The study of medieval popular romance, in Middle English or any other language, is a notoriously tricky business. Scholarly consensus over the apparent low aesthetic quality, unsophisticated form and limited conceptual framework exhibited by most medieval popular romances has affected many analyses of these texts until relatively recently. An impatience concerning the debate over the nature of their genre and classification, as well as their representative (or not) status in relation to English medieval literary culture, resulted in the selection of very few such texts for inclusion into the mainstream undergraduate curriculum – usually reserved for texts of high literary status, by authors like Langland and Chaucer. The oft-anthologized Breton lay Sir Orfeo, already distanced from other popular romances through a lack of purely chivalric focus, may be considered an exception, primarily due to its length and combination of elements – Celtic harping, magic and the fairy, links (however odd) with classical mythology, as well as the good stewardship motif – and despite the lack of any extensive descriptions of knightly combat (Orfeo's ‘fighting’ and winning of the lady is done by harp alone). The absence of conveniently short, cheap and linguistically accessible editions until the arrival of Western Michigan University's TEAMS texts in 1964, with some notable exceptions, only partially accounts for the neglect popular romance has suffered.

While recent essay collections have gone some way towards mapping out this difficult territory, no comprehensive investigation of medieval popular romance is available to date. Ad Putter's and Jane Gilbert's collection, The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance (2000), addressed important issues in its introduction, including classification and the notion of ‘popular’, though overall it favoured studies of individual romances from a variety of perspectives rather than a systematic approach to the popular romance. Nicola McDonald's edited collection Pulp Fictions of Medieval England (2004) similarly brought together a long overdue assessment of some popular romances, but, once again, without aiming for a hierarchy of themes or approaches (although her aptly named ‘Polemical Introduction’ provides a number of interesting and provocative starting points). In addition, this collection emphasized the spectacular or controversial elements present in only some of the romances, at the expense of an overview of all popular romance, including the more down-to-earth, expected motif and trope combinations found throughout the genre. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (2000), edited by Roberta Krueger, is an interesting but diffuse collection of essays which, in its rather ambitious approach, covers all medieval romance in a variety of languages, but without enough specific guidance for the researcher of English popular romance.