My name is Nicholas Perkins, I'm a university lecturer in medieval English, and I'm a fellow here at St Hugh's College in Oxford.
My current research is mostly about what we call medieval romance,
which is a huge topic and one of the main ways of transmitting myth and narrative and history
and all sorts of things like that from about the 12th century or really to the present day,
but in the medieval context, right through into the 15th and 16th centuries.
And more specifically, what I've got interested in is what happens in these stories when people give gifts to one another,
when objects circulate in narratives, and when people or protagonists in the stories themselves can be read as if they're gifts circulating
between communities developing obligations and value as they go being passed on from one person to another,
sometimes against their will and also then sometimes coming back home at the end of the story.
So romance is typically have, in inverted commas, a happy ending there comedies in a classical sense from that point of view.
But those endings, a little bit like Shakespeare's comedies, are often quite problematic,
and they involve sacrifices and compromises and treating objects and people both as parts of exchanges between
communities and between families is one way of thinking a little bit more carefully about what's happening,
what's at stake in those so-called happy endings and the happy endings to the objects get returned to their rightful owner?
Yes, very often that's true. And sometimes there are pairs of objects. So, for example, a broken sword, the two pieces of which gets combined,
or in one French story I could think of and not which cannot be undone except by the person who's done it,
or in some stories, something like a chastity belt and its key, which, you know,
symbolically and in all sorts of ways can only be unlocked by the appropriate person.
So sometimes these objects are also people. They're lovers, for example,
who get separated and who in weird and wonderful ways travel around the known
world to the exotic Orient and then come home again and find their true love.
Or perhaps a child is reunited with its parents having been orphaned and cast away at the beginning of its life,
perhaps because it's been born out of wedlock. You're doing an exhibition at the moment about we put on an exhibition in 2012 at the Bodleian,
which looked at how mediaeval romance has been transmitted and read and enjoyed not only in the mediaeval period, but right through the present day.
And the modern library is one of the best places to study and to look at these kinds of things,
work in the English faculty as I do the body, and has a big proportion of mediaeval manuscripts of English romances.
And so we can have a look at those. We wanted to display not only some of the most magnificent and beautiful manuscripts for the Middle Ages,
many of which do have romance, is in the body and has some of those.
But also look at how romance was a popular form as well, very often actually transmitted orally,
by which I don't just mean sort of the idea of the mediaeval minstrel, you know, just getting up and speaking Adelaide.
But these stories were known. They were part of the repertoire of storytellers and they were passed around in families and communities as well.
Now, by definition, if that happens, we don't then have a written record of it always.
But we do also have very modest bits of manuscript, little books which contain more straightforward or simple romances.
Sometimes there's room for children.
So romance ranges from those simple products right up to really elaborate and expensive and very complex works of literature as well.
The kinds of things that we then more often study in English course, it's like perhaps the best known single romance from the Middle Ages in England.
So going in the Green Knight or the romance is which Chaucer included in The Canterbury Tales or Chaucer's Ein masterpiece Troilus and Crusade,
which in some ways is a romance, as well as all sorts of other things as well.
So the exhibition looked at those. It looked to objects also which carry romance stories.
So works of art, things like ivory carvings and jewellery and painting,
which also have some of the famous romance stories like that of Tristan and Isolde or King Arthur,
Lancelot, Guinevere,
those kinds of stories that still are actually very much at the front of how the myths that we tell one another and that we're interested in,
you only have to look at something like, you know, Merlin or something that's been on television recently or off and stories and ideas,
you know, more generally to see that those are very long lasting mythologies that have continued to interest people right up to the present day.
And for me, I spend most of my time obviously working on the literature of that period.
It was really fascinating to be able to have a look at what's there in museums and galleries around
the country to talk to the curators of those places like the British Museum and the Victoria and
Albert Museum in London and also the Ashmolean Museum here in Oxford to ask if we could borrow some
of the things and to try and see how they might relate to the literature of the period as well.
And also to give visitors people who don't necessarily have access to precious manuscripts in
libraries to give them the chance to see first hand what these things actually looked like and.
I think it's tremendously exciting for people to have that direct contact, as it were, really touch the things,
but they're very close to them to have that contact with a book that could have been held by Chaucer or that was around in that period.
And to get that just that little sense of what it was like to experience the literary culture during the Middle Ages as well.
And I think to be able to see it right there, which I my.
And it was just there with the illustrations in everything. Yes.
Yes, that's absolutely right. And in a way, that's something that drew me into mediaeval studies,
that excitement of still being able to look at these tremendously rare now in some ways,
precious objects, often objects that are actually quite ordinary then, but which have developed importance as they've gone through,
partly because of nearly having been lost or been forgotten about like something like the Beowulf manuscript that sort
of laid around in the library was nearly burned and was the only in the 19th century really sort of brought back.
And it was realised was one of the greatest works of literature that we have.
And it's great to be able to be involved in a project which not only has a research academic focus,
but which also has an aspect of it which can show people what it's like.
One of the great things about the exhibition was that we were able to do some other events around it, like draw in school groups,
primary school children, sometimes, sometimes six former students, and have a look at the exhibition to talk about it and think about that, too.
But we also commissioned a new work, if you like, a new piece of storytelling with music from a group called The Devil's Mining Company.
And they were retelling stories really from the romance tradition, one of them, the kind of folk version of what Shakespeare rewrote as King Lear.
Another was the wife of basketball from the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. And another one was the Franklin's tale, also from The Canterbury Tales.
So Daniel Morden, who's a well-known storyteller, he kind of reworked those stories into a show with a group of musicians.
And that was something we were able to commission as part of the project. And it's still going around on tours both in the UK and internationally.
So romance is really quite easily defined genre. Yes, absolutely.
Studying genre in literature is in one way it's inevitable because we all in some senses want
to find a pigeonhole and put a piece of literature there just even as a holding position,
just to say, well, this is how we're going to study it. But genre is also very slippery,
and I think people are realising more and more the genre is very fuzzy around the
edges and very often works of literature make a claim to be in a particular genre.
But actually they're often doing that in quite a playful way and they very often
are rejecting some aspects of the genre that actually that they're inside.
I think some people tend to think about the development of genre, that genres start off, as it were, straight,
and they get more and more complicated and strange and sort of self-referential or comedic or ironic as they go through history.
But romance is one of the genres, I think, which really disprove that idea,
that teleological idea about genre that we sort of get more complicated and interesting the further on in history we get.
Some of the first romances are also some of the most self-aware, some of the most funny,
some of the most sort of undercutting and ironic as well, especially those by the great crosscountry writer and ATWA.
And in the wake of those, you could do all sorts of things with romance stories.
But generally speaking, people tend to think of romance as being written not in Latin, but in the vernacular, so often in French.
And then English romances often are translated from French versions.
They are written through narratives, often of a life, often a hero's life, the classic when we think of as a night,
you know, going out and fighting and meeting challenges and then coming back to sort of win a bride or something like that.
Often they're also, I think we'd now think of as being more like sort of family sagas as well.
They sometimes passed down generations or they're about the relationship between parents
and children or a younger couple and their misunderstanding or problematic parents.
Overbearing fathers are a particular problem in romance, is in law, also have quite a bad press as well.
So those are some of the aspects that they're interested in. But they go out into different directions as well.
They might be about the Crusades and the interaction between Christian ideology and Muslim or non Christian ideology.
Very often they misunderstand or don't really have any idea about non Christian beliefs,
but whether it's Muslims or whether it's Vikings or whether it's other kinds of monstrous enemies that they invent,
they're often testing the limits of what we think of as good behaviour or ethical behaviour as
against an enemy that might represent something that's that's wrong or bad from that point of view.
But in doing so, lots of romance is also a quite inquisitive and quite reflective about the rules and the structures and the ethics.
That's what we call core. Society is very difficult term, but aristocratic or society wants to impose on itself to go back to our most famous example.
So going in the Green Knight going takes up a challenge from this strange Green Knight.
He drops his head off and the Green Knight picks the head off and says, right, come fly me in a year's time and I'll return the blow.
So on the one hand, you've got going, who's like us? And Green Knight, who's monstrous.
He sort of comes across a castle and stays there for a while and he has a very genial
host and the host wife is even more accommodating and wants to sleep with going.
He's being tested in a way which is much more rigorous, in a sense,
a much more subtle about his own ethics and his own belief system than simply a military conflict would allow for.
And by the end of the romance, not to give the game away too much. But by the end of the romance,
it's really this Green Knight figure who is as much the arbiter of ethics as
the European Court has shown sometimes in the poem to be a little bit silly.
And so it's really very finely poised and it involves all sorts of secular but also religious ideas and brings them together in a way which
I think is much more impressive and it's much more powerful because it's contained within a story that's also exciting and interesting.
So generically, mediaeval romance is difficult. The language is difficult.
Why should we study it? Well, I wouldn't say it's difficult.
The genre is mixed and patchwork, but that's what makes it interesting.
The language of, let's say, a middle English romance.
It can be a challenge, particularly a text like so going in the green light, whose dialect is from the North West Midlands around Chechu area.
But from my perspective, that challenge is part of the excitement of doing it.
And also, I think the very difference in language,
the way in which you can't take for granted that a word means what you think it means in 21st century usage kind of requires you to read more closely.
It means you can't get away with just skin reading and assuming you know that the subtlety of what the language says.
Now, actually, you can't really do that when you're reading something from the mid 20th century.
You know, you might be reading Graham Greene or George Eliot or Noel Coward or something and reading a conversation in a play,
or you also really need to be on your guard. But very often you forget that because the language is easy enough if you like to get through it.
I think in mediaeval literature,
it's really worth the challenge of approaching the language directly and having a think about how words have changed their meaning,
how they're under debate at that time, how they're changing,
how they're different groups or different people with agendas are actually trying to define certain kinds of words in a particular way.
A particular kind of classic word that a lot of people pick up on in this period and in this kind of romance is the middle English word truth,
which we might translate it's truth, but can also mean faith or loyalty or a sense of self integrity, we might call it.
All of those kinds of things are wrapped up in that. So it's not really a word with one direct meaning.
But then when we start to think about it, no word really has one direct meaning or correspondence.
And so it's worth investigating those and sort of seeing what their hinterland is, if you like.
And would you say that the main function of mediaeval romance is to be provocative,
to make you think the main function of it, I suppose you could say, is entertainment?
Now, that doesn't rule out being provocative and thoughtful and reflective as well.
And I think that's something that literary studies has to some extent had to come to terms with only really relatively recently.
So in the mid 20th century, in order to sort of be taken seriously as literature and to an extent be taken seriously as literary scholars,
people kind of competed to sort of show that their work that they were studying was very serious and it fitted certain kinds of hierarchies,
lyric poetry, tragedy, the novel with a capital n those sorts of genres and ideas and mediaeval romance was often dismissed because it was popular.
And the phrase popular romance has sometimes been used up until really quite recently to mean actually not very good stuff.
Now, obviously, quality is variable. I'm not saying that all of this material is great literature,
but that depends on what you mean by that and how you think about its function in culture and in society.
But leaving that aside, I think many of the romances which had previously been dismissed are really because people didn't understand how to read them.
They have a different kind of aesthetic like folk stories.
They're not interested in some of the sort of literary effects that other kinds of genres strive for.
But they have a kind of story patterns and repeated formulae which have a kind of power in their own
right and sort of build up that kind of have an accretion of meaning that builds up through repetition,
through sort of subversion of that repetition and through other kinds of patterning, which are really important.
The great scholar Derek Brewer called these traditional stories and the idea of the traditional
kind of story where that comes from the Bible or whether that comes through mediaeval romance or,
say, Shakespeare's late romance plays, which were often based on mediaeval romance or other kinds of factors like that.
I think they have their own kind of power that we need to sort of take.
And interesting, you said earlier about Arthur being very popular mediaeval romance that we now find on TV today,
and I believe one of the things that you're working on at the moment is, am I right?
And that story of that has similarities to Grimm's fairy tales and other European fairy tales,
sort of creepy father and the daughter had to run away with a magical cloak or something.
Are there any other conventions of mediaeval romance that still resonate today? Yes, I think that's absolutely right.
But there are there are lots of them.
And that in some ways is because romance never really just sort of stopped happening at the end of the Middle Ages.
It was still very much being performed, sometimes in versions like plays being rewritten by people like Spencer in the Fairy Queen and by Shakespeare.
And then it carries on being rewritten and transformed in different ways, you know, through the centuries.
So in some ways, it never goes away.
Both the traditional folktale type stories and story patterns look, like I said before, about family relationships,
about the generations, particularly about male and female desire and where the boundaries of those ought to be.
You mentioned the romance MRA and in that story, the main protagonist is a young woman whose father wants to have an incestuous relationship with her.
He wants to marry her and she refuses. And then she's cast out.
She gets washed ashore for complicated way.
She then ends up marrying this prince and his mother takes against her and tells him that she's given birth to a monster,
even though it's a perfectly healthy baby. And she again gets cast out.
And it's only much later that she manages to kind of bring the whole family together.
Of course, it's not realistic in any way. It's totally farfetched.
But some of those patterns of rejection and desire and anger and revenge and
family relationships and the power of love to sort of heal those rifts are,
of course, fundamental to all sorts of stories.
And to some extent, the novel takes over some of those ideas and some of those developments into prose narrative in later centuries.
So that's one of the reasons why that stuff's still there.
The other reason is, of course, that modern writers read mediaeval romances and read other kind of mediaeval texts as well.
And in Oxford in particular, people who taught or studied in Oxford have had quite a lot of exposure to mediaeval
materials because of the sort of traditions of the course in the university.
So writers like C.S. Lewis are Tolkien, like Diana Wynn James, Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising series.
All of those whose work to some extent sort of plays on.
Of course, Tolkien is absolutely obviously, you know, uses his expertise in mediaeval literature to kind of construct these new worlds.
That has a direct impact on modern fantasy narrative, on romance stories and so on.
And I mean, another quick example just might be a character who's called Harry Potter that some people may have heard about.
And he grows up in a way, the kind of story structure is very much similar to some basic story patterns in romance and in folktale.
You know, he's an orphan. He's brought up not knowing his own heritage.
There's magic involved. He's got these very problematic kind of foster parents and he sort of could have got to make his way like that.
There are these sort of monstrous elements.
There's there's a kind of heroic quest there, all of those kinds of things which go to make up the narrative.
Now, those are basic story patterns which are still very powerful. And, of course, they get dressed up in different ways,
but they're still things that we are drawn to and which are still part of our kind of literary and artistic culture.
It speaks to us somehow. Yeah, absolutely it does. And I think having read those kinds of things,
then going back to read some of the mediaeval materials allows you both to see how they're the same and how they're also kind of exciting like that,
but also what differences there are and what kinds of ideas or ideologies are at play.
You know, five, six hundred years ago when when similar story patterns were being thought about and produced under different circumstances.