Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Then was he ware where came from a wood there fast by a knight all armed upon a white horse, with a strange shield of strange arms. The mysterious knight on his charger (preferably white, as it is here), who emerges from the non-location of the forest to take on a chivalric or amatory adventure, is one of the most compelling images of romance. It fueled the earliest of the prose romances – the great Arthurian cycle, the vast Tristan , and the even more vast Perceforest – in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France; it was taken over from there for the ever-multiplying sixteenth-century Spanish chivalric romances that told the stories not only of heroes such as Amadis de Gaule and Primaleon but of their sons and grandsons, stories that enjoyed huge popularity in almost every language of Europe, English included; it caught the imagination of Sir Thomas Malory, who is quoted here, and a century later of Edmund Spenser, who used it as the main structuring motif of the Faerie Queene , his allegorical epic for which, unusually for the date, he chose the medium of verse. Romantic and Victorian medievalism fed on such images, and recycled them in the poetry of Scott and Tennyson and the art of the Pre-Raphaelites. The new vogue for Malory's Morte Darthur in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in a crop of illustrated editions that often focused on just such moments. ... log in or subscribe to read full text