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Sir Orfeo is an anonymous Middle English Breton lai dating from the late 13th or early 14th century. It retells the story of Orpheus as a king who rescues his wife from the fairy king. The folk song Orfeo is based on this poem.
Floris and Blancheflour is the name of a popular romantic story that was told in the Middle Ages in many different vernacular languages and versions. It first appears in Europe around 1160 in "aristocratic" French. Roughly between the period 1200 and 1350 it was one of the most popular of all the romantic plots.
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As a literary genre, the chivalric romance is a type of prose and verse narrative that was popular in the noble courts of high medieval and early modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a chivalric knight-errant portrayed as having heroic qualities, who goes on a quest. It developed further from the epics as time went on; in particular, "the emphasis on love and courtly manners distinguishes it from the chanson de geste and other kinds of epic, in which masculine military heroism predominates."
Sir Aldingar is an English-language folk song. Francis James Child collected three variants, two fragmentary, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. All three recount the tale where a rebuffed Sir Aldingar slanders his mistress, Queen Eleanor, and a miraculous champion saves her.
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The Lord of Lorn and the False Steward, sometimes simply The Lord of Lorn, is an English-language folk ballad. The ballad was first entered in the Stationers' Register in 1580, with a note that it is sung to the tune of Greensleeves.
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Ipomadon is a Middle English translation of Hugh of Rhuddlan's Anglo-Norman romance Ipomedon composed in tail-rhyme verse, possibly in the last decade of the fourteenth century. It is one of three Middle English renditions of Hugh's work: the other two are a shorter verse Lyfe of Ipomydon and the prose Ipomedon, both of the fifteenth century. Each version is derived independently from the Anglo-Norman Ipomedon, which Hugh wrote 'not long after 1180', possibly in Herefordshire. It is included in a list of the popular English romances by Richard Hyrde in the 1520s.
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Generides or Generydes is an English verse romance, originating in the English Midlands and dated to the end of the 14th century. It survives in two different lengthy forms. The hero Generides is born as an illegitimate son of the King of India, and after adventures marries a princess of Persia and becomes ruler of both India and Persia.
Le Bone Florence of Rome is a medieval English chivalric romance. Featuring the innocent persecuted heroine, it is subcategorized into the Crescentia cycle of romances because of two common traits: the heroine is accused by her brother-in-law after an attempted seduction, and the story ends with her fame as a healer bringing all her persecutors to her.
The Erl of Toulouse is a Middle English chivalric romance centered on an innocent persecuted wife. It claims to be a translation of a French lai, but the original lai is lost. It is thought to date from the late 14th century, and survives in four manuscripts of the 15th and 16th centuries. The Erl of Toulouse is written in a north-east Midlands dialect of Middle English.
Amadas, or Sir Amadace is a medieval English chivalric romance, one of the rare ones for which there is neither a known nor a conjectured French original, like Sir Eglamour of Artois. The hero shares a name but no more with the romance Amadas et Idoine.
Sir Cleges is a medieval English verse chivalric romance written in tail-rhyme stanzas in the late 14th or early 15th century. It is clearly a minstrel tale, praising giving gifts to minstrels, and punishing the servants who might make it impossible for a minstrel in a noble household. Corrupt officials are central to it.
Crescentia is an Early Middle High German language chivalric romance, included in the Kaiserchronik about 1150. Other versions appeared in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in prose and verse.
Athelston is an anonymous Middle English verse romance in 812 lines, dating from the mid or late 14th century. Modern scholars often classify it as a "Matter of England" romance, because it deals entirely with pre-Conquest English settings and characters. It is mainly written in twelve-line stanzas rhyming AABCCBDDBEEB, though the poet occasionally varies his meter with stanzas of eight, six, or four lines. The poem survives in only one manuscript, the early 15th-century Gonville and Caius MS 175, which also includes the romances Richard Coer de Lyon, Sir Isumbras and Beves of Hamtoun. It has no title there. Athelston was first printed in 1829, when C. H. Hartshorne included it in his Ancient Metrical Tales.
References
- 1 2 Laura A. Hibbard, Medieval Romance in England p290 New York Burt Franklin,1963
- ↑ Rickert, Edith. 1908. Early English Romances: Done in to Modern English by Edith Rickert: Romances of Friendship . Chatto and Windus.
- 1 2 Laura A. Hibbard, Medieval Romance in England p290-1 New York Burt Franklin,1963
- 1 2 Laura A. Hibbard, Medieval Romance in England p291 New York Burt Franklin,1963
- ↑ Rickert, Edith. 1908. Early English Romances: Done in to Modern English by Edith Rickert: Romances of Friendship, "Introduction". Chatto and Windus.
- ↑ Laura A. Hibbard, Medieval Romance in England p292 New York Burt Franklin,1963