The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public’s imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the cult of courtoisie and amour courtois (“courtly love”). There is more interest in psychology, especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century, apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas’s version can be reconstructed from Gottfried von Strassburg’s German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes’s treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155; Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace’s Roman de Brut and Lawamon’s Brut]). The Bretons and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide), is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship, uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero’s rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien’s ironies and ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou, le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart’s contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance’s golden age, and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre’s periphery were short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike. Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin’amor). Its first exponents were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men. On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman’s love was a man’s aspiration, achievable, if at all, only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject’s service to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic, unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours’ songs, whose origins have been sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine (see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel, who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d’oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX’s granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of Henry II). The troubadours’ verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at clerical corruption. Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of the world’s evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen’s avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among lawyers, doctors’ quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals, inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces, bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio.