoccupation with social class and, finally, secondary to that preoccupation. Indeed, the logic of aesthetic distinction that Pearsall posits is explicitly predicated on the class affiliation of the original audience he assumes for each romance (and vice-versa). As the ‘emergent bourgeoisie’ (alternatively ‘lower or lower-middle-class’) – for whom the ‘outright vulgarisation’ of French romance is originally produced – becomes less emergent, the romances are likewise described as more sophisticated: ‘witty, smooth, [and] enormously leisurely’. Aberrantly ‘crude’ products of this later period are attributed to ‘the lowest classes of society’ because, according to this scheme of things, they can belong nowhere else. The composer-poets are similarly stigmatised: while low-class romances are ‘knock[ed] together’ (the association with manual labour is inescapable), superior ones are said to issue from those with intimate knowledge of ‘upper-class life’.²⁵ Pearsall, like Percy, is of course not alone; in fact, the identification of modern denigrations of romance with individual scholars erroneously suggests that the phenomenon is limited, and limitable, to a few key works or authors. Rather, it so pervades academic discourse, whether in print or informal conversation, that the identification of ‘the general run’ of romance as ‘rustic’, ‘primitive’ or ‘amateurish’, the product of (and for) ‘social aspirants’ who ‘lack understanding’ of ‘their social superiors’, is commonplace.²⁶ Contemporary (and widespread) assumptions that popular romance is a degraded and degenerate form of literature, the product of ‘hacks’ who ‘ransack’ aristocratic sources and treat them with ‘outrageous violence’ confirm Pierre Bourdieu’s conviction that academic distinctions ‘fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences’.²⁷ What the study of popular romance demonstrates is the extent to which contemporary medieval scholarship – whether as a result of its embattled status in the academy or simply because of the academic’s inherent need to assert his or her own intellectual superiority – is threatened, whether consciously or not, by the ‘great mass’ (as Barron calls it²⁸) who is able to enjoy popular romance.

blys, ioye and mykyll myrght: the pleasures of romance

If scholarship is distrustful of the assumed vulgarity of the Middle English popular romances – a function, as the term implies, of their low social status and denigrated aesthetic (factors that, I have argued, are indistinguishable) – it is equally discomforted by the way that medieval, as well as modern, audiences derive evident, and enormous, pleasure from these narratives. One of the ironies of English romance studies is that the genre’s harshest critics are simultaneously those who have an enormous personal investment in the very popularity that they denounce. Percy, for all of his apologetics, patently enjoys popular romance – the ‘levities’ of his youth²⁹ – and he devotes considerable energy and intelligence to his scholarship. His repudiation of the romances, effected as an assertion of his own good taste and critical acumen, is simultaneously the response of a protestant clergyman ill at ease with such a public testimonial to his private pleasures. Percy’s fear of censure from his ‘graver brethren’, alluded to in his private correspondence, is indicative of the kind of anxieties that persist today.³⁰ In her provocative essay on ‘enjoying the Middle Ages’, Louise Fradenberg posits that the preoccupation with ‘utility’ and ‘necessity’ in humanities departments (fuelled by the increasing pressure to justify the humanities as economically productive and publicly useful, as well as by the ‘ambivalence about enjoyment’ characteristic of influential critical schools – she focuses on the Marxist and feminist) is explicitly opposed to the enjoyment of medieval culture. Although medievalists know, she asserts, that ‘the pleasure of knowledgeable discourses on pleasure’ is what we ‘deliver to our audiences’, we have assumed as our ‘ethical task’ to ‘discipline’ enjoyment out of academic inquiry. In other words, medieval studies (as a modern academic discipline) has invested medieval culture with a seriousness (what Fradenberg calls ‘an ethos of pietas’) that marginalises or denies those aspects of the culture that are predominantly productive of enjoyment.³¹ So far as popular romance is concerned (a genre Fradenberg does not consider directly), I think she is right.

Manuscript evidence – unmatched, in the sheer number of surviving texts, by any other secular genre – attests not only to the social and geographical diversity of romance’s medieval audience, but to the genre’s capacity to generate desire for its distinctive form of narrative and with it the pleasure of gratification: romances written in the thirteenth century continue to be copied into the fifteenth century, while the persistent demand for yet more romance guarantees the production of new texts well into the renaissance. Modern scholars are likewise keen to confirm that Middle English romance flourishes because of its capacity to ‘delight’ or ‘entertain’ – in other words to provide enjoyment for – its audience.³² Yet, it is precisely this popularity (the genre’s capacity to be well liked) that impedes critical appreciation not only of the romance aesthetic, but of its ideologies and of the kinds of readings it can sustain. David Benson (writing about the Seege of Troye) sums up dominant attitudes to the genre as a whole: ‘entertainment for the common folk’, popular romance is ‘disqualified from claiming the attention of any serious audience’.³³ The kind of pleasure that is generated by Middle English romance is constructed by modern scholarship as second-rate (both ‘entertain’ and ‘delight’ are purposefully condescending) and it is set in opposition to the apparently superior gratification derived from the ‘supreme products of [the] age’.³⁴ We need to remember, of course, that these distinctions (between the enjoyment afforded by popular romance and the sublimated gratification of so-called elite medieval art) are at least as indicative of the need for academic self-legitimation and self-perpetuation as of anything intrinsic to romance or its production of pleasure. Academic communities have long been resistant to popular art and to the kind of pleasure it produces; the denial of ‘lower’ forms of enjoyment (musicals, Hollywood films, pulp fiction) is one of the most important ways in which consumers and critics of high culture (opera, art-house cinema, the post-modern novel) assert their cultural credentials and intellectual credibility.³⁵ What then is something endemic to academic study is today exacerbated and, despite growing theoretical interest in popular culture, perpetuated by what Fradenberg identifies as the prevailing seriousness (or ethos of pietas) that drives most modern research on the Middle Ages. Because popular romance makes explicit its commitment to its audience’s pleasure and because it is structured to gratify that pleasure, it fails to attract the kind of high profile attention (by academics and their publishers) that has recently been accorded medieval texts (the Book of Margery Kempe or Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, for instance) that, once as little regarded as popular romance, are now judged ‘serious’ because they more readily (or obviously) coincide with the agendas that propel academic study.

Key to modern scholarship’s ambivalence about the kind of pleasure that popular romance generates is the assumption that it is passive, a pleasure that comes from the consumption, without thought or agency, of standardised products that espouse normative ideologies. Although critics are quick to disparage the aesthetics of popular romance as ‘rustic’ or ‘primitive’, a sign that it issues from the ‘great mass’ who is incapable of understanding or appreciating the aesthetics of the elite, its ideologies (of gender, social class, race, religion and so on) are assumed not to challenge but rather to mimic those of that same elite. Popular romance, in other words, loses on both counts – degenerate in form and style it has none of the disruptive potential that is commonly attributed to the degenerate – and its pleasure, by all accounts banal, is refigured as form of coercion: sated with the kind of gratification that the genre provides (usually in the form of wish fulfilment), the audience is contentedly complicit in its own oppression. The view that popular culture serves as an opiate is widely held by critics who otherwise adhere to divergent theoretical schools. Its broad appeal is in part attributable to the way in which it replicates the distinctions upon which academic inquiry is built: the critic knows an opiate when s/he sees one – the masses apparently don’t – and the critical act is validated by its exposure (invariably expressed in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’) of the ideologies that oppress the unwitting consumer.³⁶ Popular romance can and does replicate dominant ideologies; so-called elite art, despite what we imagine is its inherently radical potential, likewise does so all the time. Not all dominant ideologies, however, are equally opposed to the disparate interests of the popular audience: the audience of Middle English romance is at least as heterogeneous (in terms of age, gender, wealth, social rank, education and regional affiliation) as it is homogeneous. And indeed, the individual members of that audience are just as likely as we are to have complex wants and needs that they will seek to satisfy in different, and sometimes contradictory, ways. But more importantly, popular culture (and with it popular romance) is not simply, as its detractors would have us believe, an instrument of social control – popular romance is too diverse a genre to support such reductive analysis – and neither is its audience made up solely of dupes. Popular romance is rather a space, narrative as well as imaginary, in which cultural norms and divergences from those norms are negotiated and articulated.³⁷

I want now to look more closely at the kind of pleasure – what the medieval poet designates ‘blys’, ‘ioye’ or ‘mykyll myrght’³⁸ – that is produced by popular romance. More than any other medieval genre, the Middle English romances are exemplary of what modern narratologists call ‘narrative desire’.³⁹ They are predominantly stories about desire: in the simplest terms, the protagonist’s desire for something – for instance, a husband, wife or lover, wealth, property or status (expressed as a family or knightly identity) – and the satisfaction of that desire. The plot is regularly complicated by the proliferation of desires that are sometimes incompatible – unwanted amorous advances are repulsed; a couple’s desire for an heir gives way to the heir’s own desires; misplaced desire is redirected to more appropriate ends – and the protagonist usually discovers that the satisfaction of one desire (for a wife, for instance) guarantees the satisfaction of others (for material wealth, status, property). Just as importantly, however, they are also stories in which desire functions as what Peter Brooks calls the ‘motor force’ of narrative.⁴⁰ At the start of virtually every romance a desire is present, usually in a state of initial arousal, that is so intense (because thwarted or challenged) that action – some kind of forward narrative movement designed to bring about change – is demanded. Sexual desire (whether wanted, unwanted or feared) is one of the most common initiatory devices, but a desire for offspring, material wealth, a lost identity, political or religious dominion, or simply aventure are equally effective as a way of getting the story off the ground. This desire, like all desires, is structurally end-oriented. In other words, it gives to narrative the textual energy that propels the plot forward in search of satisfaction; it pushes the protagonist through or around the obstacles that delay the achievement of desire. Modern narrative is often distinguished by the way in which it frustrates the conventional trajectory of desire, pulls it up short and resists the closure that is otherwise, in narrative terms, inevitable. Our desires, such narratives contend, are not finally satisfiable;