No literature exists in a vacuum. Meaning is generated through context, or rather contexts, since there will always be several that apply at any one point and these will change and multiply over time. This is no less true of medieval romance than of any other genre of literature, and no single study is likely to address all of the relevant contexts for a genre as widespread and popular – in sheer numbers and variety of readers – as medieval romance. The aim of the present collection of essays is to take a selection of English and Scottish romances from the medieval period and explore some medieval contexts that might deepen our understanding of them. The contexts explored here include more traditional literary concerns with questions of genre and rhetorical technique or literary-cultural questions of authorship, transmission and readership, but they also extend to such broader intellectual and social contexts as medieval understandings of geography, or the physiology of swooning, or the efficacy of baptism. This is a two-way process: the romances studied here are illuminated by the various contexts in which the volume's contributors set them, but so too are those contexts enriched and altered by romance's interaction with them. The medieval audience for romance was relatively broad and varied: old and young, women and men, clerical and lay, nobility, gentry, merchants and those who could not afford – perhaps could not read – their own manuscript or print copy of a Middle English romance.