Walter Map's story of ‘Sadius and Galo’ is the longest self-contained narrative in Map's only extant work, the collection of anecdotes, satires, marvels and historical narratives now generally known as De nugis curialium (Of Courtiers’ Trifles). It is often characterised as a ‘courtly romance’ in Latin prose, but this classification is implicitly a contradiction in terms, since originally and by strict definition the word ‘romance’ applies only to compositions in the vernacular languages, rather than (or indeed, as opposed to) those in Latin. So how is this apparent contradiction to be explained? Is Map's tale simply an appropriation of the romance mode into a language environment in which it is essentially foreign, a text that consistently borrows distinctively ‘romantic’ themes and motifs in such a way as to offer what is, in effect, a translation of the romance mode into the language of ‘clerks’? Or should it be seen rather as an illustration of the extent to which Latin could also be seen as a natural vehicle for courtly romance, itself fully embodying the creative energies of the genre, without necessarily deferring to, or being subordinate to, other languages? Or would it be more useful to seek a tertium quid here, to rethink the genre of courtly romance in such a way as to emphasise both its essential vernacularity (together with the values implicit in its vernacularity, such as its secularity and its popular appeal) and its simultaneous openness to influence by, and interference from, clerkly Latin-language culture, thus defining it as a genre that is always and essentially implicated in an ongoing process of exchange between languages? From this perspective, ‘Sadius and Galo’ might perhaps be seen as a particularly clear example of this process in action: as a literary text that expresses, but also exploits, the inherent tensions between vernacular and Latin culture.

‘Sadius and Galo’ certainly suggests a confident familiarity with the narrative conventions and implied ideology of vernacular courtly romance, displaying none of the lack of confidence that might be expected of a text that is consciously at odds with its own identity. In fact, Map's work is more than just confidently familiar with its romance models. The tale he tells is carefully constructed in such a way as to accommodate a remarkably intense accumulation of ‘romantic’ themes and motifs within a relatively brief compass.

Attempts to define treason often imply a debate about the very nature and limits of the law, and about the legal authority of governments. Medieval literature reflects such tensions, but also seems to invest imaginatively in the concept of treason to an extent that the history of law alone cannot explain. In this chapter it is argued that treason took on a new shape during the period from the 1260s to the 1340s, and that this was to have a lasting effect on its representation, not just in English law, but also in English culture more generally. This evolution was significantly conditioned by the political turmoils of the period, including the Second Barons’ War of 1264–7, Edward I’s campaigns in Wales and Scotland, Edward II’s conflict with Thomas of Lancaster, and Edward II’s eventual deposition in 1327. Literary texts testify to the legal paradigm-shifts provoked by these events, and to the differences of political principle that underlay them; but they themselves seem to have played a part in the very processes that led to the creation of these new paradigms. What we see in several late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century texts is something of the cultural and political ferment in which new attitudes to treason were formed.

SEVERAL of the items in Oxford, BodL, MS Digby 86 provocatively insist on, or assume, the inevitability of conflict or competition between men and women, especially in the context of sexual and/or marital relationships. Within the composition of the manuscript as a whole, these texts weigh at least heavily enough to suggest that the Digby compiler-scribe was consciously interested in gender conflict as a literary theme. Some of these texts are explicitly presented as debates about gender or gendered experience, or else implicitly as contributions to such debates. Others are principally narratives, but narratives driven by the assumption that relationships between men and women are necessarily and universally mutually exploitative or antagonistic. Such narratives include The Four Wishes of Saint Martin (in French), Dame Sirith (in English) and the Lay of the Horn (in French). Digby 86 also contains two debate poems that focus specifically on gender and gendered perspectives: The Strife between Two Ladies (in French), which assesses the value (to women) of marital fidelity, and The Thrush and the Nightingale (in English), in which two birds play the part of advocates for and against women in general. In addition, there are several texts that present accounts of gendered experience that are so conspicuously one-sided as to seem to be relying on, or even implicitly contributing to, an ongoing debate about the nature of the relationship between men and women. These include texts like The Little Fable of the Jealous Man, The Lad Who Sided with Ladies and Damsels and The Life of a Lusty Lad (all in French). In this chapter, I offer brief characterisations of each of these texts (some of which deserve to be much better known than they are), emphasising in particular their shared intertextuality – by which I mean the sheer complexity of the ways in which they seem to borrow from each other or from a shared set of sources. This intertextuality is sometimes so pronounced as to suggest that each of these texts, whatever its particular literary form, was imagined as a contribution to a wider tradition of literary ‘talk’ about gender. A question I particularly try to answer here is: what social function(s) would such texts have served? And, correspondingly, what kind of audience/readership should their association in Digby 86 be taken to imply?

This chapter is about the discomforts involved in reading medieval romance: the edginess, unpredictability and discord that at least some medieval romance texts seem to cultivate. That might seem like an unpromising line of enquiry. After all, there are many general accounts of romance as a genre that describe it as a cultural product of a deeply reassuring kind, fundamentally patterned and predictable, ideologically conservative, morally normative and unashamedly aimed at the provision of certain kinds of wish-fulfilment fantasy. Perhaps the classic version of this view is the one offered by Northrop Frye, in his influential Anatomy of Criticism. His description of literary romance begins with the assertion that: ‘The romance is the nearest of all literary forms to the wishfulfilmentdream.’ Frye goes on to argue that romance is fundamentally ‘dialectical’, by which he means that as an imaginative mode it typically divides the world into poles of good and evil, with the result that, so far as characterisation goes:

These elemental tendencies that Frye perceives in romance suit his larger argument, which is that romance itself is elemental: a primal and persistent mode, a kind of cultural building-block and, in effect, a literary archetype. Indeed, his account of romance is designed to demonstrate the validity of what he calls ‘archetypical’ criticism, and the implication of this distinctly Jungian language is that romance is a structural element in human culture because it is also a structural element in the human mind. Certainly, of all literary genres, romance is perhaps the one most prone to being treated as if were some sort of psychological condition or neurosis: a form of discourse all the more meaningful for expressing all sorts of things that are not entirely under the control of those who write it, or indeed of those who read it.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight begins with a catastrophe: the destruction of a city so terrifyingly complete that there is nothing left but charred wood and ashes (‘brondes and askes’). It is in the context of this allusion to the ‘sege and the assaut’ of Troy that the poet then refers to a certain knight (a ‘tulk’), who he says committed an act of treason somehow so profound or archetypical as to be ‘the truest [treachery] on erthe’. The implication seems to be that the knight's treason is in some important way the cause of the disaster. But who is this traitor? How exactly does his treason relate to the spectacular destruction of the city? And how is either Troy's fate or the traitor's role in it relevant to themes of the story that the Gawain-poet goes on to tell?

These are questions that have troubled scholarship on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ever since it was first printed by Sir Frederic Madden in 1839. Indeed, the interpretation of the problem that Madden offered in this editio princeps of the poem seems to have largely determined the direction of the debate ever since. Most modern editors of the poem accept Madden's identification of the traitor as Aeneas, although some prefer the alternative candidate championed by Sir Israel Gollancz in his edition of 1940: i.e. Antenor, who in several late-classical and medieval versions of the story conspires with Aeneas (and others) in acts of treachery against the city. In either case, commentators often acknowledge at least a degree of doubt or uncertainty, but they virtually always conclude in the end that either Madden or Gollancz must have been right. In this essay, I argue that there is room for a fresh approach to the problem, and that such an approach might be illuminating for an understanding of the poem as a whole.

This essay is an analysis of the implied cultural geography of the Lai de Melion, an anonymous Old French narrative lay now extant only in a thirteenth-century manuscript in the Bibliothèque d'Arsenal in Paris. What is argued here is that the Irish landscape in which Melion's adventures are set is actually much more solidly and precisely imagined than is generally assumed; and that the complexity of the particular political and ethnic identities associated with this landscape is visibly figured in the bodily metamorphoses of the werewolf who is the Lai's eponymous protagonist.

Initially at least, this is not a text that would seem to encourage such an approach. In its first few lines, the action is located (both temporally and geo - graphically) only in terms that are conspicuously vague. The poet refers simply to ‘the time when King Arthur reigned’ (‘Al tans que rois Artus regnoit’ (1)); and describes him blandly as ‘he who conquered lands’ (‘cil ki les terres conqueroit’ (2)), without even saying what those lands were. Melion himself also seems like an appropriately conventional inhabitant for so colourlessly generic a setting. He is introduced as a knight who is both ‘courtly and noble’ (‘cortois et prous’ (7)) and universally popular (‘amer se faisoit a tos’ (8)). Then one day the knights in Arthur's household decide to hold some sort of chivalric competition in which each of them chooses to make a vow of some kind. The vow that Melion decides to make is a particularly extravagant one: he swears not to love any woman who has ever before loved any another man, or even ever before spoken of any other man (13–22). Not surprisingly, this rather presumptuous undertaking fails to win him any approval from the women of King Arthur's court. Indeed, they are said to hate him for it (‘Molt durement l'en enhaïrent’ (28)), with the result that Melion becomes downcast (37–42), and the king attempts to console him for this by giving him a fine estate by the sea (‘sor cele mer’, (55)).

Medieval romances so insistently celebrate the triumphs of heroes and the discomfiture of villains that they discourage recognition of just how morally ambiguous, antisocial or even downright sinister their protagonists can be, and, correspondingly, of just how admirable or impressive their defeated opponents often are. This tension between the heroic and the anti-heroic in romance-texts contributes considerably to the complexity of the reading experience that they generate, but it is not an aspect of the genre that has been much discussed up to now. Part of the reason for this lies in the way that medieval romances still tend to be characterized as ideologically and psychologically naïve texts. Romance, so the argument goes, is a genre that typically prefers simplistic scales of value, intellectual commonplaces and easy stereotypes; and it relentlessly depicts the victories and happy endings of its chivalric protagonists only as a means of asserting the intrinsic superiority of the social and ethical ideals that they embody. Viewed in this way, it would perhaps be the very last literary genre in which anyone would expect to find either depth or complexity of characterization, let alone any figures interesting enough to be described as ‘anti-heroes’. Medieval romances may not aspire to the illusion of three-dimensional characters whose motives and emotions are complete enough to seem entirely realistic, but this certainly does not mean that they are incapable of sustaining any ambivalence towards their heroes, or towards the idea of heroism.