Romance

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Verse romances built around King Arthur's court, a body of material later writers called the Matter of Britain, gave medieval romance its most durable repertoire: the knightly quest, courtly love for an often unattainable lady, magical or supernatural encounters, and single combat as a test of honor. The twelfth century French poet Chretien de Troyes wrote the most influential of these verse romances, introducing or popularizing figures including Lancelot and the Holy Grail quest, and his versions were adapted, translated and expanded across French, German and English literature for centuries, carrying Arthurian romance's conventions forward long after Chretien's own lifetime.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

By the early seventeenth century, chivalric romance's conventions, the wandering knight, the impossible quest, the idealized lady, had become familiar enough to satirize, and Miguel de Cervantes built Don Quixote directly out of that satire: an aging Spanish gentleman reads so many romances that he loses his grip on reality and sets out to become a knight errant himself, mistaking windmills for giants and a farm girl for a noble lady. Cervantes had read the chivalric romance tradition closely enough to turn its own plots and language against it, and Don Quixote's comic deflation of romance's ideals is often credited as a key step in the genre's own decline and in the rise of the realistic novel that displaced it.