New approaches to this most fluid of medieval genres, considering in
particular its reception and transmission.
Romance was the most popular secular literature of the Middle Ages, and
has been understood most productively as a genre that continually
refashioned itself. The essays collected in this volume explore the
subject of translation, both linguistic and cultural, in relation to the
composition, reception, and dissemination of romance across the
languages of late medieval Britain, Ireland, and Iceland. In taking this
multilingual approach, this volume proposes a re-centring, and
extension, of our understanding of the corpus of medieval Insular
romance, which although long considered extra-canonical, has over the
previous decades acquired something approaching its own canon - a canon
which we might now begin to unsettle, and of which we might ask new
questions.
The topics of the essays gathered here range from Dafydd ap Gwilym and
Walter Map to Melusine and English Trojan narratives, and address topics
from women and merchants to werewolves and marvels. Together, they
position the study of romance in translation in relation to cross-border
and cross-linguistic transmission and reception; and alongside the
generic re-imaginings of romance, both early and late, that implicate
romance in new linguistic, cultural, and social networks. The volume
also shows how, even where linguistic translation is not involved, we
can understand the ways in which romance moved across cultural and
social boundaries and incorporated elements of different genres into its
own capacious and malleable frame as types of translatio - in terms of
learning, or power, or both.
