Courtly Narration and the Field of Books

Abstract Courtly romance is a book-derived genre, and certain romances stand out because they claim that their story matter is distributed over multiple books in more than one language. In these ‘romances with bibliography’, books are present as a field of transmission from which narration issues. This essay describes the imaginative and conceptual configurations which organize the representation of the field in German romances from the late twelfth to the middle of the fourteenth century; taken together, these configurations reveal the variety of ways in which romance authors situated their work of narration in relation to books in a vernacular textual culture where the literary word was poised between the written medium of its composition and transmission and the spoken or sung aurality of its performance.