From King Arthur and the Round Table to Alexander
the Great's global conquests, the stories of romance
appear in some of the most beautiful books of the Middle
Ages, and still resonate today. This book provides an
engaging, scholarly and richly illustrated guide to
medieval romance and its continuing influence on
literature and art. Romance's conjunctions of chivalric
violence, love and piety, and its openness to the
miraculous, monstrous or bizarre mark it out as the most
fertile narrative form of the Western Middle Ages. This
book examines the development of romance as a literary
genre, its place in medieval culture, and the scribes
and readers who copied, owned and commented on romance
books - from magnificent illuminated manuscripts to
personal notebooks and chance survivals. It also
explores the complex anatomy of human desire in romance,
as portrayed by writers including Dante, Chaucer and
Thomas Malory. Medieval romance was hugely popular after
the Middle Ages. Shakespeare, Spenser and Walter Scott
imbibed its motifs, Mark Twain parodied them, and the
Pre-Raphaelites based an aesthetic movement around them.
The Romance of the Middle Ages traces the influence of
the genre to the twentieth century and beyond,
encompassing the stories of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis
and J.K. Rowling, the Jedi knights of Star Wars and
Monty Python's Knights who say 'Ni!'.
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