Romance and resistance

This article considers evidence regarding the printing, translating, and reading of chivalric romance in late sixteenth-century England. After analysing the market conditions that influenced the printing ventures of William Copland, the main mid-century printer of chivalric romances, evidence of readership is considered in the form of ownership inscriptions and marginalia in his editions of romances. The case of William Bellasis, a prominent member of the Yorkshire gentry, provides suggestive anecdotal evidence of a romance being read as an anti-metropolitan and anti-Reformist narrative. Margaret Tyler's approach to translating Spanish chivalric romance is then considered for its conscious affiliation to a discourse of impoverished northern chivalry. Finally, a reconsideration of the drive to appropriate chivalric romance as a narrative form for the centralized, Protestant Tudor polity by writers like Spenser and Bateman suggests that these initiatives should be seen as reacting to a perception of romance as relying on the twin concepts of power delegation and intercession, both of which were anathema to the Tudor administration

Art · Chivalry · Gentry · Literature · Marginalia · Narrative · Obedience · Political science · Romance · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity