In this essay Corinne Saunders explores the secular genre most often associated with women, that of medieval romance, but also challenges the notion of romance as a womenߣs genre. While women were patrons, owners, readers, and even writers of courtly romances, the picture is complex: romances were often addressed to mixed audiences and read publicly rather than privately, and it is impossible to know for certain how women responded to the romance narratives that they encountered. Focusing on three central romance themes-- love and consent, virtuous suffering, and magic and enchantment ߝ this essay explores the imaginative spaces that female protagonists inhabit and the agency they demonstrate, and suggests how these might connect to ideals of Christian virtue, the constraints imposed on women by chivalry, and perhaps to the lived experiences of medieval women. Examples drawn from a range of Middle English romances, from Sir Orfeo, King Horn and Havelok the Dane to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Thomas Maloryߣs Morte Darthur at the very end of the period, show medieval romance as the locus of dialogue and debate about women and their place in medieval society and culture.

The introduction explores womenߣs authorship and addresses the range of works by or attributed to women that were in circulation in England in the Middle Ages in the context of their contributions to a multilingual and inclusive literary culture. It examines the importance of collaboration, arguing that womenߣs writings may be collaborative in different ways: through amanuenses, through translation and adaptation, and through their historical and literary relationships with the men who write their lives. It explores other collaborative aspects of womenߣs literary culture, including womenߣs contributions as patrons, scribes, readers, and subjects of texts. It considers the importance of womenߣs religious communities, as well as the ways in which devotional books were owned by women and exchanged between nuns and by lay women, and it considers the active engagement of women with secular writing as owners and commissioners of books as well as writers. It argues that English womenߣs networks extend from Britain to the Continent and beyond.

The work of Elizabeth Archibald spans many languages and many genres: Latin, French, Scots, English; history, morality, comedy, lyric and most of all romance. That recurrent interest in romance is no coincidence, for it is here, in the fiction of the Middle Ages, that medieval imagination is most evidently at work, and that Elizabeth’s project of ‘literary archaeology’ has been most richly repaid. Her interests in romance have been various: beginnings and endings; mothers and daughters; fellowship and strife; speech and silence; beauty and bathing; love and incest. Yet they have in common an emphasis on the disruptions, the undoings, the subversions of order, in the ways that violence, desire and error can overturn the ideal. Such disruption is the subject of her extended study of incest, but figures in many other ways across her work, seen in microcosm in violations of home and private spaces and in violence resulting from untrammelled feeling, and in macrocosm in the fall of the Arthurian kingdom. For repeatedly within romance, it is the moments of extreme difficulty, violence and suffering that provide narratives with their dramatic arc. As Northrop Frye wrote, the movement of romance is characteristically from darkness to light, disorder to order, winter to spring. This movement is enacted in stories of test, quest, adventure, challenge, journey and homecoming, powerful human narratives that recur across times and places, gesturing towards the strength of hope in adversity and to the ways in which story is rooted in patterns. To focus on these large patterns, however, can mask romance’s engagement with individual thinking and feeling in the moment, with the ways in which mind, body and affect respond to extreme experience of violent, disruptive or traumatic kinds. Nor is the pattern of hope straightforward. As Elizabeth has shown in her work on incest, disorder can also often seem ominously near, and darkness, as at the end of the Arthurian legend, can return.

Contemporary models of resilience in traumatic circumstances, like Frye’s model, emphasize order and emergence: coping in the face of adversity and positive outcomes, the journey from darkness to light. However, the pattern is often narrowly conceived.