Challenging the Boundaries of Medieval Romance: Thomas Chestre’s Lybeaus Desconus

Critics such as M. Mills and Derek Pearsall marginalize English medieval popular romance in comparison to the idealized courtly romance. Pearsall writes that popular romances have "no inviolate identity" (93), a view which Mills shares in his study of Thomas Chestre’s work when he writes that Chestre’s Southern Octavian, Sir Launfal and Lybeaus Desconus are indistinguishable ("Composition" 90). Mills asserts that Chestre corrupts his sources and overuses formulaic phrases characteristic of tail-rhyme romance, and argues that these stylistic features are evidence of Chestre’s authorial inadequacy (Lybeaus 64-65). While recent critics such as Carol Fewster and W. A. Davenport are more generous to Chestre, the unfavourable precedent of Mills still dominates criticism, and indeed, Davenport maintains that Chestre is a "second-rank" writer and that Lybeaus Desconus is his "least successful" work (4, 100). However, a re-examination of Chestre’s Lybeaus Desconus reveals that Chestre is not an inept and inadequate "disour" (Mills, "Reviser" 20), but rather a writer who redefines the popular romance hero and thus the genre through his version of the story of the fair unknown. This paper focuses on two arguments presented by Mills as key evidence of Chestre’s ineptness in order to demonstrate how Chestre successfully rewrites and therefore challenges the tradition of medieval popular romance: passages in Lybeaus that Mills consider corruptions of source material, and a formulaic expression that Mills classifies as an example of Chestre’s limited and overused vocabulary.