The English Romance in Time

The great story motifs of romance - quests and magic, rudderless boats and passionate heroines, missing heirs and fairy mistresses - were transmitted directly through from the Middle Ages to the age of print in an abundance of editions, to form a corpus of secular literature that was universally known in the sixteenth century, by the educated and the illiterate alike. Spenser and Shakespeare assumed a familiarity with them, and so did the various monarchs and rebels who exploited them for their own purposes. Helen Cooper sets out to recover that lost cultural literacy of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.