Re-Forming the Past: The Medieval Romance Book as a Dynamic Site of Memory

While scholars recognize that the polemical debates between post-Reformation Protestants and Catholics sparked a re-consideration of how England’s recent Catholic past fit into a changing understanding of English national and religious history, the ways in which literary genres, like the romance, shaped and were shaped by such debates are less well studied. To bring the romance genre into these conversations, this dissertation argues that for the producers and readers of the medieval romance, the genre and the books that preserved it were a means by which readers could both travel to the past and meditate on their connections with that past. Combining bibliographical analysis, reception history, and theories of cultural memory and historiography, this project demonstrates that polytemporal material objects allowed readers to experience both present and past in directions that unsettle the period divisions foundational to much modern scholarship.

After Chapter One grounds my research theoretically, methodologically, and historically, the dissertation's remaining chapters examine four sites of material romance memory: the library, the manuscript, the monument, and the museum. In Chapter Two, I study the act of building a collection or library as a means by which readers could materially fashion their own versions of literary history. Chapter Three takes up two romance manuscripts that were created by a Catholic scribe in 1564, complicating narratives that trace progress from medieval to early-modern, Catholic to Protestant, or manuscript to print. Chapter Four analyzes Thomas Berthelette's 1532 folio edition of John Gower's Confessio Amantis alongside William Shakespeare's reimagining of Gower in his late romance Pericles. I argue that while Berthelette separates the medieval author from his work, Shakespeare's play both recognizes Gower's alterity and simultaneously insists on his presence in living cultural memory. Finally, Chapter Five compares two collections of artifacts said to be associated with the romance of Guy of Warwick, arguing that medieval and early-modern romance texts provided the narrative framing needed to make such objects legible.