Anglicising Romance: Tail-Rhyme and Genre in Medieval English Literature

Description

Tail-rhyme romance unites a French genre with a continental stanza form, so why was it developed only in Middle English literature? For English audiences, tail-rhyme becomes inextricably linked with the romance genre in a way that no other verse form does. The first examples are recorded near the beginning of the fourteenth century and by the end of it Chaucer's Sir Thopas can rely on it to work as a shorthand for the entire Middle English romance tradition. How and why this came to be is the question that Anglicising Romance sets out to answer. Its five chapters discuss the stanza's origins; the use of tail-rhyme in Anglo-Noman literature; questions of transmission and manuscript layout; the romances of the Auchinleck manuscript; and the geographic spread of tail-rhyme romance. The individual entries in the Appendix present newly reassessed evidence for the provenance and date of each of the thirty-six extant tail-rhyme romances. RHIANNON PURDIE is Senior Lecturer in Mediaeval English at the University of St Andrews. Contents......Page 5 Illustrations......Page 6 Acknowledgements......Page 7 Abbreviations......Page 9 Introduction......Page 13 Stanza Origins......Page 25 The Anglo-Norman and Early Middle English Inheritance......Page 44 Manuscripts, Scribes and Transmission......Page 78 The Auchinleck Manuscript and the Beginnings of Tail-Rhyme Romance......Page 105 The Geography of Tail-Rhyme Romance......Page 138 Appendix: The Survey of Provenance......Page 163 Bibliography......Page 255 Index of Manuscripts Cited......Page 275 General Index......Page 277