SOURCE: "Toward a Theory of Popular Literature: The Case of the Middle English Romances," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 23, No. 3, Winter, 1979, pp. 31-47.

Among modern forms of popular literature, romance is unique in its continuity with the Middle Ages. Even before the advent of popular romance as we know it, medieval romances were referred to as "popular antiquities" by early scholars such as Bishop Percy and Joseph Warton. In spite of this long standing identification of romance with popular literature and the frequent use of the word "popular" to describe certain Middle English romances, the designation "Middle English popular romance" remains problematic. It presents a number of difficulties: the word popular itself has several meanings, many of the conditions usually associated with popular literature did not exist in the Middle Ages, and the romances written in medieval England are a diverse lot. This paper examines current theories of popular culture and literature in light of what we know about the romances themselves and offers a dialogue between medievalists and scholars of popular culture from which we may draw a clearer and more satisfactory analysis of the romances' popularity.

Although popular literature has been with us for a long time, the study of it is relatively new and often deals with modern materials. Thus, as sociologist Zev Barbu says, there has been a "tendency to confine the phenomenon of popular culture to its most recent version, namely popular culture in advanced industrial society, and to apply to it models and analytical tools relevant for this and for no other type of study." In this way "popular culture" has become associated with mass production and consumption, and a largely middle class audience; "popular literature" suggests widespread literacy. Yet, in medieval England, members of the middle classes made up only a small portion of the population and it was not until the Renaissance that they produced a literature of their own. Actually, as Derek Brewer explains, "the nineteenth—century idea of upper, middle and lower classes did not exist in England at the time the romances were composed and cannot be applied to the society of that day." Though literacy gradually became more common, D. W. Robertson says there was "nothing like the large homogeneous audience available for writers today." Despite the efforts of medieval bookshops with their standardized operations, volume production of reading matter—to say nothing of mass production—was not possible until the introduction of the printing press. While it is not necessary to equate popular culture with mass culture, Robertson's assessment of the matter seems accurate: "It is probably fair to say that there was no popular literature in the modern sense in late medieval England and except for certain religious beliefs held in common, it lacked a 'mass culture.'" Bruce Rosenberg concludes that "popular culture contributed little to medieval life." Recent studies of romances have questioned the usefulness of the term popular as applied to these narratives. Susan Crane's study of indigenous insular romances, and Carol Meale's comparison of the three versions oilpomedon find much in these narratives that runs counter to our expectations of popular literature and received notions about the romances.

The Middle English romances themselves are so diverse that one can not easily make generalizations about them. Some statement of this difficulty has become almost conventional in discussions of these works. There are more than one hundred narratives, composed over a period of 275 years (from approximately 1225 to 1500). Most, however, were composed between 1350 and 1450. A few are unique in English, the rest have French sources. The romances range in length from 500 to 20,000 lines and come in various forms of verse, and in prose. Some are frankly fictional entertainments, others have the authority of history; some are folktales, others read like psychological novels. There are religious epics (the Charlemagne romances, Titus and Vespatian), homeletic tales of chivalry (Ami and Amiloun, Isumbras, Florence of Rome) tales of romance (Floris and Blancheflur, Sir Launfat), exploits of English heroes (Guy of Warwick, Richard Cour de Lyon), stories belonging to the Great Matters of Greece and Rome, France, and England (romances of Arthur, Tristran, Gawain, Roland, Alexander and Troy). The themes, style and provenance of the romances are as varied as their subjects.

In spite of all this variety, "popular" can be a useful word for describing certain Middle English romances. It is also an important consideration at this time of cultural study. I have sought to address both sides of the question: what does the word "popular" mean and what are the romances like? The object of the present essay is to enhance our understanding of the romances and to test our theories of popular literature. What we need is a working definition of popular that will help us better understand the cultural dynamic of the romances. Or, as Paul Strohm succinctly puts it, to better study generes and "how they live in history."

The meaning of a term is conditioned by its semantic context. In part, "popular" must be understood in the context of other cultural terms it may be distinguished from—"folk" and "elite." Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand describes elite culture as academic, progressive and institutionalized; popular culture as mainstream, normative, mass; folk culture as conservative, traditional, and largely oral. He calls these "levels" of culture, in the sense of strata, but other scholars understand them as a continuum with folk and elite forming the ends of the spectrum. Still other scholars, among them Joseph Arpad, understand elite and folk cultural artefacts in terms of opposites (such as oral-written, official-unofficial) and see popular culture as a kind of anomalous mediator between folk and elite. The limitations of the designations "folk," "popular" and "elite" are apparent, though. As Rosenburg notes, they are arbitrary lables, not analytic categories. They are based upon extrinsic rather than intrinsic features. Such conceptions tend to suggest that popular, folk and elite are mutually exclusive categories, and that literary artefacts like the romances can be classified according to these categories. In fact, any individual romance is a blend of various cultural elements. The Middle English romances incorporate many elements found in folktales. Their plots can be analyzed according to the Tale Types of folklore and their details can be identified with motifs in the folklore motif indexes. Rosenburg devotes most of his essay on the folkloric sources of medieval popular literature to the romances' and their similarities to marchen. Yet the genre romance originated in the courts and it is to these elite origins that Middle English narratives owe their noble characters and concern for chivalry. If artefacts can be, in a sense, multicultural, members of their audiences can be too. Though social stratification was greater and mobility more limited in the Middle Ages than in modern times, it was still quite possible for an individual to participate in more than one kind of culture.

An image of the relationships between cultural kinds of literature must be multi—dimensional and dynamic. Such a model has been proposed by Donald Dunlop and others who seek to understand folk, popular, and elite literature in terms of the dynamic relationship between author, artefact and audience. The elements of the triad are mediated by formulas, media and middlemen. The artist shapes the artefact according to a formula and the material is imbued with a certain aesthetic. The material comes to its audience through a particular medium and various middlemen bring the author's work to its audience. Though one factor may dominate the interaction of two elements, the other factors are always engaged. Thus the audience responds to the artefact according to its formula or aesthetic. The medium the artist uses also shapes his material. Middlemen bring the artefact to the audience and sometimes have a hand in shaping it. An author's choices of material and aesthetic usually reflect the audience's interests and tastes. The complex interrelationship of the author, material and audience lies at the heart of a work's cultural dynamic.

There do seem to be characteristic dynamics of author, audience and artefact which distinguish folk, popular and elite literature. Both folk and elite audiences constitute a close, or high context group. The elite audiences of the medieval courts constituted a close group based on noble birth or membership in the noble household. The court of Marie de Champagne, for which Chretien de Troyes composed his romances, would be a case in point. Its literature, especially the romances, required an appreciation of chivalric conduct—the nobility's self—styled raison d'etre and its high context. Georges Duby's studies of this chivalrous society and his comments on the romances show their audiences to have been a close as well as closed group. Crane refers to twelfth century French romance as a kind of "récit clos" in that it sought to be exclusive rather than accessible. If elite and folk literatures are high context, popular literature is low context. Hinds proposes that only artefacts which find "adoption/consumption by more than one regional culture and by more than one narrow socio—economic group" be considered popular. To appeal to a large, diverse audience, the work must not rely on media and materials available only to particular groups.

A further implication of popular cultures's low context can be seen in statements such as Northrop Frye's that popular literature is accessible with minimal formal training or education. This is not to say that only the minimally educated appreciate popular literature, but formal education does provide much of the high context for elite literature. Historical studies of literacy and education in late medieval England contribute greatly to our understanding of the dynamics of literary genres in the period. It has been assumed that the earlier English romances were intended for native speakers with minimal education because those with more education would have used French.

That the romances are written in English is sometimes taken as defacto evidence of their popularity and middle class audience. By the Fourteenth century, English was the most widely accessible language in England. The composer of Arthour and Merlin took note of this fact in his introduction, and similar sentiments are expressed in similar language elsewhere.

Right is that Inglishe vnderstond,
That was born in Inglond;
Freynsche vse this gentilman,
Ac euerich Inglishe can.
Mani noble ich haue yseize
That no Freynsche couthe seye.

Estimates suggest that fifty percent of London lay males were literate in English. Even at court, many who knew French knew English as well. Chaucer was the first major poet to compose for the royal court in English; his early career was devoted to the translation of works in French such as the Roman de La Rose. If English was finding acceptance among the aristocracy, French was being used by the bourgeoise in the fourteenth century. Sylvia Thrupp, describing the books owned by middle class Londoners of the time, notes that many of their romances were in French. Thus it is not possible to distinguish the audience of English romances from that of French romances on the basis of language alone. A few romances survive in manuscripts that are bi-, or even tri-lingual. The fact that the romances are in English is significant not because English was the language of the lower classes, but because it was the most widely accessible literary language.

Whatever else the word popular may mean, it always carries the sense of widely known and well liked. Thus some quantitative measure of the audience or the artefacts is relevant to their status as popular culture. However, quantitative information about the romances is very incomplete and conjectural. Any interpretations of the data that we do have must recognize the limitations of medieval book production and of our information about minstrel performances of romances. By various estimates, about 120 Middle English romances have come down to us, and there were others of which no text survives. Few of the romances exist in many manuscript copies. Titus and Vespatian has the most, 11, Robert of Sicily 10, Isumbras 9, The Sege of Jerusalem 7, Richard Cour de Lyon and Bevis of Hampton 7, Partenope of Blois 6, Guy of Warwick, Degaré, Libeaus Desconus 5, Amis and Amiloun, Eglamour of Artois, Seege of Troy, Earl of Toulous and Arthor and Merlin 4 (though these are not all identical versions). Most romances survive in only one or two texts, but, of course, many copies have been lost. D. S. Brewer computes that for each remaining copy, there were once at least five more ("Introduction" x). For comparison we might mention the English works which survive in the most manuscripts—The Prick of Conscience in over one hundred, The Canterbury Tales in ninety, Piers Plowman and The South English Legendary in more than fifty, Troilus and Criseyde in twenty. Since most book production was in the hands of the church or the court and literacy was more common in these mileux, it is to be expected that learned and aristocratic works would survive in many copies. It is also not surprising that didactic works of religious instruction would have reached a large audience. If individual romances do not survive in really large numbers of manuscripts, the size of the corpus suggests that the genre had significant appeal. The many catalogues of romance heroes in romances themselves and in other kinds of works indicate that their names were well known and associated with a certain type of story.

Besides reaching a large audience, popular literature is assumed to reach a varied audience, particularly members of the middle classes. Many would agree with Derek Pearsall that, with the exceptions of Chaucer's and the alliterative poems, the verse romances in Middle English were popular literature since they were composed for "lower or lower-middle-class audiences who wanted to read what they thought their social betters read." The most conclusive evidence we have about the romances' audience is what we know about the owners of the manuscripts containing romances. Unfortunately, though, the number of volumes whose owners can be identified is small. Nor are the manuscripts' owners the original audiences for whom the romances were composed; most romances survive in texts made fifty to one hundred years after their composition. A number of important literary anthologies were owned by members of the gentry class. Robert Thornton, a Yorkshire knight of a locally prominent family, copied out two large manuscripts containing a variety of romances, including our only surviving copy of the Allitertive Morte Arthur. The Findern manuscript contains several works by Chaucer, as well as the romance Sir Degrevant, and was the property of the Findern family, members of the Derbyshire gentry. The Auchinleck manuscript, a product of a London bookshop, was designed for commercial if not mass distribution. It is thought to have been owned by London civil servants. MS Harley 2252 is the commonplace book of John Colyns, a prominent London merchant, into which were copied Ipomedon and our one extant text of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur. Another version of Ipomedon survives in a fine illuminated copy associated with Richard III.

Chaucer, who assigned tales to his Canterbury pilgrims with an eye to their social status, gives romances to the Knight, Franklin, Wife of Bath and himself. The tales are quite various. Only his own burlesque, Sir Thopas, and the Wife's fairy tale have ties to other Middle English romances. It would not do to take these assignments as a simple reflection of cultural reality. Chaucer was also following literary decorum which associated elevated (or at least idealistic) genres with the higher classes and comic, realistic stories with the lower—only his lower class pilgrims tell fabliaux, and the bourgeois Wife's tale is a fabliau in romance guise. The Franklin and the Knight are members of the gentry, and Chaucer's descendents were such. While in practice literary genre and social status were not so simply related, it is significant that Chaucer's contemporaries felt the tales were socially appropriate to the tellers. The evidence suggests, then, that the romances appealed to the country gentry and to prominent merchants and city bureaucrats, among others. These are not members of the lower classes, though they are also not members of the court elite. Really, what strikes one is the diversity of the audience implied by these examples and difficulty of making correspondences between the manuscript owners' social status and the types of romances they read. If the romances are popular literature, it is not because they were favored by the lower classes, but because they reached a varied audience and were attractive to more than a single socio-economic group.

Since the gentry class will be important to later discussions, we should take a moment to describe it here. According to Thrupp, the gentry included those belonging to the four military ranks of knight, banneret, esquire and man-at-arms, those who held senior posts in the estate and household service of the great barons (though the rank was associated with the post, not the person who held it), and those who performed high services in municipalities or in the administration of the crown. Rodney Hilton further describes the country gentry as those who had incomes of fifty pounds a year and held half a dozen manors. These people witnessed local charters, stood on grand assize juries and performed tasks imposed by sheriffs or the central government. To fill out our picture of the gentry, we might note with M. T. Clanchy that the great merchant dynasties took on the coloring of landed gentry rather than forming a distinct bourgeoise. Thrupp enumerates the distinguishing marks of the gentry as birth, money and a distaste for manual labor. Usually three or more generations passed before members of a family of lower origins, for example, merchants or lawyers, could be considered truly gentle.

In part because popular audiences do not constitute a high context group, they are less likely than elite or folk audiences to have direct relationships with the authors whose works they read or hear. The relationship between author and audience may be characterized by degree of closeness or distance. Artistic expressions of both elite and folk culture come to being in direct, relatively unmediated relationships of author and audience. Rosenberg and Schroeder note the similarity, suggesting that the presence of middlemen is more characteristic of popular literature. This is certainly true of modern popular literature with its mass production and mass marketing, but even in the Middle Ages there were scribes, bookshops and scriptoria, and minstrels who acted as middlemen.

The roles of mediators vary according to whether the material is popular or popularized. As distinguished by Barbu, popular literature is widespread owing to an intrinsic condition, while popularized works profliferate as a result of organized social action. One is widespread naturally, the other is made to be widespread. Instances of medieval popularized literature would be exempla and saint's legends, which were widely disseminated by the Church through the sermons of the friars and other orders whose main function was to preach to the general populace. Not only did these narratives circulate orally, but ecclesiastical scriptoria and clerks produced many texts as well. In medieval England, the closest thing to mass literature was this popularized literature of religious instruction. Manuscripts and early prints indicate that such items were the most widely circulated. Religion would seem to be the driving force of popular literature before and after printing. Few Middle English romances can be said to be popularized in Barbu's sense. Indeed, they were officially regarded with suspicion by the Church, the only institution capable of a program of popularization. At times, however, the church seems to have appropriated the intrinsically popular form for its own purposes, as in the case of the Charlemagne romances. Albert Baugh has proposed a theory that these, and other romances, were composed in writing by clerics for oral dissemination to lay (unlettered) audience by minstrels. There are relatively few romances relating to Charlemagne in English—the attempt to popularize them seems not to have succeeded. Some romances do incorporate features of popularized genres like saints' legends—Guy of Warwick, Ami and Amiloun, Isumbras and Florence of Rome are cases in point.

These terms, "popular" and "popularized," may also be used to distinguish between what A. C. Gibbs calls

a sophisticated aristocratic romance which has been simplified, or even debased to suit the needs and understanding of a popular audience and a poem which has been deliberately put together out of the tastes and attitudes of such an audience and borrows the form of romance for reasons of convenience and literary prestige.

A number of romances are popularized in the sense that they are transformations of narratives originally composed for elite audiences. But we must, I think, reject the assumption that popularized romance is somehow romance manqu'e and that popular romance is really something else dressed up as romance. There are Middle English romances which could be called simplified, even debased versions of the original stories; Sir Tristrem would be a case in point. But there are numerous others which do not fit this description. Sir Launfal, based on Lanval by Marie de France, has a more complex narrative than its source and none the worse for it. Yvain and Gawain is in some ways simpler than Chretien's Yvain, but has virtues not found in its source. The impoverishment of Sir Tristrem should be attributed to the author's modest literary ability as much as to the audience's intellectual and artistic perceptivity. The question of literary sophistication and social status of the romances' audiences is rather complex, as we have seen in our earlier discussions. The questions of aesthetics and of the relationship of form to content raised here will be considered in later sections. The English romances mentioned above, and many others, all demonstrate that the stories of the courtly French works were adapted for an audience with different interests and literary expectations. While still elitist, the narratives are less exclusive than their sources, in their broadened accessibility. The Middle English romances are potentially popular literature. Mediators made them more accessible—in this sense the stories have been popularized. But because the romances were not popularized in the sense of created in order to be widespread, they did not necessarily reach a large audience. They were not the product of a large, organized, well supported program of dissemination as were popularized religious works. The notable feature of the mediation of popularized romances is that the mediators funda-mentally alter the material of their source before passing it on, and have contacts with different social groups within the culture.

There is one other point that should be made about the distance between author and audience and the manner of the artefact's mediation. This pertains to the artefact's medium. In the case of a Middle English romance, that medium could be either writing or voice, and if oral, the story could be sung or spoken, recited from memory, improvised or read aloud. Of course, in the Middle Ages, society was less literate and more dependant on oral communication in all areas of life than is modern. Most medieval literature was written to be read aloud. The oral/written distinction which applies to certain forms of folk and elite literatures is less clear when we deal with medieval romances. They do display a number of oral traits. Certain romances contain evidence of oral formulas (as compositional units in the classic sense described by Lord and Parry), and some employ an oral style of narration which gives the effect of a minstrel performance. However, most were based on stories already written in French and were probably not composed orally, or performed by minstrels after the middle of the fourteenth century.

If the Middle English romances are not, primarily, oral literature, in some ways they behave like oral literature. They exist in variants, as oral tales do, thus there is no fixed text and no single correct version. Reliance on a fixed text, whether in writing or in perfect memorizations of oral literature, seems characteristic of elite, official cultures. Modern scholarship, a part of elite culture, has often confirmed this reliance as when H. S. Bennett, in writing about the romances, comments on "the gradual degeneration which is inseparable from oral transmission." (Folklorists and others would object.) Concern for textual integrity is a mark of the elite artist—see Chaucer's envoy to Scoggan, his erring scribe, and Chretien's warnings about those who would add lies to his stories. To some extent, reliance on a written text may come about in elite literatures because, as Franz Bauml has found in his studies of medieval literacy, without a fixed text it is difficult for an author to establish an individual voice, and elite audiences value this. Hans Jauss, in discussing the alterity of the Middle Ages, reminds us of "the great extent to which our modern understanding of literature is formed by the written character of tradition, the singularity of authorship, and the autonomy of the text understood as a work." These biases may distort our understanding of medieval popular literature by leading us to identify as elite literature only those works conforming to the tastes of modern cultural elites and to overlook what orality, convention and textual plurality have contributed to the development of literature.

In part, the dynamic character of medieval texts, so troubling to modern editors, may be related to the way medieval authors understood their role as artists. Like folk artists, they often functioned as mediators or passers-on of traditional materials. Medieval theories of art cast the author as a mediator between the audience and stories already in existence. Literary decorum required that they at least appear to play this role. Medieval rhetorics and works on the art of poetry were primarily concerned with enumerating devices for the amplification or dimunition of material. Such topoi and colors of rhetoric would be useful to an artist working with received material. The authors of the Middle English romances were indeed mediators of pre-existing stories. The story recounted in any individual text had a life outside that text, in other versions mediated by other composers.

Bauml's remark about the importance of the fixed text to authorial individuality indicates another source of aesthetic alterity—the modern predeliction for novelty and originality. For us, heirs of the Romantics, works which reflect the individuality and creativity of the author are most significant. This emphasis on novelty may be a function of cultural change. When cultures change and become more heterogeneous, Cawelti says, intellectual elites place more emphasis on invention, "out of a sense that rapid cultural changes require continually new perceptions of the world." But it does not follow that elite literature is that which is original while popular literature is derivative and conventional, and folk is traditional literature. Again, the writings of Jauss suggest a corrective. He contrasts the modern reader who admires that in a work "which makes it stand out against the received tradition" with the medieval reader who "found texts enjoyable because they told him what he already knew, and because it satisfied him deeply to find each thing in its correct place in the world model." Such an appeal is often associated with popular literature. Many theories of popular aesthetics are based on the pleasure of fulfilled expectations and an appreciation of the familiar. Cawelti's studies of formula fiction show how the formulas function as "conventional materials for structuring cultural models: favorite plots, stereotyped characters, common metaphors." These are found in the Middle English romances and in romances and medieval narrative generally.

Aesthetics are among the most important factors in the cultural dynamic of author, audience, and artefact. They play a part in the relationship between author and artefact, for authors shape their material in accordance with an aesthetic. Aesthetics also enter into the relationship between material and audience, for the audience anticipates a certain kind of presentation, a certain kind of experience. Scholars still have not arrived at an accepted aesthetic of popular literature. The aesthetics of the Middle English have always been problematic.

Toelken defines fine art as that "based on the study of objects that are related to an ever-developing intellectual sense of proportion, design and individual creativity held by and judged by people of educated and sophisticated taste." High literature tends to be academic, exclusive and formal, judged by the standards of a small intellectual elite. Another study of cultural aesthetics, by Arpad, touches on several other points we have noted before. High literature is characterized by complex expression, reliance on the permanence of the written record, individual creativity, innovative outlook, self-conscious design and selection of materials. On the other hand, popular literature may be said to be characterized by direct expression, pragmatic outlook, conventional design, the use of received materials and non—exclusiveness. David Madden says that the audience for high literature judges the achievements of artists by how well they are able to transform their inherited material through their imaginative conceptions. Popular artists are judged by their skill in manipulating the conventions and formulas of the genre for a calculated effect. Popular aesthetics are based on receptivity and familiarity, affirming accepted values and encouraging the individual to identify with a picture of the world as he would have it be—a moral fantasy. Such literature reaffirms, in an intense form, values and attitudes already known; it reassures. Its design is conventional because such works are said to be derived from a limited repertoire of elements which are combined in stereotyped, formulaic ways.

Some would stress the fact that all genres go through their own cycle of innovation and conventionlization. Others have noted that some innovation is essential to the success of popular literature. Winfred Fluck suggests that it is not so much the fulfillment of expectations which accounts for a particular popular work's appeal, since other formulaic works would fulfill the same expectations. What matters is the way in which it threatens (but only threatens) not to fulfill them—the test and trial of convention through a fictional process of disturbance followed by reintegration.

Such generalizations must be tempered in light of the features of medieval literature we have noted above. Most medieval audiences enjoyed that which was familiar, and did not privilege originality or individual creativity as we do. Nor did most medieval authors strive for these. Per Nykrog, writing of twelfth century French romances, comments on the practices of medieval narrative artists. Most, he says, "selected (modified, develped) a certain number of thematic elements found in literary tradition and/or in… [their]… own experience as a historical person, and combined them into a story." It appears that many composers of medieval romances behaved in ways we would associate with popular artists today. Only an atypical few sought originality for its own sake. The Middle English romances and popular literature in general have suffered in some discussions of aesthetics, as the earlier quotes from Gibbs and others suggest. "Popular" implies an artist with inferior abilities and an audience with inferior tastes. In particular, the Middle English romances have been criticized for being conventional and poetically inept. A classic statement of this point is Laura Hibbard Loomis' in her study of the Auchinleck manuscript. She refers to romances'

"patter" of well-worn cliches, the same stereotyped formulas of expression, the same stock phrases, the same stock rhymes, which Chaucer was to parody in such masterly fashion in Sir Thopas.

Advances in scholarship—theories of oràl-formulaic composition and stucturalist analysis as well as studies of formula fiction—have given us more insight into the formulaic nature of romance. Susan Wittig's analysis of the romances shows that their repetitive style is not a function of the authors' lack of talent but a conscious choice of narrative technique integral to the stories' meanings. Forms of popular culture have their own aesthetics; they are not simply denegrated or naive forms of the fine arts.

There is a question as to whether an aesthetics of popular literature can be evaluative. Richard Peterson objects to an aesthetic basis for a theory of popular culture because, he says, "aesthetic value inheres in the acts of evaluation and not in the object of evaluation, per se." This is to say that the aesthetic values are those of the audience rather than the artefact itself. But artefacts are embued by their authors with their aesthetics, so aesthetics do have some bearing on the nature of popular literature. Hinds objects to a value based aesthetic because the value of a popular artefact is determined by the number of people who adopt or consume it. He further suggests that there is no bad popular literature, because a bad work would be a failure and so not attract many readers. Roger Rollin, talking about modern culture, says "the only evaluation which counts is the strictly quantitative one …" As we have seen, quantitative information about the Middle English romances is limited, so such an approach is not very fruitful. One can distinguish popular literature which is artful from that which is not, just as one can distinguish masterpieces from lesser works of elite literature. An evaluation of the romances' artistry does not determine their status as popular artefacts, though the nature of the artistry into which they aspire is relevant to this status. Aesthetics are more than a matter of evaluation—they are also a matter of function; how a work seeks to engage the audience and shape its response.

All art has a double aspect: it is both a model for life and a model of life. It is not only that art imitates life and life imitates art, but that both processes are essential to the generation of meaning. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz elaborates on this observation, "cultural expressions… give meaning, i.e. objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves." He further explains that through its art, a culture expresses its ethos (its "tone, character and quality of life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood") and presents its worldview (its picture "of the way things in sheer actuality are," its "most comprehensive ideas of order." Any particular work of art offers, then, a synthesis of ethos and world view; the nature of that synthesis is determined by the kind of aesthetic the work employs. One aesthetic attempts to create a unique synthesis that is complete and conventional, affirming accepted values and attitudes. Another aesthetic privileges unique synthesis of ethos and worldview and works which challenge audiences to construct their own.

For an example of how ethos and world view, life and art interact in the romances, we may observe the narratives of twelfth century France and those of fifteenth century England. The fact that rapid cultural change may stimulate intellectual elites to demand a literature of new perceptions, which we noted earlier, is particularly relevant to the synthesis of ethos and world view. It would seem that at times of rapid change, ethos and worldview are not in accord and therefore require revision or reinterpretation. The twelfth century was a time of such change, and though there is not yet consensus as to its processes and details, its general nature is well understood. Among the most important changes, for the romances, was the development of chivalry and the formation of a rigidly hereditary aristocracy which consolidated family holdings by primogeniture. Much has been written on these complex topics, but historian Georges Duby's description of the chivalric society makes clear the cultural significance of the early French romances' blend of idealism, realism, fantasy and ironic self-consciousness. These features, among others, distinguish these romances from earlier related narratives such as the chansons des gestes. The development of romance was partly a literary response to the new experiences brought about by the changes in the way people lived.

Eric Auerbach has said that the purpose of twelfth-century French romances was the "self-portrayal of the ideals and mores of the feudal knightly class." This statement neatly encompasses both aspects of these romances-they present models for life in ideals, but also models of life in self-portraiture. Basic to this class's conception of itself was the idea that its members were superior to non-nobles not just in degree, but in kind. This superiority manifested itself in chivalric behavior of which only the nobility were thought to be capable. The idealistic ethos of the courtly romances came about because, Auerbach says, the aristocracy held that nobility, greatness and intrinsic value had nothing in common with anything ordinary.

The concept of chivalry, developed during the twelfth century remained an important cultural pattern throughout the later Middle Ages in Western Europe. In one of the better known cases of life imitating art, those who felt themselves to be members of the chivalrous society of fifteenth century England (and Europe as well) modeled their activities and attitudes upon those of the characters in earlier romances. What had been a kind of fiction objectifying its audience's experience in an idealized chivalric past came to be regarded as akin to history, a record of practice and a model for emulation. Chretien and other writers of the twelfth century were creating the patterns, the world view of their romances. By the fifteenth century this view had become traditional. However, the social realities of fifteenth century Englishmen were rather different from those of their predecessors.

Interestingly, though England in the later Middle Ages was undergoing changes as profound and accelerated as those of Chretien's time, the cultural elite was essentially conservative and continued to insist upon the relevance of older forms. This is clearly demonstrated in Caxton's programme for translating and publishing romances of the Nine Worthies and chivalric treatises from the libraries of the Dukes of Burgundy. By the fourteenth century, the function of romances had changed as the relationship between art and reality changed. If, in parts of France during the twelfth century, the upper classes became a hereditary hierarchy, in England during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the upper class became stratified as social mobility increased. As K. B. McFarlane explains,

a nobility of a type peculiar to England, having little in common with the French noblesse, first came into existence.… The essential changes had already occurred by 1485; they had hardly begun in 1300. In the reign of Edward I a dozen earls, the dwindling survivors of a seemingly obsolescent baronage, shared their nobility with an undifferentiated mass of some three thousand landowners, each of whose holdings were said to be worth £20 a year or over.… By the second half of the fifteenth century the lords were sharply distinguished from those without the fold. Nobility had parted company with gentility, the quality with which those rejected were still permitted to be endowed. The gentry, that is to say, did not so much rise (though some did) during the later middle ages as fall from the nobility which their antecessors had enjoyed in common with all landowners from a great earl to the lord of an estate worth £20 a year.

A similar dynamic is suggested by Crane's discussion of the romances. Unlike French romances of the twelfth century whose exclusivity asserts their audience's noble status, "English romances facilitate the Barony's claim to status by their very openness, by advertising the naturalness and imitability of their new courtly love and chivlary." Susan Wittig shows that the non-cyclic romances are structured on the pattern of tie male Cinderella, a formula which bridges two classes within the society by offering the possibility of upward mobility to worthy man of low station through marriage to a noble woman. At the same time, the formatila "endorses the upper-class belief that worth and birth are synonymous, that only a noble man can be nobleman." To quote Katheryn Hume's discussion of medieval English romance and modern science fiction, both "justify an elite in its possession of power," but must balance the contra-diction that this justification and self-idealization are made popular and even palatable to an audience partly composed of those outside the power group.

The process of social stratification described by McFarlane was expressed culturally by the withdrawal of the greatest folk from the communal dinners and entertainments of the hall. This practice was one of the many signs of degeneration lamented by Langland in Piers Plowman. Romances were part of these communal entertainments, but the great folk took them with them as they withdrew to the privacy of their chambers. We find numerous references to the reading of romances in such settings. Social stratification of culture and life increased as medieval civilization was transmuted into what might be called early modern Europe. Peter Burke says that not until the Renaissance did the aristocracy withdraw from the common popular culture which had until then been part of its cultural tradition along with courtly culture. This was accompanied by the development, among the middle classes, of a distinctive culture and literature which expressed their concerns.

We have already seen that several important collections of Middle English romances belonged to gentry families in the fifteenth century. It is easy to see how members of this class would have found the more open form of romance appealing—would have felt it necessary to create a more open form of romance—since their gentility entitled them to gentry status. Though they were no longer among the power elite, their ancestors had held nobility in common with the ancestors of that elite. Those gentry who did rise to this status would have identified with those rising heroes whose innate gentility entitles them to marriage into the upper classes. However, even in the stories of Havelok, Octavian, and the Squire of Low Degree—all variations of the male Cinderella story—we court reductionism if read in the romances only their putative audiences' supposed social anxieties. They have meaning in other areas of experience as well. Also, as I have shown, most romances reached a varied audience over a period of time during which the structure of society changed, so it would not do to associate particular narratives with a single, narrowly defined class. Some scholars would question the existence of a chivalric class, in Duby's sense, and this is an important reservation to the argument that I have been following in regard to the origins of romance. Crane's association of the barony with Anglo-Norman romances and their English versions, and my own emphasis upon the Middle English romances' connections with the gentry need to be corroborated by more detailed studies of the social structures in medieval England and the audiences of romances.

There can be little question, though, that social status is significant to the meaning of the romances. The early romances had their origins in a particular social milieu and rather directly express their audience's preoccupation with class. The characters in romances all belong to the chivalric class. Literary convention associated the reading of romances with characters of the social elite.

What points can we make, then, about the popularity of English romances and the nature of popular literature? It would seem that the Middle English popular romances did not originate among a lower class of social aspirants. They owe their existence not to the appropriation of a form by an outside group, but to a development from within. In their formulaic aesthetic they accord with the predominant elite aesthetic of their time, which was intensified by the heightened conservatism of late medieval elites. Theories of popular literature, even when corrected for the lack of mass culture in the Middle Ages and the small scale of popular literature in medieval England, must acknowledge the biases of Romantic and Post-Romantic literary theory, as well as the medieval proclivity for authority and convention which influenced the role of the author and the audiences' expectations.

Theories of popular culture, insofar as they take social class to be a determinant in the creation of cultural artefacts, should be based on historical studies and recognize the fluidity of social systems. Further studies of individual romances and their cultural and bibliographic contexts are needed to reveal the cultural dynamics of the genre.

The following will serve as a concluding illustration of this dynamic. Per Nykrog notes that the early French romances (particularly Chretien's) are unique in their cultural and psychological realism—two elements which contributed greatly to the exclusivity, novelty and difficulty of these works, and to their appeal for modern scholars. Middle English versions tend to downplay such matters, as in Yvain and Gawain, thereby reducing the tension between realism and the idealized chivalric world. Of the English romances, only those by Chaucer, Malory and the Gawain Poet employ a realism akin to the early narratives'. Robert Jordan, recognizing this, argues somewhat facetiously that these are decadent works, reversions to an earlier state of the genre. This formulation runs counter to the usual observation—that the English romances are generally decadent and only works by these great authors make contributions to the form. In fact, by easing the tension between realistic and idealistic elements in romance, the anonymous English composers made it more accessible and created a more enduring form. Paradoxically, they, not the elite authors, could be considered the important innovators.