Torrent of Portyngale (archaic spelling for "Portugal") is a Middle English romance, composed around 1400, probably in the north Midlands. It is written in 12-line tail-rhyme stanzas, with the rhyme scheme AABCCBDDBEEB, and is number 983 in the Index of Middle English Verse . It is possible that it draws some inspiration from the Middle English Sir Eglamour of Artois . The romance survives only in the fifteenth-century East-Midland manuscript Manchester, Chetham's Library, MS 8009 (folios 76r-119v). The romance describes the tortuous efforts of the young earl's son Torrent to win the hand of Desonell, daughter of King Colomond of Portugal, against her father's wishes. Amongst other feats, Torrent fights five giants on different occasions and travels to Jerusalem. The romance ends with Torrent and Desonell's marriage and the uniting of their family. [1] It has been characterised as 'perhaps the most critically neglected member of the Middle English verse romances'. [2]
James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps was an English Shakespearean scholar, antiquarian, and a collector of English nursery rhymes and fairy tales.
Pearl is a late 14th-century Middle English poem that is considered one of the most important surviving Middle English works. With elements of medieval allegory and from the dream vision genre, the poem is written in a North-West Midlands variety of Middle English and is highly—though not consistently—alliterative; there is, among other stylistic features, a complex system of stanza-linking.
Guy of Warwick, or Gui de Warewic, is a legendary English hero of Romance popular in England and France from the 13th to 17th centuries, but now largely forgotten. The story of Sir Guy is considered by scholars to be part of the Matter of England.
Gesta Romanorum, meaning Deeds of the Romans, is a Latin collection of anecdotes and tales that was probably compiled about the end of the 13th century or the beginning of the 14th. It still possesses a two-fold literary interest, first as one of the most popular books of the time, and secondly as the source, directly or indirectly, of later literature, in Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Giovanni Boccaccio, Thomas Hoccleve, William Shakespeare, and others.
Bevis of Hampton (Old French: Beuve(s) or Bueve or Beavisde Hanton(n)e; Anglo-Norman: Boeve de Haumtone; Italian: Buovo d'Antona) or Sir Bevois was a legendary English hero and the subject of Anglo-Norman, Dutch, French, English, Venetian, and other medieval metrical chivalric romances that bear his name. The tale also exists in medieval prose, with translations to Romanian, Russian, Dutch, Irish, Welsh, Old Norse and Yiddish.
Thomas Chestre was the author of a 14th-century Middle English romance Sir Launfal, a verse romance of 1045 lines based ultimately on Marie de France's Breton lay Lanval. He was possibly also the author of the 2200-line Libeaus Desconus, a story of Sir Gawain's son Gingalain based upon similar traditions to those that inspired Renaut de Beaujeu's late-12th-century or early-13th-century Old French romance Le Bel Inconnu, and also possibly of a Middle English retelling of the mid-13th-century Old French romance Octavian. Geoffrey Chaucer parodied Libeaus Desconus, among other Middle English romances, in his Canterbury Tale of Sir Thopas.
Libeaus Desconus is a 14th-century Middle English version of the popular "Fair Unknown" story, running to about around 2,200 lines, attributed to Thomas Chestre. It is a version or an adaptation of Renaut de Beaujeu's Le Bel Inconnu though comparatively much shorter.
Layamon's Brut, also known as The Chronicle of Britain, is a Middle English alliterative verse poem compiled and recast by the English priest Layamon. Layamon's Brut is 16,096 lines long and narrates a fictionalized version of the history of Britain up to the Early Middle Ages. It was the first work of history written in English since the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Named for Britain's mythical founder, Brutus of Troy, the poem is largely based on the Anglo-Norman French Roman de Brut by Wace, which is in turn a version of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin Historia Regum Britanniae. Layamon's poem, however, is longer than both and includes an enlarged section on the life and exploits of King Arthur. It is written in the alliterative verse style commonly used in Middle English poetry by rhyming chroniclers, the two halves of the alliterative lines being often linked by rhyme as well as by alliteration.
South English legendaries are compilations of versified saints' lives written in southern dialects of Middle English from the late 13th to 15th centuries. At least fifty of these manuscripts survive, preserving nearly three hundred hagiographic works.
The Eneados is a translation into Middle Scots of Virgil's Latin Aeneid, completed by the poet and clergyman Gavin Douglas in 1513.
Galiens li Restorés, or Galien le Restoré or Galien rhétoré, is an Old French chanson de geste which borrows heavily from chivalric romance. Its composition dates anywhere from the end of the twelfth century to the middle of the fourteenth century. Five versions of the tale are extant, dating from the fifteenth century to the sixteenth century, one in verse and the others in prose. The story—which is closely linked to the earlier chansons de gestePèlerinage de Charlemagne and The Song of Roland —tells of the adventures of Galien, son of the hero Olivier and of Jacqueline, the daughter of the (fictional) emperor Hugon of Constantinople.
Moses Tyson, was a British historian and librarian who was Keeper of Western Manuscripts at the John Rylands Library from 1927 to 1935 and then Librarian of the Manchester University Library from 1935 until 1965. He was the first University Librarian to be a member of the University Senate.
Octavian is a 14th-century Middle English verse translation and abridgement of a mid-13th century Old French romance of the same name. This Middle English version exists in three manuscript copies and in two separate compositions, one of which may have been written by the 14th-century poet Thomas Chestre who also composed Libeaus Desconus and Sir Launfal. The other two copies are not by Chestre and preserve a version of the poem in regular twelve-line tail rhyme stanzas, a verse structure that was popular in the 14th century in England. Both poetic compositions condense the Old French romance to about 1800 lines, a third of its original length, and relate “incidents and motifs common in legend, romance and chanson de geste.” The story describes a trauma that unfolds in the household of Octavian, later the Roman Emperor Augustus, whose own mother deceives him into sending his wife and his two newborn sons into exile and likely death. After many adventures, the family are at last reunited and the guilty mother is appropriately punished.
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.
Sir Tryamour is a Middle English romance dated to the late fourteenth century. The source is unknown and, like almost all of the Middle English romances to have survived, its author is anonymous. The 1,719-line poem is written in irregular tail rhyme stanzas composed in the Northeast Midlands dialect. There are textual ambiguities and obscurities that suggest corruption or "loose transmission." Consequently, interpretations, glosses and notes vary between editions, sometimes substantially.
Sir Degrevant is a Middle English romance from the early fifteenth century. Generally classified as a "composite romance," that is, a romance that does not fit easily into the standard classification of romances, it is praised for its realism and plot. The poem is preserved in two manuscripts along with a variety of secular and courtly texts, one of which was compiled by the fifteenth-century scribe Robert Thornton. It is notable for its blending of literary material and social reality.
The Irish Astronomical Tract is Irish text created in the first half of the 14th century. It was written in Early Modern Irish, and is based on a Latin translation of an Arabic work De Scientia Motus Orbis by Masha'allah ibn Atharī. Of its 40 chapters, 27 correspond to chapters in Masha'allah and the rest to various classical authors.
Beves of Hamtoun, also known as Beves of Hampton, Bevis of Hampton or Sir Beues of Hamtoun, is an anonymous Middle English romance of 4620 lines, dating from around the year 1300, which relates the adventures of the English hero Beves in his own country and in the Near East. It is often classified as a Matter of England romance. It is a paraphrase or loose translation of the Anglo-Norman romance Boeuve de Haumton, and belongs to a large family of romances in many languages, including Welsh, Russian and even Yiddish versions, all dealing with the same hero.
Robert Thyer was an 18th-century British writer and literary editor, best known as Chetham's Librarian.
Þjalar-Jóns saga, also known as Saga Jóns Svipdagssonar ok Eireks forvitna is a medieval Icelandic saga defined variously as a romance-saga and a legendary saga. The earliest manuscript, Holm. perg. 6 4to, dates from around the first quarter of the fifteenth century, and the saga is thought to be from the fourteenth century.