Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

When William the Conqueror and his knights invaded England in 1066, they ensured that their own language became the dominant one among the rulers of their new land, and that what was the current taste in northern France for epic literature became popular among the aristocracy here. The imported entertainment had a long life in insular society; nevertheless, in the first century and a half after the Norman arrival there was also an astonishing flowering of vernacular writing of many kinds, which owed little, sometimes nothing, to previous writing on the Continent. Recent scholarship has made us aware of the precocity of Anglo-Norman literature, and has convincingly linked this to England's multicultural and multilingual environment. Among this writing in the French vernacular, romances occupy a prominent position. Long overlooked in favour of their Continental counterparts, they nevertheless appear earlier than many of them, and those early productions are of fine quality. Indeed, the beginnings of romance as a genre could fairly be said to be more associated with this country than with any other, as we shall see. To distinguish insular from Continental romances too rigidly, however, would be a mistake: they are often written for patrons, and directed to audiences, who would have had lands and kin on both sides of the Channel, and who would have had similar interests and tastes; ... log in or subscribe to read full text