Romance and resistance: narratives of chivalry in mid‐Tudor England

This article considers evidence regarding the printing, translating, and reading of chivalric romance in late sixteenth‐century England. After analysing the market conditions that influenced the printing ventures of William Copland, the main mid‐century printer of chivalric romances, evidence of readership is considered in the form of ownership inscriptions and marginalia in his editions of romances. The case of William Bellasis, a prominent member of the Yorkshire gentry, provides suggestive anecdotal evidence of a romance being read as an anti‐metropolitan and anti‐Reformist narrative. Margaret Tyler's approach to translating Spanish chivalric romance is then considered for its conscious affiliation to a discourse of impoverished northern chivalry. Finally, a reconsideration of the drive to appropriate chivalric romance as a narrative form for the centralized, Protestant Tudor polity by writers like Spenser and Bateman suggests that these initiatives should be seen as reacting to a perception of romance as relying on the twin concepts of power delegation and intercession, both of which were anathema to the Tudor administration.