Thinking Medieval Romance

Katherine C. Little, 1. Professor of English, University of Colorado Boulder,Nicola McDonald, Senior Lecturer, Department of English and Related Literature, University of York

Katherine C. Little is Professor of English at University of Colorado Boulder. Author of Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England and Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry, she has also published essays on the Wycliffite heresy, the Piers-Plowman-tradition, and the poetry of Chaucer and Spenser.


Nicola McDonald is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature & the Centre for Medieval Studies, at the University of York. Editor of Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Middle English Romance and Medieval Obscenities, her research focuses on Middle English romance as a fundamentally interrogative genre. She also works on medieval women, in particular women's literacy and ludic culture and is, additionally, the author of essays on Chaucer, Gower, and late-medieval household miscellanies.

Introduction, Katherine C. Little and Nicola McDonald
I. Does Romance Think?
1. The Wonder of Middle English Romance, Nicola McDonald
2. Unthinking Thought: Romance's Wisdom, James Simpson
II. Romance Thinks Politics
3. Killing the King: Romance and the Politicization of History, Laura Ashe
4. Thinking through the English Crusading Romance: Sir Gowther and the Baltic, Lee Manion
III. Rethinking Genre
Romance Thinks Religion
5. Weaving a Tapestry from Biblical Exegesis to Romance Textuality: Caught in the Web of Chretien's Conte du Graal, Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner
6. Marie de France, the Psalms, and the Construction of Romance Authorship, Geoff Rector
7. Romance and Revelation, Emma O'Loughlin Berat
Romance Thinks Music
8. Song and the Soundscape of Old French Romance, Emma Dillon
9. Music by Tristan: the Two Lais of Chevrefeuille, Monika Otter
IV. Rethinking the Term 'Romance'
10. Romance and the Medieval Mediterranean, Sharon Kinoshita
11. Good History, Bad Romance, and the Making of Literature, Michelle R. Warren