The Meanings of Romance: Rethinking Early Modern Fiction

Early modern scholars often use the term ‘‘romance’’ in speaking about Renaissance literature. Loose and ill-defined as it is, ‘‘romance’’ still seems the best fit for all those curious older form of fictions we cannot quite call ‘‘novels,’’ distant as they are from the conventions of modern realism. Today we use ‘‘romance’’ quite broadly: we speak of chivalric romances such as Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516, 1532), pastoral romances such as Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), or Greek romances like the Aethiopica of Heliodorus (third or fourth century CE), for example. ‘‘Romance’’ has become the word that indicates one of our most powerful genre categories, inspiring a long tradition of theory from W. P. Ker, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye, Patricia Parker, David Quint, and many others. But for sixteenthcentury readers, the term as we understand it now did not exist. Much of what we today call Renaissance ‘‘romance’’ was, in its own day, a genre without a name—if, in fact, the authors of the new modes of fiction believed they worked within a common genre at all. I do not mean that words such as romance, romanzo, and roman were never used then, or that Renaissance theorists did not have their own sophisticated ideas about what such terms should mean. They did, though their ideas are not identical to ours. What I will argue instead is more complicated: that the meaning of ‘‘romance’’ and its cognates changes radically between 1550 and 1670. Word and meaning even become a site of struggle: a focal point for vehement debates over the status of fiction, over male aris-