d'aventure, so-called, the Blancandrin or the Amadas or the Flamenco, may be taken as the type; or, if one will, Flore et Blanchefleur and Aucassin et Nicolette, those two enduring lovers' tales.[1] Courtly love and knightly ventures are the themes of these romans so illustrative of noble French society in the thirteenth century. They differ from the Arthurian romances in having other than a Breton origin; and their heroes and heroines are sometimes of more easily imagined historicity than the knights and ladies of the Round Table. But they never approached the universal vogue of the Arthurian Cycle.
It goes without saying that tastes in reading (or rather listening) diverged in the twelfth century, just as in the twentieth. One cannot read the old chansons de geste in which fighting, and not love, is the absorbing topic, without feeling that the audience before whom they were chanted was predominantly male. One cannot but feel the contrary to have been the fact with the romances in verse and prose which constitute that immense mass of literature vaguely termed Arthurian. These two huge groups, the chansons de geste and the Arthurian romances, overlap chronologically and geographically. Although the development of the chansons was somewhat earlier, the Arthurian stories were flourishing before the chansons were past their prime; and both were in vogue through central and northern France. But the Arthurian stories won adoptive homes in England, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere. Indeed their earlier stages scarcely seem attached to real localities: nor were their manners and interests rooted in the special traditions of any definite place.
The tone and topics of these romances suggest an audience chiefly of women, and possibly feminine authorship. Doubtless, with a few exceptions, men composed and recited them. But the male authors were influenced by the taste, the favour and patronage, and the sympathetic suggestive interest of the ladies. Prominent among the first known
- ↑ See Gaston Paris, Lit. française, etc., chaps, iii. and v.; and Émile Littré in vol. 22 of the Histoire littéraire de la France. For examples of these romans, see Langlois, La Société française au XIIIᵉ siècle d'après dix romans d'aventure (2nd ed., Paris, 1904).
