Cultural Translations in Medieval Romance

Romance was the most popular secular literature of the Middle Ages and has been understood most productively as a genre that continually refashioned itself. The essays collected in this volume explore the subject of translation both linguistic and cultural in relation to the composition reception and dissemination of romance across the languages of late medieval Britain Ireland and Iceland. In taking this multilingual approach this volume proposes a re-centring and extension of our understanding of the corpus of medieval Insular romance which although long considered extra-canonical has over the previous decades acquired something approaching its own canon - a canon which we might now begin to unsettle and of which we might ask new questions.<br/>The topics of the essays gathered here range from Dafydd ap Gwilym and Walter Map to <i>Melusine</i> and English Trojan narratives and address topics from women and merchants to werewolves and marvels. Together they position the study of romance in translation in relation to cross-border and cross-linguistic transmission and reception; and alongside the generic re-imaginings of romance both early and late that implicate romance in new linguistic cultural and social networks. The volume also shows how even where linguistic translation is not involved we can understand the ways in which romance moved across cultural and social boundaries and incorporated elements of different genres into its own capacious and malleable frame as types of <i>translatio</i> - in terms of learning or power or both.