Having been recommended to read Barbara Cartland by another poster, I have been goaded into giving this matter some thought. So when do you think it all started? And where do you think it is going, come to that? Do men read it? Why does anyone read it? I think it was all the rage in the Middle Ages but tha is a private preserve so venture there at your peril.

Greek novelists in the first century CE churned out some high quality Cartland stories. Chariton's "Callirhoe (Love Story in Syracuse)" is often cited as the oldest extant novel of any description and is the pre-runner of any Mills & Boon plot revolving around two lovers being kept forcibly apart by fate and malevolent people until love conquers all (including logic and reality) in the last chapter.

Xenophon of Ephesus's "Ephesian Tale" written a century later is even more Mills & Boon, with the first Jack Sparrow to make it into literature to boot. This time the doomed lovers do everything to kill themselves when their union is thwarted only to be rescued by their would-be pirate captain captor, amongst other unlikely twists in the plot. Even Barbara Cartland might have balked at getting the lovers at one point to each raise an army to fight their way through hostile lands and be united once more. A happy ending too - everyone including their arch nemesis end up in old age sitting round a fire and telling the story to each other amidst great hilarity.

"The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon" (I'm not making these up!) by Achilles Tatius has the lovers separated by fate as usual but this time there is also a gay lover sub-plot that goes tragically wrong, a fair amount of graphic rape scenes to keep the book on the top shelf of the βιβλιοπωλείο, and an ending in which a dastardly kidnapper proves in the end to be a loving and kind soul (he cogged that from the Jack Sparrow lad in "The Ephesian Tale".

Longus's "Daphnis and Chloe" is much more conventional - even the pirate is bad and stays bad. The twist this time is that they think they are brother and sister while being reared by a goatherd (behave!) and the whole tension revolves around a will-they won't-they teaser regarding kissing and copulation. In the end they do.

Prior to these books (all from the first and second centuries CE) such romantic narratives were dealt with in poetry. There is some conjectural opinion that Xenophon actually tried poetry and found that he was crap at it. However the public loved his racy stories anyway so he just abandoned poetic structure and went all-out for flat prose instead. The art form he invented would lead to Dickens, Tolstoy and Douglas Adams (to name but three literary giants) but the sub-genre he created in the process would lead to Mills, Boon, Cartland and Gregory (to name but four toilet paper manufacturers).

PS: I liked Cartland - she was honest about her trade and never pretended to literary genius or great historical knowledge even in her period-pieces. Who does that not remind you of?

Not sure about the PS, nordmann, however, the romantic type fiction you outline - which actually looks interesting, I suppose we can assume that on the whole were written for men's reading pleasure; there were educated women but far fewer at that time. So when did the genre pick up again?

In terms of mediaeval Romantic fiction, The Roman de la Rose remained the courtly best-seller for about three centuries. The original work by Guillaume de Lorris (circa 1230) was so successful that in 1275 Jean de Meun greatly extended the story. The poem is an allegory for a courtly love affair: in it, a man becomes enamored with an individual rose on a rosebush, attempting to pick it and finally succeeding. The rose represents the female body and the location, within a walled garden, is one of the classic settings for epic and chivalric literature. But the romance also contains lengthy digressive discussions on free will versus determinism as well as on optics and the influence of heavenly bodies on human behavior ... not things you usually get in a Mills & Boon. As with any successful work it was plagiarised and aspects of the tale were clearly absorbed into the writings of Dante and Boccaccio, as well as Chaucer, who also produced one of the first English translations.

The work's stated purpose was to both entertain and to teach others about the 'Art of Love' and although it's sexual imagery was attacked at the time by some moralists it seems that being in the form of an allegorical poem made it more acceptable. As the historian Johann Huizinga wrote: "It is astonishing that the Church, which so rigorously repressed the slightest deviations from dogma of a speculative character, suffered the teaching of this breviary of the aristocracy (for the Roman de la Rose was nothing else) to be disseminated with impunity".

Of course if mediaeval allegory ain't your thing then, 'Yvain le Chevalier au Lion' written by Chrètien de Troyes in the 1170s is more in the style of the classic romantic adventure story. It has some stereotypical characterisations that I'm sure Barbara Cartland would recognise: the long-suffering woman who deserves better treatment from her man and who gets left at home while he goes off on his laddish adventures. When he gets bored of the knightly fun he eventually comes home, but she won't accept him back, so he goes off again in a huff leaving her bitter but distraught. But eventually everyone sees the light of day: truely repentent he comes back again in the nick of time to save her from being burned at the stake and she joyfully accepts him back (along with his friendly lion that he'd somehow picked up along the way à la Wizard of Oz). All good rollicking romantic fun in which everyone, other than the evil giant, the wicked knights and the poisonous serpent, eventually get to live and love happily ever after. And the whole thing is written in rhyming couplets.

And would this have been written mainly for men to read?

Marie de France was a contempory of Charles, I think but I don't know if she wrote similar tales. Her Lais were about love and chivalry, I think. That's about all I know of her to be honest so I had better end there and look up stuff.

Priscilla wrote:

And would this have been written mainly for men to read?

Literacy, within the social rank in which it was widespread, was never confined to men - be it in Roman times or in the Middle Ages. In fact literary appreciation - especially reading something for the joy of it rather than simply to educate oneself or acquire factual data - seems to have been much more the preserve of women than men. While the discipline of literary critcism has historically been a male pastime the mechanics by which a published story grew in popularity were (thankfully) not down to these men's contributions and recommendations but to word-of-mouth endorsement, an area in which women were just as active as men, if not even more so.

As to whether the author of any romance would therefore gear the story to a female readership or male is moot. I would tend to think that stories in which the female characters display rather more subtlety in composition than the stereotypical "extremely bad/extremely pure" caricatures so often employed and unquestioningly accepted as valid by male authors and readers would indicate instances where a female readership has been anticipated, even if unconsciously so. It would definitely help explain their subsequent popularity amongst both sexes.

One woman is now recognised as the epitome of all these facets of early literature from the pre-printing age. The 14th century rhetoritician Christine de Pizan intruded into the male preserve of literary criticism with an intelligence and skill that earned her within her own lifetime a high reputation and respect within that almost exclusively male world. However she was not content simply to be a "back-seat driver" type of critic. Her works included poetry and stories in which the protagonists (most often female) instigated and drove the storyline. Romance was present but never the main point of the story, and as a result it was often portrayed in a manner accessible and immediately understandable to what quickly became a very wide readership, of which a considerable component must have been female. So much so that she immediately also acquired imitators - men in the main - and a recognisably more complex and realistic version of female characters began appearing in literature from this point.

Her most famous work "The Treasure of the City of Ladies" is not a romance, but its treatment of femininity and its very politicised and intelligent definition of women's real worth and roles was a watershed in literature in the sense that anyone's portrayal of women afterwards had to at least acknowledge that the stereotypical woman in fiction had a formidable counterpart as defined and illustrated by de Pizan.

Oh shit, shit, shit - sorry, still in Miller mode - just lost a great long post about Chaucer, courtly love, misogyny and the "Miller's Tale".

Also Sex and the Sinner and Margaret of Navarre and her writing.

Priscilla - really interesting thread - no more time now, but will try again later.

Temperance wrote:

Oh shit, shit, shit - sorry, still in Miller mode - just lost a great long post about Chaucer, courtly love, misogyny and the "Miller's Tale".

Also Sex and the Sinner and Margaret of Navarre and her writing.

Priscilla - really interesting thread - no more time now, but will try again later.

Temperance,
I sympathize with you. Especially as I know the feeling...after loosing a long message...in English or French...which means for me as a Dutch speaking one it is even more difficult to edit...
With sympathy from your friend, Paul.

Temperance wrote:

... just lost a great long post about Chaucer, courtly love, misogyny and the "Miller's Tale".

Interesting you mention Chaucer - I have just finished reading a book "The Rhetorical Tradition" in which Christine de Pizan's "naturalism" is discussed as part of a revolutionary new literary expressionism then gaining ground throughout Europe. Chaucer appears to have been the granddaddy of them all - prior to Geoffrey "realism" in a story was seen as an indication that the author hadn't done enough work on it. After Geoffrey and Christine et al a story was deemed inferior in style if it deviated from realism in its language for no obvious or stated reason.

What makes Chaucer even more revolutionary, as the authors Herzberg and Bizzell can show, was that prior to him there just wasn't anyone ever who had attempted a complete novel in an absolutely natural style. Everyone was slave to convention, no matter what the language or the culture that they worked in, and that convention shaped each sentence as much (if not more sometimes) than the author's intended meaning.

Geoffrey was a punk!

Geoffrey was indeed a punk!

No time now, but will post something later.

I think it's really important to remember that the hugely influential (and we are *still* being influenced by it today) Roman de la Rose was - as MM points out - written by *two* men: by de Lorris and by the cynical and much more realistic (whatever that word means) continuator, de Meun. Chaucer was impressed by both: his Knight's Tale (first story in the Canterbury Tales) is pure de Lorris - Barbara Cartland plus philosophy? The Knight gives us the lot - a chaste and beautiful maiden (Emily) who wanders about in her walled garden; two ardent young men (Palamon and Arcite) who live and want to die by the chivalric code, and who are appalled by the accusation that desire could have made them act "like beasts" without honour; a tournament; and, of course, in true Barbara Cartland style, an ending where the better man wins the girl and goes off to live happily ever after with her - like you do:

"Now is Palamon in complete happiness,
living in bliss, in riches and in health;
and Emily loves him so tenderly,
and he serves her just so gently,
that there has never been between them a word
of jealously or any other vexation.
Thus ends the story of Palamon and Emily,
and God save all this fair company. - Amen."

The Miller ("drunken churl") snorts in derision at all this Frenchified (pansified?) "romantic" nonsense. He, like de Meun, sees things rather differently, as indeed did Chaucer's contemporary, John Gower, who wrote: "I find the nettle when I look for the rose*." The "Miller's Tale" comes straight after the "Knight's Tale": the two stories could not be more different. Romantics v. the Realists?

Chaucer's - and the Miller's - rather naughty nettle is Alison. She is a real TOWIE hottie living in Oxford. Alison is just as young and beautiful and desirable as the virtuous Emily, but Alison is what you might call a realist. She has married sensibly - a wealthy carpenter who can afford to give her a comfortable and secure life, but she runs rings round her boring husband and finds her pleasure with a handsome student, her young lover, Nicholas. She's also wooed by Absolon, who pines after her every week in church.

Absolon is a great character - a foolish parish clerk who fancies himself as an ardent courtly lover. He is an absurdity - think David Walliams as Sebastian in "Little Britain". Absolon has lovely curly hair which he grooms with a huge comb; he dresses fashionably with pointy shoes and he sucks comfits to keep his breath sweet. He can "trippe and daunce" and likes to "pleyen songes on a small rubible". He is extremely fastidious and "somdel sqaymous/Of farting". He is forever mooning around Alison, but she finds him immensely irritating.

But - despite his declarations of passionate love for Alison, and the lovesick looks which he bestows on her in church - Absolon is in fact no passionate heterosexual lover: he is actually very careful (unlike the lusty Nicholas) to avoid any direct approach to Alison and he does not venture any boldly *physical* contact with her whatsoever. His rather silly wooing is all very proper and in the best tradition of fine amour - he satisfies appearances, but also provides a convenient cover for his disinclination to become involved in any purposeful fleshy liason. No sex please - we're pretending to be Norman French? And his "comic reversal", the - er- misdirected kiss (far too rude to give details here) drives him to the extreme of hating and reviling women - a very interesting transformation which discloses the deep-rooted fear of female sexuality previously disguised by his imposture as a gay lover in the best courtly love tradition. Courtly love -"love as desire never to be fulfilled" - perhaps had a darker purpose in the court of Richard II and his minions. Courtly love or courtly pretence - the adoration of la dame lointaine - who was supposed to *stay* very much lointaine - as a cover not just for adultery, but also for homosexual misogyny?

PS Nordmann - don't know much about Christine de Pizan - only what I've read in a novel "Blood Royal". I suppose the move towards "realism" was the move *away* from all the dream/vision/ Allegory of Love (C.S. Lewis) stuff.




* "Lurtrie truis si jeo la Rose quiere..." (Gower Ballade XXXVII).

PaulRyckier wrote:

Temperance wrote:

Oh shit, shit, shit - sorry, still in Miller mode - just lost a great long post about Chaucer, courtly love, misogyny and the "Miller's Tale".

Also Sex and the Sinner and Margaret of Navarre and her writing.

Priscilla - really interesting thread - no more time now, but will try again later.

Temperance,
I sympathize with you. Especially as I know the feeling...after loosing a long message...in English or French...which means for me as a Dutch speaking one it is even more difficult to edit...
With sympathy from your friend, Paul.

Paul - forgive me - to cope with losing a carefully constructed message in a *foreign* language; now that must require real self control. A self-control, alas, that is beyond me...

Now that would have been much more fun for O level than the 'The Nonnes Priest's Tale' that we had to do - though the Prologue was much enjoyed. I suspect that Chaucer devised his tale-tellers he was more likely challenging himself with wry amusement to get a good fit than to entertain his readers.

Moving on - so if Chauser was a water shed in the development of Romantic fiction, what came next? But pause please - just a point of curiosity - all the stuff that went before Caxton, these romances were copied by whom? and would have had access to them? And what of distribution? I shall sulk if someone suggests ye ancient HP and Will Herbert Booke-smithe

Codex production was expensive and therefore used oftenest traditionally for religious texts. However by no means exclusively so. In 14th century Europe certain towns had already established a reputation for their proficiency in reproducing secular texts, especially those cities which were to become the university cities we still have today and whose establishments were beginning to be founded from around this time. This prompted the founding of commercial scriptoria servicing the same, and it was also a handy earner for monasteries themselves who were not averse to knocking off copies of secular codices which were then distributed through prototype publishing houses, a peculiar industry in that it is one of the few emergent industries of its time which was international from the word go.

Another development at this time was the establishment of royal libraries. Those of Louis IX and Charles V of France were renowned, but were emulated by thousands of private individuals, the new bourgoisie which corresponded with the growth of cities and commerce. In these libraries the content in terms of subject matter was catholic in the extreme, and it is these that can be said to have first put a value on what we would now would term the "novel" form - a story often told for no better reason than that it was a good story.

Commercial scriptoria employed scriveners and initially paid them handsomely, so rare was their skill. This was the first impetus therefore towards the acceptance of the concept of universal literacy as a legitimate and worthwhile aim on the part of educators. When such employment had been the preserve of monasteries the effect had been not only to restrict the activity to the reproduction of sacred scripture but also to mean that it was in everyone's interests in the trade to keep personnel involved to limited numbers. The increasing demand for scriveners' skills fed a circular development whereby more wished to acquire those skills, more varied and quantitative output was thus produced, this created even more demand rather than sating existing demand, and thus the mushrooming of both the trade and the value of literacy itself carried on at ever increasing pace.

Getting back to Chaucer's watershed (sounds like a rude invitation to have a peek at Geoffrey's etchings out in the garden), what came next was the proliferation of narratives in which the protagonists became less and less idealised inventions constructed to make philosophical, moralistic or religious points, and more characters with whom the intended reader could identify. Points could still be made but they were more and more at the discretion of the inventor who was now less restrained by having to conform to pre-set conditions on their output, or indeed to pander to expectations of either their sponsor or their reader. In fact it could be said to have become in their interest to surprise both, and especially the latter. The popularity of the story could rest on such surprise, and popularity itself became an increasingly legitimate primary motivation for writing it. The novel, as we now know it (and indeed the TV drama, film etc) was born.

Found this from Herzberg - "[Sir Thomas Malory's] 'Morte d'Arthur' is one of the first evidences that literature as a concept had been irrevocably altered through the rise in literacy and the demand for romance. A badly composed pot-pourri of plagiarised, copied and indiscriminately sourced fragments of folk tales relating to the theme of King Arthur, cobbled together with no regard for continuity or narrative logic, often at the expense of its comprehensibility, became one of the most reproduced works in the English language of the pre-printing era. The only discernible editorial policy Malory had employed was to excise the most lurid, violent and earthy components of the Arthurian myth cycle and retain only those elements which conformed to the new definition of "romance" in literary terms. It was an astute, if cynical, attempt to construct a romance that would sell well in its contemporary market, and it worked excellently in that respect."

So, it seems that if Geoffrey C was the punk then Tommy Malory was the "New Romantic" coming along in his wake - no unique or innovative style, just a cycnical slapping together of stylistic cliches to get high in the charts.

Malory, by the same definition above, is also "first" in quite a few disreputable ways. First "chick-lit" bandwagon-jumper, first Dan Brown, first best-selling author to pretend to historical authority (here we go again) ....

Seems Malory (well, one possible Malory) could have been an early member of the Soprano mob too! This from his Wiki page:

By far the likeliest candidate for the authorship is Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire. H. Oskar Sommer first put forth this theory in his 1890 edition of Le Morte d'Arthur and Harvard Professor George Lyman Kittredge provided the evidence in 1896. Kittredge showed Malory as a soldier and member of Parliament who fought at Calais with Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. However, a biography by Edward Hicks in 1928, revealed him as a thief, bandit, kidnapper, and rapist, hardly in keeping with the high chivalric standards in the book. Helen Cooper referred to his life as one that 'reads more like an account of exemplary thuggery than chivalry.

I know we are moving on from Chaucer now, but could I add that many who enjoyed his writing would have *listened* to his work rather than have owned a manuscript copy of it? The posh folk, then as now, were greatly amused by the doings of the lower orders, especially when the hoi polloi tried to ape the manners and behaviour of their betters. But I wonder if some of Chaucer's sly humour was lost on his courtly and other wealthy patrons? Did they realise, as they heard his excellent tales, that just about *everyone* was being mocked in one way or another (even that "verray, parfit, gentil knight")? I think Chaucer's Poor Parson is really the only character who emerges unscathed.

Got to mention Petrarch and Boccaccio too - Chaucer was greatly influenced by them; he may even have met them during his travels in Italy.The Italian "novella", or short story, is really the beginning of the "novel" - that, and the other popular genre, the fabliau, which was the comic, usually bawdy and cynical type of story related to audiences everywhere by the itinerant jongleurs.

Mentioning Boccaccio gets me to Margaret of Navarre. Her merry and improper tales, the Heptameron , were also influenced by Boccaccio's Decameron. Yet Margaret - usually so witty and such fun - could also churn out the most dreadful religious stuff. The title of her The Mirror of the Sinful Soul says it all; it's an interminable poem and horribly dull. Catherine Parr tried to go one better with her Lamentations of a Sinner. But royal ladies who liked writing had to be careful. I believe Margaret nearly got investigated for heresy; but that it was her religious writing that was actually more offensive to the authorities than her risque stories! Odd. Mind you, Catherine too very nearly came a cropper and she *only* wrote about religion, never about adultery. Henry VIII never read his sixth wife's Lamentations - probably just as well...

PS I believe Paul's Walk at the old St. Paul's in London became a popular place for stationers and booksellers in the 16th century (as well as the preachers and the "news-mongers"). I wonder if women were ever seen there buying books - or was that considered too disreputable a thing for women to do, certainly if unaccompanied by a responsible male?

Re your PS, Temp. Women of course bought books - wills and correspondence of the period show a healthy business relationship between well-to-do ladies and book merchants, suggesting that acquisition of literature for the domestic library was at least a shared responsibility between the spouses in many households. Pepys, over a hundred years later, actually made reference to this as far as I remember when he explains that his own jealously guarded responsibility for building "his" library might once have been seen as an effeminate affectation on his part but that he didn't care what people thought (suggesting that excluding his wife from the task would still have been criticised within his social milieu).

In London it would also have been a social practise for "ladies" in town to attend the cathedral on shopping excursions while their "companions" ventured into the more disreputable areas of Cheapside and its surrounds to purchase the more mundane goods that the house required. It is not inconceivable (though as yet an unexplored area historically) that the proliferation of book-sellers around Paternoster Row might have been at least partly fuelled by this practise of well heeled customers killing time in the district.

The view that ladies were traditionally demure, innocent of commercial function and practise, and void of responsibility for acquisition of life's finer things does not square with their recorded behaviour in the Middle Ages. It seems to have been the advent of puritanism and its aftermath in which such notions gained currency in the form of social expectation.

Found this really interesting link - and it is possible to access the rest.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3173638?uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21101781644353

"Preliminary research suggests that book-owning women substantially influenced the development of lay piety and vernacular literature in the late Middle Ages. Women frequently bought and inherited religious as well as secular books and spent considerable time reading them..."

Fascinating stuff - makes me feel guilty about not looking it up myself but I know you guys have fingers on the pulse of sources that would escape me - in this area, anyway. Broadening the wiew of any stage in history about how people actually lived it beyond that which has been crystallized into selectve presentation, is most enriching.

Drama and the likes of the shivering-pike-wallah aside - what then of Romantic fiction in Tudor times? ( I didn't know C. Parr wrote - and I assume R.111 didn't)

Story reading is another interesting thought. People used to be read to. Radio fills the gap now though I have friends who like audio books.... I think my own are se up for it but no doubt they will come over as Stephen Hawkin so I'm giving them a miss.

The first important *prose* work that appeared after Malory was not "romantic fiction" at all: it was another translation from the French - Froissart's Chronicles, translated by John Bourchier, Lord Berners and published in 1523-5. More terrible history(?), I believe, so perhaps it does count as fiction!

But the Tudor writers - where do we start? The great poets of the early Tudor age were Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard - impassioned language, Petrarchian sighs and supplications - wonderful stuff written for/about the likes of Anne Boleyn and Fair Geraldine, the Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald. And really we have to suspend the habitual distinction between prose and verse in the Tudor century. Poetry penetrated everywhere. The prose for example of such later romances as Lyly's Euphues and Sidney's Arcadia is actually entirely poetic.

But if poetry penetrated everywhere, so did religion, of course. Another royal lady, Mary Tudor (Henry VIII's daughter, not his sister), encouraged by Catherine Parr, translated Erasmus's Paraphrases of the New Testament. Udall, in his preface to her work (which was put in many parish churches as a companion to the English Bible - we don't usually think of Mary Tudor as a Protestant author!) praised modern learning in "gentlewomen who, instead of vain communication about the moon shining in the water, use grave and substantial talk in Greek or Latin". Poor Mary - I suspect she'd rather have had Wyatt or Howard writing sonnets about her. Actually somebody did write about Mary when she was a girl, describing her face as "like a lamp" - I can't remember who it was. Will look it up in a sec.

It was John Heywood. Here's the poem he wrote about the eighteen-year-old Mary - I knew there was something about a lamp in it somewhere:

http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/heywoodmary.htm


Give place, ye ladies! all be gone;
Show not yourselves at all.
For why? behold! there cometh one
Whose face yours all blank shall.

The virtue of her looks
Excels the precious stone;
Ye need none other books
To read, or look upon.

In each of her two eyes
There smiles a naked boy;¹
It would you all suffice
To see those lamps of joy.

If all the world were sought full far,
Who could find such a wight?²
Her beauty twinkleth like a star
Within the frosty night.

There are several more verses - not quite Wyatt, I'm afraid.

PS Here's a letter written by Catherine Parr to her stepdaughter, asking how the translation's going:

http://englishhistory.net/tudor/letter16.html

Thank you again. The Erasmus translation came as a surprise. I wonder how she identified with it later. I also know nothing of this work by Erasmus. must look it up - did he condense the 4 gospels into one. Labouring over contextual comparison in RI brought me to endless questioning and the first serious cracks in my schooled faith. I have always had a soft spot for Erasmus.

Onwards and upwards, let's us not get bogged in the poetical expansion of those times - I suppose Spencer's Faerie Queen sits there and not where I would consign it, and get back to romantic fiction in prose. Where next then?

It is indeed very easy to get "bogged down" in 16th century poetry and religion - best avoided here!

Thanks to the gentle discipline of this thread I have just discovered a woman called Margaret Tyler - I'd never heard of her before. Tyler has the distinction of being the first English woman to produce a work of romantic fiction.

Margaret Tyler (died 1595?) was the first Englishwoman to translate a Spanish romance and the first woman to publish a romance in England.She also published a defense of the seriousness and importance of women’s writing. She proposed that both men and women should be treated as rational beings, arguing that “it is all one for a woman to pen a story, as for a man to address his story to a woman.”

In 1578, the publication of The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood, Margaret Tyler's translation of Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra's Spanish romance, Espejo de Principe y Cavalleros, was met with criticism because its masculine and secular topic was considered inappropriate for a woman. Other women had translated religious literature, as this conformed with the notion that female education should promote piety. Treaties and handbooks on education stressed the danger in allowing eager female students to read foreign tales of love. Tyler protested in her letter “to the reader” against restrictions imposed on the literary efforts of women.

http://www.fordham.edu/mvst/conference12/Romance/Boro.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Tyler

Tyler is truly enigmatic - not only in terms of the few tantalising snippets of her life of which we know and which suggest she was working in the Howard household (in the second half of the 16th century a precarious position indeed), but also in terms of her publisher, Thomas East.

East himself is extremely enigmatic too. In the 1570s, when Tyler's "Mirrour" was published, he held a high position in the Stationers' Company, a guild which above all others was one that wielded extraordinary power behind the scenes. It was a forerunner of the freemasons in the sense both of its internal organisation and rules, and in the sense of its ability to make and break public reputations - and not be afraid to use that ability as a counter-threat against any form of officialdom's attempt to rein it in. He himself is remembered today chiefly for publishing music (his first book was a collection of Christmas carols) but in the 1570s he was the named publisher on a very varied range of non-musical books, the only common factor amongst them being that they might never have reached publication without him, being on the dodgy side of what represented legality with respect to treason, sedition, and these other anti-state laws whose character and application swung so wildly in these years. In other words he handled the "hot stuff", and his name and position were the crucial factors in getting the material into print.

Tyler's translation of the Spanish romance (almost verbatim) hardly seems to fit this category. Yet for East to have attached his name to it (the Howards had their own publishers) suggests otherwise, and there has been much speculation as to what might have been so subversive about her work - one which became instantly popular and a best-seller. It is a fair bet that she was Catholic, though that in itself was hardly the problem which merited so strong a measure of protection for its author. She may have been a ghost-writer or "front" for someone else who had fallen foul of the authorities (the sequel commissioned by East's house was assigned to another author), though this seems unlikely as far more palatable candidates than a Catholic female Howard affiliate would have been a more logical choice.

The theory I like best is that East wasn't just protecting Margaret Tyler but an entire publishing house - one run by women. Statistically between 1765 and 1785, when he returned to exclusive publication of music, almost half of the works he published were by female authors - a number unprecedented in Europe at the time and unsurpassed by any single publisher until the 20th century. Logistically the sourcing of female authors, along with their commissioning and the marketing to ensure sufficient sales would have been a formidable challenge at the time - and for many years to come. There is no evidence that East's small publishing house had the wherewithal or the expertise to have done this. In that sense East could best be thought of as a willing employee of this other house which did all this background work, or maybe just willing to lend his imprimatur (literally!) for a small fee.

Whatever the actual arrangements, East's two decade long venture into chick-lit has left us with a fair number of works by female authors that would most likely have never seen the light of day without him, and we would have been even more inclined to see the absence of such authorship as evidence of inability on women's part to actually write (a notion held by an alarmingly large number of people in subsequent years). East's contribution, for whatever personal motive, has at least left an emphatic contradiction of this stance on the historical record.

PS: Biographies of East assiduously avoided even oblique references to this activity on his part right up to the mid 20th century, though the information was freely available to biographers throughout. Some historical data is so emphatic and contrary to contemporary expectations that it cannot even be discussed by historians at times, it appears, simply ignored.

I knew absolutely nothing of this.

Probably a silly question, but is William Ponsonby worth mentioning? Did he have conections with East? Ponsonby published the work of the hugely influential Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke I think - also that of Emilia Lanier.

The Catholic connection is fascinating - so hard to know who was secretly Catholic and who wasn't. But then Sidney family were extreme Protestants, so the Ponsonby connection is no doubt a horse that won't run...

Re nordman's post on Evans. Startling revelations - and I like the bit about selective historical recording because I have come across it else where - however, I am confused by the dates within the above. Just when was Evans? Or do you mean his publishing house in the 1780's?

Probably of no relevance whatsoever, but I've just found this snippet on the John Alday Wiki page:

A translation of another French treatise from Alday's pen was printed by Thomas East for William Ponsonby in 1579; it bears the title, ‘Praise and Dispraise of Women: Gathered out of sundrye Authors, as well Sacred as Prophane, with plentee of wonderfull examples, whereoff some are rare and not heard off before, as by the principall notes in the Margent may appeare. Written in the French tongue, and brought into our vulgar by John Allday,’ London, 1579, 8vo.

So gushing book blurbs began a while back!.......I love that 'plentee of wonderful examples' Not used so much these days is it, 'plenty?'

Temp, I'm not aware of any link between Ponsonby and East. However having said that, all these publishing houses operated almost literally from the same city block. There was huge overlap in terms of the sharing of presses, setters, editors, and even managers. The way to think of them, thanks to the huge clout of the Stationers' Company, is of sharing a common basement (the machinery) and a common loft (the upper management), while retaining different entrance doors to give both the public and the authorities the idea that they operated independently. So yes, the two could well have been in cahoots on certain projects.

PS. Not sure what you mean by "nordmann's post on Evans", P.

I wrote Evans for East - word blindness is a curse that gets me into all kinds of probs. Sorry for the confusuion - it was the dates and 'he' I'm probably misreading that too. Sorry.

The buzz of the publishing houses is pleasing to reflect on - especially when freedom of the press here is a current issue; without going all Daily Mail, it's a worrying issue nevertheless.

P, did you know that the term "freedom of the press" was coined by another prominent member of the Stationers' Company, Thomas Dockwray, its first master? He was an ecclesiastical lawyer who, from the livery's foundation, felt that printing was an activity not above or below the law, but outside of it altogether - equating it with the wind (a lovely synonym) in that it conveyed speech and could never on that basis be prosecuted as either the originator or conveyor of seditious thought.

Anyway, Thomas East (I'm not aware of any other) was indeed a 16th century publisher, P. His portfolio has been preserved as a unit - on his death it became the property of his widow and she bequeathed it to another publisher on the condition that it never be broken up and sold as independent articles of copyright (Shakespeare did the same). In those days before copyright law as we know it this was a common way of facilitating possible future prosecutions for plagiarism or illicit copying. I believe Browne's Publishing House are the current custodians.

Am really enjoying all of this info, especially of the Stationers' Company. We need a thread on freedom of the press but not sure how to word it. Truth is a great procuct to sell but less easy to use.

So where have we got to on the time line of this odd but unusually absorbing topic?

The Stationers' Company are still there - they've moved twice in six hundred years, but less than a hundred yards the last time (originally in Milk Street they moved to St Peter's College in the early 16th century and then to Ave Maria Lane). Their hall, like St Paul's Cathedral, miraculously escaped unscathed when that whole area was flattened during the blitz and is used today by the livery to present public lectures, amongst other things. I have been to two - one by Terry Pratchett and one by Michael Wood when he launched his "In Search of Troy" book. A beautiful location!

Before we leave the 16th century however, and in strict keeping with the subject of romance (and not poetry), we have to give honourable mention to Marguerite de Navarre, wife of Henry II of Navarre, and one of those rare people in history - someone of whom no one ever had a bad word to say, alive or dead. Even Erasmus, a hard man to please, gushed like a lovestruck schoolboy when writing once to her; "For a long time I have cherished all the many excellent gifts that God bestowed upon you; prudence worthy of a philosopher; chastity; moderation; piety; an invincible strength of soul, and a marvelous contempt for all the vanities of this world. Who could keep from admiring, in a great king's sister, such qualities as these, so rare even among the priests and monks?".

Marguerite was clever, witty and eloquent - and she put all these talents into her "Heptameron", a sort of French version of the Arabian "1001 Nights" - though today we would simply call it an anthoogy of short stories, and an excellent one at that. Some of them were local folk tales already well known. Some were her own inventions. Some were factual reportage relayed with an extremely sly wit that still makes them hilarious by modern standards. They addressed everything from morality to justice, love's reward to love's folly, and remained a consistent best-seller for well over two hundred years after her death. Even today, when "modernised" in language, they stand the test of time as proof of a master storyteller, employing suspense, narrative twist, shock and pithy understatement where necessary to keep the reader enthralled. Even the stories' names are the stuff of a modern literary agents' wet dreams - though possibly a little on the long side for modern tastes. But who couldn't resist "The story of the President of Grenoble, who saves the honour of his house by poisoning his wife with a salad" (a cautionary tale about gold-diggers in fact) or "How the honourable behaviour of a young lord, who feigns sickness in order to be faithful to his wife, spoils a party in which he was to have made one with the King, and in this way saves the honour of three maidens of Paris" (an Ayckbourn farce which would still make a good screenplay today)? Romance abounds, though never with a happy ending guaranteed, and as trailblazers for modern (very modern) romance stories they are probably unparalleled by any other single writer's oeuvre.

Official huff - *I* mentioned Marguerite of Navarre first - you've just added a bit of (very interesting) woffle.

Quote :

Mentioning Boccaccio gets me to Margaret of Navarre. Her merry and improper tales, the Heptameron , were also influenced by Boccaccio's Decameron. Yet Margaret - usually so witty and such fun - could also churn out the most dreadful religious stuff. The title of her The Mirror of the Sinful Soul says it all; it's an interminable poem and horribly dull.

You can "Look inside" this book on Amazon (Heptameron, not Sinful Soul).

Sorry.

In a mild digression - an official huff ought have an embroidered device, Temps. Would swan proper roussant suffice? Though perhaps unicorn proper rampant might have more appeal. There's a thought, where do all the chained unicorn etc tales come from ?

And before we abandon Shakespeare, what of the sources of his tales. Were any original? I assume the parameter here is that happy endings and comedy go together. That is a cynical thought for the day, if ever.

Now I do like the idea of a swan huffant device - she is rather magnificent, isn't she?




Unicorns always strike me as a bit silly, especially rampant ones - they always look as though they are prancing rather than ramping. Not exactly fearsome. You've got to be a lion really to do rampant effectively - or a leopard - or a boar. But did you know you can have a mole (moldiwarp) in your coat of arms? The Mitfords had moles, three of them. Now a mole rampant - there's a thought. Not exactly *scary*, but quite endearing.

A Midsummer Night's Dream was original. He pinched a lot of ideas from the Italians. Romeo and Juliet came from an Italian writer of novellas - Bandello.

EDIT: Shakespeare's primary source for Romeo and Juliet was a poem by Arthur Brooke called The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Iuliet, written in 1562. He also could have known the popular tale of Romeo and Juliet from a collection by William Painter, entitled The Palace of Pleasure, which was written sometime before 1580.
Shakespeare also likely read the three sources on which Brooke's poem and Painter's story were based -- namely, Giulietta e Romeo, a novella by the Italian author Matteo Bandello, written in 1554; a story in a collection called Il Novellio, by the widely-popular fifteenth-century writer Masuccio Salernitano; and the Historia Novellamente Ritrovata di Due Nobili Amanti or A Story Newly Found of two Noble Lovers, written by Luigi Da Porto and published in 1530.

This is a really useful link for anyone interested in Shakespeare's sources.

http://shakespeare-w.com/english/shakespeare/source.html

Confirms that the main plot for Dream was original; but I should have noted that the Pyramus and Thisbe element was taken from Ovid.

I'm half way through Lorna Doone by R D Blackmore, anyone here read it? It's pretty good, more of a romance than I expected. My main gripe is the use of dialect in his "country" characters, well nigh unintelligible. 
Reading it because I recently watched a DVD of the TV version from 2000 starring the utterly gorgeous Amelia Warner.

I feel I should have read it, since it is one of those books that are considered classics, but unless I read it when I was young, I don't seem to have. We re-watched Brideshead Revisited recently and I was quite surprised it was mostly about the damaging effects of Catholicism. I had only really remembered Sebastian (played by Anthony Andrews) and Aloysius, his bear. But it was basically seen through the eyes of Charles Ryder played by Jeremy Irons. It was really a tragedy with Sebastian succumbing to alcoholism and Charles and Diana's love having to give way to her beliefs and his non-beliefs.

Yes, Lorna Doone is one I read long aeons ago. Never got into Brideshead though.

I havent read Lorna Doone since I was in my early teens.  I quite liked it and have seen a couple of adaptations over the years.  I haven't read Brideshead Revisited though.  I don't mind a romantic story sometimes as long as it's not too 'slushy'.

Caro wrote:

I feel I should have read it, since it is one of those books that are considered classics, but unless I read it when I was young, I don't seem to have. We re-watched Brideshead Revisited recently and I was quite surprised it was mostly about the damaging effects of Catholicism. I had only really remembered Sebastian (played by Anthony Andrews) and Aloysius, his bear. But it was basically seen through the eyes of Charles Ryder played by Jeremy Irons. It was really a tragedy with Sebastian succumbing to alcoholism and Charles and Diana's love having to give way to her beliefs and his non-beliefs.

Charles and Diana! That's another love story altogether! I had to look it up but it's Charles and Julia. I've never read it nor seen the TV serial. In fact I've never read any Evelyn Waugh, but looking at the descriptions of his books Vile Bodies sounds like a good one to start with.

This is fraught with danger so I'll have to word it carefully. I mostly read fiction written before 1950, a lot from the 19th century. In almost every romantic scene a man will "make love" to a woman. Now of course back then it simply referred to courtship or mild flirtation. Today it means something completely different! So when did the meaning become racier and come to mean the sexual act. I'm sure I've seen it in its more innocuous tone into the 1920s.

MarkUK wrote:

Caro wrote:

I feel I should have read it, since it is one of those books that are considered classics, but unless I read it when I was young, I don't seem to have. We re-watched Brideshead Revisited recently and I was quite surprised it was mostly about the damaging effects of Catholicism. I had only really remembered Sebastian (played by Anthony Andrews) and Aloysius, his bear. But it was basically seen through the eyes of Charles Ryder played by Jeremy Irons. It was really a tragedy with Sebastian succumbing to alcoholism and Charles and Diana's love having to give way to her beliefs and his non-beliefs.

Charles and Diana! That's another love story altogether! I had to look it up but it's Charles and Julia. I've never read it nor seen the TV serial. In fact I've never read any Evelyn Waugh, but looking at the descriptions of his books Vile Bodies sounds like a good one to start with.

I preferred Decline & Fall when I first read it, but that was in my schooldays. Not romantic, but the "Sword of Honour" trilogy also appealed.