University of Chicago Press Medieval Narratives Between History & Fiction: From the Centre to the Periphery of Europe, c. 1100-1400

The rise of literary fiction in medieval Europe has been a hotly debated topic for at least two decades. Important progress has been made, but difficulties remain in finding a common ground among scholars from various disciplines and regions. The present volume seeks to clarify and broaden the subject in two ways: first by including a wide range of medieval narratives irrespective of their modern label and affiliation to certain disciplines; secondly, these studies extend the discussion beyond the canonical French and German romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by focusing mainly on texts in Greek, Latin, and Old Norse and by opting for a "peripheral" and a long-term view of the problem. The chapters take us from Greco-Roman antiquity to medieval France, then to the Scandinavian lands and from there to south-eastern Europe and Byzantium as the link back to the Greco-Roman world. This disposition also follows a spiral motion in time: from Antiquity to Late Antiquity and from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. By broadening the linguistic as well as the geographical and chronological scope of the debate, the book shows that we should not think of one "rise of fiction", but rather of a potential always imbued in, and related to, historical narratives and that a modern understanding of medieval fiction cannot afford to disregard non-fictional or non-vernacular writing.