The Question of Middle English Romance

This article explores the question of Middle English romance. Literal questions, variously rudimentary, enigmatic, preposterous, provide the impetus for understanding the genre as fundamentally interrogative. The first section takes seriously the genre’s didactic claims, detailing English romance’s learned preoccupations and its preoccupation with learning. Yet, even as the romances promote authorized, socially sanctioned kinds of knowledge, the second section proposes that the very dynamic of inquiry simultaneously offers the romance reader the opportunity to interrogate that knowledge. The questioning that is indispensable to medieval practices of education is, it demonstrates, inseparable from romance’s classic form, the quest. Where the first two sections range widely across the corpus, the third turns to the questions that animate just one romance, the Erle of Tolous, which, it argues, invite readers to interrogate what it is they think they know. The search for orientation gives way, here as elsewhere, to radical disorientation.