Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance

Having vigorously defended for more than a decade the orthodox classical precepts of his day,' Richard Hurd finally yielded to the romantic spell of the far away and long ago and in 1762 offered his one important contribution to the renascence of interest in the mediaeval. The contribution-a collection of twelve letters to which the author gave the title Letters on Chivalry and Romance-provides critical justification for the literature of the Middle Ages and the use of romance material in modern poetry by insisting that the chivalric manners and Gothic superstitions are more poetic than those of the Greek heroic age; by arguing that the greatness of Spenser and the Italian renaissance poets lies in the romantic rather than the classical features of their epics; and by defending imagination and the fairy way of writing. Seldom has the historical method in criticism been employed more effectively or to better advantage than it is by Hurd in his efforts to discover the latent causes of chivalry and the mediaeval romances and, in so doing, to exonerate the from the charges of caprice and absurdity that his own age was too ready to bring against them. Nothing in human nature is without its reasons, he tells us in Letter I. If we would understand the romances, we must know the institution of chivalry which gave birth to them; if we would understand chivalry, we must know from what causes it was derived-the wants, designs, and policies of the barbarians among whom it rose must be explored. Wherefore, Hurd employs one of his favorite critical methods, that of explaining phenomena as the inevitable results of causes which lie in the social, economic, and political conditions of the age, and discovers that chivalry was an unavoidable consequence of the feudal system, that certain features inevitably characterized

Art · Chivalry · Literature · Romance · Historical and Literary Studies · History · Medieval Literature and History · Renaissance Literature and Culture