Tail-rhyme romance unites a French genre with a continental stanza form, so why was it developed only in Middle English literature? For English audiences, tail-rhyme becomes inextricably linked with the romance genre in a way that no other verse form does. The first examples are recorded near the beginning of the fourteenth century and by the end of it Chaucer's Sir Thopas can rely on it to work as a shorthand for the entire Middle English romance tradition. How and why this came to be is the question that Anglicising Romance sets out to answer. Its five chapters discuss the stanza's origins; the use of tail-rhyme in Anglo-Noman literature; questions of transmission and manuscript layout; the romances of the Auchinleck manuscript; and the geographic spread of tail-rhyme romance. The individual entries in the Appendix present newly reassessed evidence for the provenance and date of each of the thirty-six extant tail-rhyme romances.
RHIANNON PURDIE is Senior Lecturer in Mediaeval English at the University of St Andrews.
Reviews
An important work to which scholars interested in medieval prosody and/or romance will return repeatedly. ENCOMIAA study of this thoroughness and scope, which also offers new or refined insights into the nature and significance of tail-rhyme romance, is to be warmly welcomed as a significant contribution to the scholarship of Middle English romance and to the study of distinctively regional or national developments in medieval writing. THE MEDIEVAL REVIEW