Knights and Merchants Unite: Sir Amadace, the Grateful Dead, and the Moral Exemplum Tradition

Abstract

Sir Amadace, a Middle English romance composed in the late fourteenth century, has been almost uniformly ignored by critics. However, at the center of this text lies a striking social relationship between a knight and a merchant, an anomaly within chivalric literature. Most of the existing scholarship on this text has investigated the relation of Amadace to either the folkloric tradition—particularly the tale type of the Grateful Dead—or to Old French romance. In this essay, I suggest that the closest analogues likely lie in the exemplum tradition; furthermore, I suggest that the fourteenth-century French exempla collection known as Ci nous dit offers the closest parallels to the unique knight–merchant interaction lying at the heart of Amadace’s narrative.