Publisher Description

What happened to the medieval romance genre during and after the Protestant Reformation in England? Who read these works; who printed them; and what did they mean to the varied audiences encountering them? Through a cross-temporal study using book history, reception history and cultural memory studies, this book argues that the medieval romances printed across the early modern period provided a flexible space for post-Reformation readers to negotiate their relationships with the recent 'medieval' past, a past that was becoming, for some, increasingly distanced from the present. In exploring the complex entanglements of time and technology that accrue on the pages of the post-Reformation romance book, Difficult Pasts offers an interdisciplinary framework for better understanding the role of physical books and imaginative forms in grappling with a 'difficult' past.

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Medieval romances were widely condemned by early modern thinkers: the genre of questing knights and marvelous adventure was decried for it 'open manslaughter, and bold bawdry' by Queen Elizabeth's humanist tutor, Roger Ascham, and seemed intended to 'kindle in men's hearts the sparks of superstition' for Protestant polemicist Edward Dering. Despite such proclamations, though, the Middle English romance genre remained popular across the early modern period. Difficult pasts examines the reception of the Middle English romance genre after the Protestant Reformation in England, arguing that the genre's popularity rested not in its 'violent' or 'superstitious' qualities, as Dering and Ascham feared, but in its multivocality. Incorporating insights from book history, reception history and cultural memory studies, Ensley argues that the medieval romance book became a flexible site of memory with which early modern readers could both connect with and distance themselves from the recent 'difficult past', a past that invited controversy and encouraged divided perspectives. Central characters in this study range from canonical authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to less studied figures, such as printer William Copland, Elizabethan scribe Edward Banister and seventeenth-century poet and romance enthusiast, John Lane. In uniting a wide range of romance readers' perspectives, the book complicates clear ruptures between manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant, or medieval and Renaissance. Difficult pasts reveals how the romance book offers a new way to understand the simultaneous change and continuity that defines post-Reformation England.

Author Biography

Mimi Ensley is an Assistant Professor of English at Flagler College

Table of Contents

Introduction: Palimpsests: Reformation, romance and erasure
1 Catalogues: Sammelbände, libraries and defining the romance genre
2 Collage: A recusant's romance connection to the past
3 Monuments: Reviving and restoring Chaucer's Squire's Tale
4 Museums: Temporality and timelessness in artefacts, relics and romance
Conclusion: Palimpsests and gaps

Index

Long Description

What happened to the medieval romance genre during and after the Protestant Reformation in England? Who read these works; who printed them; and what did they mean to the varied audiences encountering them? Through a cross-temporal study using book history, reception history and cultural memory studies, this book argues that the medieval romances printed across the early modern period provided a flexible space for post-Reformation readers to negotiate their relationships with the recent 'medieval' past, a past that was becoming, for some, increasingly distanced from the present. In exploring the complex entanglements of time and technology that accrue on the pages of the post-Reformation romance book, Difficult Pasts offers an interdisciplinary framework for better understanding the role of physical books and imaginative forms in grappling with a 'difficult' past.

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