Before the Novel: Medieval Romance

Harvard FAS

Medieval romances are ancestors of the modern novel, including the psychological novel and the fictions we call “fantasy.” In modern French, the word “roman” means “novel.” In this course, we read a series of romances from England and elsewhere written between the twelfth century, when this baggy genre developed, and the fifteenth century, when it entered the age of print. We consider why romances came into being where and when they did, where they found their basic ingredients—imagined…