Courtly romance was the most important vernacular literary genre during the Middle Ages in Europe. This new Companion introduces students and general readers to its poetics, narrative voice, and manuscript contexts, and reveals its relationship with the Mediterranean, gender, race and emotions alongside many other themes.

Introduction Roberta L. Krueger; 1. For love and for lovers': the origins of romance Laura Ashe; 2. The manuscript contexts of medieval romance Keith Busby; 3. Matters of form: experiments in verse and prose romance Jane Gilbert and Ad Putter; 4. Authors, narrators, and their stories in Old French romance Sylvie Lefèvre (translated by Roberta L. Krueger); 5. Arthurian transformations Elizabeth Archibald; 6. Romance and the medieval Mediterranean Sharon Kinoshita; 7. The crusading romance in Britain: religious violence and the transformation of popular chivalric narrative Lee Manion; 8. 'Making race' in medieval romance: a premodern critical race studies perspective Nahir I. Otaño Gracia; 9. The construction and interrogation of gender in Old French romance Kathy M. Krause; 10. Emotions as the language of romance Megan Moore; 11. Medieval Iberian romance David A. Wacks; 12. Medieval and early modern Italian romance Laura Chuhan Campbell; 13. German medieval romance Albrecht Classen; 14. The ends of romance in Chaucer and Malory Patricia Clare Ingham; 15. French romance in the late middle ages and the renaissance Jane H.M. Taylor; 16. Romance in historical context: literature and the changing values and norms of aristocratic society Craig Taylor; 17. Romance in twentieth and twenty-first century popular culture Susan Aronstein.