Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Editorial Introduction: Namoore of this! How to read Guy of Warwick and why
- 1 Gui de Warewic at Home and Abroad: A Hero for Europe
- 2 Gui de Warewic in its Manuscript Context
- 3 Guy of Warwick as a Translation
- 4 From Gui to Guy: The Fashioning of a Popular Romance
- 5 The Manuscripts and Texts of the Middle English Guy of Warwick
- 6 The Speculum Guy de Warwick and Lydgate's Guy of Warwick: The Non-Romance Middle English Tradition
- 7 An Exemplary Life: Guy of Warwick as Medieval Culture-Hero
- 8 The Visual History of Guy of Warwick
- 9 ‘In her owne persone semly and bewteus’: Representing Women in Stories of Guy of Warwick
- 10 Of Dragons and Saracens: Guy and Bevis in Early Print Illustration
- 11 Guy of Warwick and The Faerie Queene, Book II: Chivalry Through the Ages
- 12 Guy as Early Modern English Hero
- Appendix: Synopsis of the Guy of Warwick narrative
- Index
4 - From Gui to Guy: The Fashioning of a Popular Romance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Editorial Introduction: Namoore of this! How to read Guy of Warwick and why
- 1 Gui de Warewic at Home and Abroad: A Hero for Europe
- 2 Gui de Warewic in its Manuscript Context
- 3 Guy of Warwick as a Translation
- 4 From Gui to Guy: The Fashioning of a Popular Romance
- 5 The Manuscripts and Texts of the Middle English Guy of Warwick
- 6 The Speculum Guy de Warwick and Lydgate's Guy of Warwick: The Non-Romance Middle English Tradition
- 7 An Exemplary Life: Guy of Warwick as Medieval Culture-Hero
- 8 The Visual History of Guy of Warwick
- 9 ‘In her owne persone semly and bewteus’: Representing Women in Stories of Guy of Warwick
- 10 Of Dragons and Saracens: Guy and Bevis in Early Print Illustration
- 11 Guy of Warwick and The Faerie Queene, Book II: Chivalry Through the Ages
- 12 Guy as Early Modern English Hero
- Appendix: Synopsis of the Guy of Warwick narrative
- Index
Summary
Gui de Warewic is one of the latest of the Anglo-Norman romances; Guy of Warwick is a comparatively early Middle English romance – the one responds to the foundational texts of insular romance and the other has an ongoing influence on later texts (as this volume demonstrates). Between them they form one of the most popular legends created by English romance writers, and the essential question remains that asked by M. Domenica Legge: ‘What, then, could be the cause of the strange fascination this story [Gui] has exerted?’ This chapter will re-examine the relationship between these two versions, arguing that the close resemblances are more significant to our understanding of the development of insular romance than the differences – the most obvious of which is the change in language.
The story of Guy of Warwick indeed provides one of the most popular romances of the English middle ages, sufficiently popular to give rise to numerous versions across several centuries. Popularity is itself a slippery concept; it can be measured variously: by evident success, by subjective assessment of literary quality, or by assumptions about audience. By the first measure, Gui is evidently as popular, if not more so, than Guy, in that more manuscripts survive or are recorded. By the second measure, the legend of Guy is recognized as a benchmark – ‘an epitome of what was most popular’ – but in response to the apparent register of literature in French, subjective readings of the two linguistic versions have tended to find ‘popular’ attitudes and styles in the Middle English rather than the Anglo-Norman versions. This relates to the third, more problematic, measure. Gui, written in the socially superior vernacular of the thirteenth century, is associated with baronial patrons and audiences, seen as distinct from the ‘popular’ or populist audiences posited for Guy. I would suggest, however, that the popularity, however assessed, of the English-language versions of the story of Guy owes its existence to that of Gui, or to be more precise, it is the author of Gui de Warewic who can be given the double-edged compliment of being recognized as the first writer of popular fiction amongst insular romance writers.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor , pp. 44 - 60Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007