Publisher:
Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, Calif. [u.a.]
Renaissance romances often include seemingly fantastic stories about castles that impose strange, mostly evil customs on traveling knights and ladies. Conceived by Chrétien de Troyes in the twelfth century and widely imitated in medieval French...
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Renaissance romances often include seemingly fantastic stories about castles that impose strange, mostly evil customs on traveling knights and ladies. Conceived by Chrétien de Troyes in the twelfth century and widely imitated in medieval French romance, the "custom of the castle" flowered again when Italian and English authors, during the century before Shakespeare's plays and the rise of the novel, adopted this well-known motif to serve serious social purposes. Where previous studies have dismissed the convention or conceived it as no more than a heroic test or a common expression of an ideology of court, this study uses the changing legal and cultural conceptions of custom in France, Italy, and England to uncover a broader array of moral issues.
A digital reproduction is available from E-Editions, a collaboration of the University of California Press and the California Digital Library's eScholarship program
