SOURCE: Speed, Diane. “Middle English Romance and the Gesta Romanorum.” In Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, edited by Rosalind Field, pp. 45-56. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999.

In the following essay, Speed catalogs a series of motifs that appear both in the stories of the Gesta Romanorum and in medieval romances.

I Introduction

Amongst scholarly efforts to locate both individual Middle English romances and the amorphous entity ‘Middle English Romance’ in shifting generic discourses, one recurrent topic has been the parallels observable between certain romances and the Gesta Romanorum, ultimately the most extensive and widely disseminated of the medieval exemplum collections. Given renewed interest in the generic boundaries of Middle English romance in the post-modern situation, together with a surge of interest in exemplum generally and the Gesta Romanorum in particular,¹ it may be opportune to look further into the nature of the interrelationship. This paper is offered...