Chivalric romance
A medieval narrative genre centered on knights, quests, courtly love, and adventures that often include marvels or supernatural events.
Knight-errant: A wandering knight who undertakes adventures, often to prove courage or defend the vulnerable. The knight-errant gives romance its mobile hero and sequence of challenges.
Yvain, the Knight of the Lion: A twelfth-century Arthurian romance by Chrétien de Troyes about a knight seeking to regain his honor and wife. Yvain’s trials combine knightly adventure, comic episodes, and marital reconciliation.
Chrétien de Troyes: A French poet of the twelfth century whose Arthurian romances established influential forms of the genre. His works helped define the romance’s courtly heroes, quests, and interlaced plots.
Chanson de geste: A medieval French heroic poem, usually about warfare and loyalty among legendary or historical warriors. Unlike romance’s quests and love plots, it often foregrounds collective military action.
Quest: A journey undertaken to attain a significant object, goal, or transformation. Quests organize many romances around tests that reshape a knight’s reputation.
Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart: A romance by Chrétien de Troyes in which Lancelot undertakes a humiliating rescue quest for Queen Guinevere. Its central rescue makes courtly devotion and compromised honor inseparable.
Marie de France: A twelfth-century poet who wrote French verse lais, short narratives often featuring love and marvels. Her lais share romance’s courtly settings and supernatural turns in a compressed form.
Medieval chronicle: A historical narrative that records events in chronological sequence, often linking them to rulers and kingdoms. Romance reshapes the past around adventure and marvel rather than chronological record.
Courtly love: A literary ideal of refined, often extramarital devotion expressed through service, restraint, and longing. Romances make desire a source of discipline, conflict, and knightly achievement.
Perceval, the Story of the Grail: An unfinished romance by Chrétien de Troyes that introduces Perceval’s encounter with the Grail procession. It redirects knightly adventure toward spiritual mystery and the Grail.