This is as true of medieval romances as of their descendants, including the French and the English 18th-century novel and the pastoral romance, which, at the time of the Renaissance, revived the classical traditions of pastoral poetry and led to the appearance, in 1504, of the Arcadia by the Italian poet Jacopo Sannazzaro and, in about 1559, of the Diana by the Spanish poet and novelist Jorge de Montemayor. Both works were widely influential in translation, and each has claims to be regarded as the first pastoral romance, but in spirit Diana is the true inheritor of the romance tradition, giving it, in alliance with the pastoral, a new impetus and direction.

Medieval romance began in the 12th century when clerks, working for aristocratic patrons, often ladies of royal birth such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughters, Marie de Champagne and Matilda, wife of Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, began to write for a leisured and refined society. Like the courtly lyric, romance was a vehicle of a new aristocratic culture which, based in France, spread to other parts of western Europe. Translations and adaptations of French romances appear early in German: the Roman d’Enéas, in a version written by Heinrich von Veldeke before 1186, and the archetypal Tristan romance in Eilhart von Oberge’s Tristant of c. 1170–80. In England many French romances were adapted, sometimes very freely, into English verse and prose from the late 13th to the 15th century; but by far the most important English contribution to the development and popularization of romance was the adaptation of a number of French Arthurian romances completed by Sir Thomas Malory in 1469–70 and published in 1485 by William Caxton under the title of Le Morte Darthur. In the Scandinavian countries the connection with the Angevin rulers of England led to importation of French romances in the reign (1217–63) of Haakon of Norway.

The decline of romance

As has been seen, in the later Middle Ages the prose romances were influential in France, Italy, and Spain, as well as in England; and the advent of the printed book made them available to a still wider audience. But although they continued in vogue into the 16th century, with the spread of the ideals of the New Learning, the greater range and depth of vernacular literature, and the rise of the neoclassical critics, the essentially medieval image of the perfect knight was bound to change into that of the scholar-courtier, who, as presented by the Italian Baldassare Castiglione in his Il Cortegiano (published 1528), embodies the highest moral ideals of the Renaissance. The new Spanish romances continued to enjoy international popularity until well into the 17th century and in France gave rise to compendious sentimental romances with an adventurous, pastoral, or pseudo-historical colouring popular with Parisian salon society until c. 1660. But the French intellectual climate, especially after the beginning of the so-called classical period in the 1660s, was unfavourable to the success of romance as a “noble” genre. Before disappearing, however, the romances lent the French form of their name to such romans as Antoine Furetière’s Le Roman bourgeois (1666) and Paul Scarron’s Le Roman comique (1651–57). These preserved something of the outward form of romance but little of its spirit; and while they transmitted the name to the kind of narrative fiction that succeeded them, they were in no sense intermediaries between its old and its new connotations. The great critical issue dominating the thought of western Europe from about 1660 onward was that of “truth” in literature; and romance, as being “unnatural” and unreasonable, was condemned. Only in England and Germany did it find a home with poets and novelists. Thus, while Robert Boyle, the natural philosopher, in his Occasional Discourses (1666) was inveighing against gentlemen whose libraries contained nothing more substantial than “romances,” Milton, in Paradise Lost, could still invoke “what resounds/In fable or romance of Uther’s son . . .”

The 18th-century romantic revival

The 18th century in both England and Germany saw a strong reaction against the rationalistic canons of French classicism—a reaction that found its positive counterpart in such romantic material as had survived from medieval times. The Gothic romances, of which Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764; dated 1765) is the most famous, are perhaps of less importance than the ideas underlying the defense of romance by Richard Hurd in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762). To Hurd, romance is not truth but a delightful and necessary holiday from common sense. This definition of romance (to which both Ariosto and Chrétien de Troyes would no doubt have subscribed) inspired on the one hand the romantic epic Oberon (1780) and on the other the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott. But influential though Scott’s romantic novels may have been in every corner of Europe (including the Latin countries), it was the German and English Romantics who, with a richer theory of the imagination than Hurd’s, were able to recapture something of the spirit and the structure of romance—the German Romantics by turning to their own medieval past; the English, by turning to the tradition perpetuated by Edmund Spenser and Shakespeare. In the 19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville adapted the European romance to address the distinct needs of a young American republic and literature.