penitential romance and thoughts

Starts off with a definition of the genre of romance, only to trouble that genre and what we typically put in it. She gives a great overview of why scholars often take Middle English romances and set them aside as being somehow inferior because they are by and large involved with religious themes, rather than secular themes, and the treatment of said themes is often heavy-handed enough that critics have often dismissed them as being inferior. That said, romances that are in Middle English are often more concerned with religious themes and are occasionally labeled as 'secular hagiographies,' which becomes one of many terms that she throws out that scholars have used to try and determine how to classify many of these tales, which seem to have romance features but also seem to be highly involved with more saintly concerns and are at any rate completely over the top. (don't think that last sentence made any sense at all). These stories, like all romances, seem to be involved with somehow teaching the audience the lesson of the story - whatever it is - through a combination of letting the reader identify with the protagonist, thus reenacting the journey through reading it, or by making clear moral judgments in the tale itself for clearer didactic purposes (something that is often scorned by critics).

I'm starting to wonder if the collection of stories I'm dealing with in the dear ol' Auchinleck manuscript are somehow aimed at letting us understand different ways to live a Christian life - I wonder if I could overlap even the obviously non-Christian stories with Christian counterparts to get the reader to understand each story as a sort of internal journey of faith, sin, and repentence or something like that. With cannibalism, incest, and lump babies thrown in...

Things I need to read - the rest of this book... several books on medieval romance to get a better sense of what all critics have to say on the genre... whatever I can find on what people have said about medieval miscellanies like this... anything on any stories in the manuscript that seem pertient... more on repentance and how it's understood in 1330's London... the rest of the #$%^&*(*&^%$#$%^&*&^%$%^&* manuscript...

...by Thursday.