Medieval Romance and Material Culture (Relié)

Medieval romances glitter with the material objects that were valued and exchanged in late-medieval society : lovers' rings and warriors' swords, holy relics and desirable or corrupted bodies. Romance, however, is also a genre in which such objects make meaning on numerous levels, and not always in predictable ways. These new essays examine from diverse perspectives how romances respond to material culture, but also show how romance as a genre helps to constitute and transmit that culture.
Focusing on romances circulating in Britain and Ireland between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, individual chapters address such questions as the relationship between objects and protagonists in romance narrative ; the materiality of male and female bodies ; the interaction between visual and verbal representations of romance ; poetic form and manuscript textuality ; and how a nineteenth-century edition of medieval romances provoked artists to homage and satire.