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The writer, poet, and teacher Ján Kalinčiak (1822 – 1871) is a representative of the strand of Slovak Romantic fiction that accentuates the subject. His oeuvre helps build the individualistic, heroic variant of Slovak Romanticism, putting emphasis on the individual and freedom – also in relation to the nation. For Kalinčiak, Romanticism was not just a way of artistic self-expression, but also a path towards personal heroism. Kalinčiak’s leaning towards Romanticism is demonstrated among other things in the fact that he drew on European schools of thought concerning such issues as the portrayals of knightly characters. These drew on mediaeval models preferred in the poetics of Romanticism. Kalinčiak modelled his literary world on the basis of the concept of noble rivals, equal adversaries and his portrayals abstained from building negative characters. His version of Romanticism is not based on the fight between good and evil, but on the struggle between two competing visions of the world which in their search for authenticity naturally get into conflict. While his historical fiction is undeniably Romantic, his best known work, Reštavrácia ([County elections], 1860) used to be regarded as a transitional piece bearing elements of Realism. Current research, however, regards it as Romantic.

Marriage and the relationship between husband and wife in medieval literature have often been analyzed from many different points of view. However, there is an aspect which remains unexplored and this is the analysis from a discursive perspective of the conversation between the knight and his lady before he departs in search of adventures, war or whatever other reason. This study aims to verify if there is any kind of coincidence or similarity in the arguments used by the lady in different texts, when she tries to stop her husband from leaving. Therefore, in the present study conversations concerning the departing of a knight from his lady shall be analyzed in Icelandic, German, French, Catalan and Spanish chivalric texts of the Middle Ages, taking into account the consequences of the knight’s departure for the lady, for the knight and for the marriage bond itself. A detailed analysis of the lady’s arguments intending to keep the knight by her side seems to lead to a hypothesis concerning the existence of similar arguments across literary texts in different languages.

Modern scholars of early Tudor chivalric prose romance identify Francis Hastings, second Earl of Huntingdon, as the probable patron of Lord Berners's translation and publication of Huon of Bordeaux. This essay argues instead, based in part on the Hastings family manuscripts at the Huntington Library, that George Hastings, the first earl, was the actual patron; analyzes the financial commitment this entailed; and suggests the first earl's possible motivations. More generally, it presents a detailed case study of the social and political role of aristocratic patronage for this popular genre during the reign of Henry VIII.

A former colleague used to insist that there are really only two questions we need to ask: “says who?” and “so what?” Were we to refine these admittedly rough questions into “what are our legitimate sources?” and “how do they help us understand the past?” we might secure more general agreement. But rough or smooth, we are stuck with them and they continue to generate useful debate. These are the questions I want to address in relationship to chivalry, a topic of great interest to all medievalists and certainly to the members of De Re Militari. I expect to generate debate. In the process I will likely have to draw on evidence I have tapped before, but who can doubt in the twenty-first century that recycling is a virtue?My general position will be known to any who have read books and articles I have written, but just for clarity let me announce a thesis, that sine qua non that is so often merely sine in student essays – and, yes, in the occasional professional paper. I am convinced of the legitimacy of reading chivalric literature as historical evidence; I believe that use of these sources is, in fact, necessary to an understanding of chivalry; and I take chivalry to be the basic organizing code of the lay elite of Europe for perhaps half a millennium. The issues at hand are not trivial.

The Occitan literary tradition of the later Middle Ages is a marginal and hybrid phenomenon, caught between the preeminence of French courtly romance and the emergence of Catalan literary prose. In this book, Catherine Léglu brings together, for the first time in English, prose and verse texts that are composed in Occitan, French, and Catalan-sometimes in a mixture of two of these languages. This book challenges the centrality of \"canonical\" texts and draws attention to the marginal, the complex, and the hybrid. It explores the varied ways in which literary works in the vernacular composed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries narrate multilingualism and its apparent opponent, the mother tongue. Léglu argues that the mother tongue remains a fantasy, condemned to alienation from linguistic practices that were, by definition, multilingual. As most of the texts studied in this book are works of courtly literature, these linguistic encounters are often narrated indirectly, through literary motifs of love, rape, incest, disguise, and travel.

The fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight shows how an idiosyncratic literary text can open new ways of thinking about that unruly topic, time. Through close readings of the poem and its sole surviving manuscript, I demonstrate how Gawain elaborates its own vision of dynamic, social time in its descriptions of time and characters. Through its evasion of teleologies, the poem offers a critique of discourses of inevitability. Gawain complicates an already complex picture of medieval time-schemes, demonstrating how literary works can add nuance to our understanding of how medieval time worked.

This study features essays from leading scholars highlighting the important Jewish contributions to the popular medieval genre of romance. Writing against strict notions of genre boundaries and canonization, this volume provides a new understanding of medieval and early modern romance through a working definition consisting of variable elements, including language, literary devices, plot, and characters. The contributions in this volume establish that many texts written in the medieval and early modern Jewish communities across Europe and beyond can be classified as \"romance.\" Each of the nine chapters as well as the afterword by Eli Yassif discusses romance as it relates to the medieval and early modern Jewish world, as well as the greater non-Jewish context. This volume places Jewish texts into the scholarly conversation as sources for forming a new understanding of the genre of romance across religious and cultural boundaries.