Medieval romances in today's popular culture: The feminist in the castle

Abstract

Ijince the publication of Kathleen Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower in 1972, historical romances have become increasingly popular among women readers and have won an important share in the lucrative field of women's literature, curtailing the traditional leadership of Harlequin and other serial romances. In less than twenty years, the genre has split into a number of subgenres, which can be identified by their historical setting: Regency romances, Indian and western romances (The Conquest of the West), the North and the South romances (Secession War), and the medieval romances. Medieval romances, which are being produced by writers on both sides of the Atlantic, raise many interesting questions for students of female popular culture criticism. In this paper, I would like to explore two aspects of these novels: Firstly, I shall examine how contemporary authors have represented and developed the historical specificities of the Middle Ages for a readership that possesses little or no historical knowledge. Secondly, I will discuss how the same authors handle a female heroine, who must be both a credible woman of the past and a lovable woman of the present. We should begin by recalling that medieval romances are one of the subdivisions of an enormous body of reading material for women known as romances or love stories. The genealogical tree of the romance is quite intricate. Romance novels branch off into serials and into mainstream form: serial authors are obliged to follow strict formal guidelines provided by the editor; the authors of mainstream romance on the other hand have relatively greater freedom, but they must produce a longer novel, full of adventure, sensational development, and passion. The medieval romance is a mainstream historical love story set in the Middle Ages and is one of the fastest growing kinds of romance today. Carol Thurston, author of The Romance Revolution,1 has argued that this trend can first be detected around the middle 1980s. The readership is estimated at roughly twentyfour million in the United States alone and more than two hundred million worldwide, the latter statistic pertaining only to Harlequin novels.2 The popularity of romances among women readers has brought about such a proliferation of books and editors that statistics are very difficult to obtain; editors are also reluctant to release such data because it can be used by the competition. In spite of its enormous worldwide readership, romance has been until very recently the most despised and neglected of literary genres—even in the field of popular literature! Many intellectuals and scholars have relegated the reading of romances to the status of a