The Wonder of Middle English Romance

Marvels and the marvellous are synonymous with medieval romance. Yet scholars often express disappointment at the wonders they find in Middle English romance. This chapter asks a simple question: how does Middle English romance understand wonder? and how, in turn, does our understanding of wonder in Middle English romance help us better comprehend the genre and what it can achieve? The chapter is made up of two parts. The first seeks to articulate a theory of wonder specific to English romance. Its focus is lexical, attentive to what the sources themselves identify as a wonder or as productive of wonderment; and its remit is wide, drawing evidence from across the whole genre. The second turns to a single romance, Octovian Imperator, in order to demonstrate how wonder puts into question the very certainties that Octovian and romances like it are conventionally understood to instantiate. Wonder has been credited as the beginning of philosophy, not something we normally associate with Middle English romance. This chapter argues, however, that what the particularity of wonder in the English romances highlights is the genre’s fundamentally interrogative mode.