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Courtly romances in Byzantium: A case study in reception

Roderick Beatona
a
Koraes Professor of Modem Greek and Byzantine History, Language, and Literature, King's College,
London

To cite this Article Beaton, Roderick(1989) 'Courtly romances in Byzantium: A case study in reception', Mediterranean
Historical Review, 4: 2, 345 — 355
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 Courtly Romances in Byzantium:
A Case Study in Reception

RODERICK BEATON

It was Alain de Lille, during the 1170s, who first claimed the courtly
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romance as a major export to the crusading East. In an often quoted

passage he boasted:
For whither have the wings of fame not taken the name of Arthur
of Britain and made it popular? What Christian realm has it left
untouched? Who indeed may not speak of Arthur of Britain,
since he is almost better known to the peoples of Asia than to the
Britons, as we are informed by our Pilgrims returning from
eastern parts? Orientals speak of him, occidentals speak of him,
the whole world. Egypt speaks of him; the straits of the Bosporus
are not silent.. . . His deeds are celebrated in Antioch, Armenia,
Palestine.1
Despite its undoubted exaggeration, this testimony has been taken at
face value, and has found superficial corroboration, at least, in the
existence of a number of Byzantine romances of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, translated or adapted from Western originals. Only
one of these, it must be said, is Arthurian: the idiosyncratic translation
of the 'Branor le Brun' episode in the romance of Palamedes, better
known as Guiron le Courtois. The brief Greek text is known as "The Old
Knight'.2 Of the other surviving Greek translations of Western
romances, Fleur et Blanchefleur was translated from Italian and the
Roman de Troie from French in the fourteenth century; Pierre de
Provence et la Belle Maguelonne was epitomized in a loose adaptation,
probably from the French, in the fifteenth century; and the same
century saw an adaptation of Apollonius of Tyre and a fairly close
translation of Boccaccio's Theseid,3 both from the Italian. With the
exception of the Arthurian fragment and the vast Roman de Troie
(which must be the longest work of vernacular Greek produced before
the twentieth century), all these originals appeared relatively late in the
West. And there are good reasons for supposing that the Greek
versions were produced in Greek-speaking lands held by descendants
of the crusaders. There is some evidence to link the Fleur et Blanche-
fleur translation with Morea under the Villehardouin dynasty;4 the
 346 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

Theseid was probably translated in Crete;5 we know of the existence of a

manuscript of Tristan in Chios before the fifteenth century;6 and the
late date of the translation of Pierre de Provence makes it almost certain
that it could not have been produced within the Byzantine empire.7
Were these the only Greek romances of the period, it would be an
easy matter to conclude, as some scholars have recently tended to do,
that this kind of secular, vernacular fiction in Greek was simply an
extension of the fama volons of Arthur and the courtly tradition of the
West.8 But there also survive five original romances written in Greek
during the same period. And although precise dating has proved
impossible for any of these early texts in a form of Modern Greek, three
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of these original romances certainly, and in all probability four of them,

were in existence before the middle of the fourteenth century, the time
when it appears that the earliest translations (of Flew and the Roman
de Troie) were made. The same evidence also allows us to place the
composition of these three or four original romances fairly confidently
in Byzantine Constantinople.9 Although there are evident signs of
interaction later between these two groups of romances, original and
translated, the impetus for the composition of original fiction in
vernacular Greek does not seem chronologically to have followed from
the translation of comparable texts from the West.
Elsewhere I have examined in detail the nature of these romances
as literary texts and their close links to the Hellenistic novels (or
romances) of ideal love and their revival in twelfth-century Byzantium;
and I have also reviewed the evidence for some degree of assimilation,
in these romances, of elements derived from the West.10 In particular
attention has been drawn to vocabulary and technical terms in these
romances which betray Western 'influence'; and more importantly
Carolina Cupane, in a series of articles, has argued that certain 'motifs'
in the later Byzantine romances, such as the portrayal of Eros as a king
in splendour and the allegorical role of the castle, are Western importa-
tions, cunningly disguised and assimilated to the anterior Greek tradi-
tion.11 Cupane's well-documented studies are exemplary in their
approach, in that they do not seek to isolate specific 'sources' for the
'influence' of Western literature on the Greek romances, but rather
to show how common currents in the West are adapted but subtly
modified by Byzantine writers who are far from being merely passive.
But they also overstate their case because they underplay the extent to
which these Western 'motifs' are already present half-formed in
the Byzantine tradition by the mid-twelfth century. The only other
Western connections that have been discussed in the original Greek
romances of the fourteenth century are minor linguistic pointers,
descriptions of dress and technical terms which can tell us little.
 COURTLY ROMANCES IN BYZANTIUM 347
For the rest of this paper I shall investigate further the relationship
between the romances originally written in vernacular Greek in the
fourteenth century and the tradition of courtly romance in the West, in
terms oí reception, in the sense that the term has acquired in the writings
of Hans Robert Jauss and other modern theorists of literature.12 The
essence of Jauss's model, so far as it concerns this paper, is that the
production of a new text, or of a new kind of text, is constituted by a new
way of reading older texts, or alternatively by the reading of different
older texts from those than had previously dominated the canon. The
writer of a new text is not in any passive or pejorative sense 'influenced'
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by his reading; it is he who takes the initiative in determining which

models from the past will furnish him with a framework in which his new
texts will make sense. I therefore wish to argue that 'imitation' or
allusion to other literary texts may in certain cases be proof of active
innovation rather than of mere passive reflection. The original Greek
romances of the fourteenth century pay homage in this way to the
learned Greek romances of the twelfth century, and beyond them, to
the prose novels written in Greek under the Roman empire in the first
centuries CE. But in subtler, and less evident ways, I wish to argue, the
writers of these romances were also aware of and prepared to allude to
the courtly tradition of the West. And it is probably a more important
discovery that Byzantines in Constantinople were reading Western
secular and vernacular literature, than that their counterparts in Latin-
ruled lands were translating it.
I shall focus on three areas of contact between East and West for
which there is evidence in the Byzantine romances: language and
choice of subject matter; narrative structure; and proper names and
geographical allusions. For the sake of simplicity I shall confine discus-
sion to the three Greek texts which we know to have been written
during the first half of the fourteenth century, and to have circulated
in Constantinople during that time. They are Kallimachos and Chry-
sorrhoe, Velthandros and Chrysantza, and Livistros and RhodamneP

LANGUAGE AND SUBJECT-MATTER

It is not until the fourteenth century that we find the Greek vernacular
accepted as the natural medium for fictional literature. Although texts
which exploit the vernacular register for specific purposes are found in
Greek in the twelfth century, it is not until the fourteenth that literature
of entertainment regularly uses this medium; and from then on it
almost always does so. For this 'breakthrough of the vernacular' the
Western example must surely have served as at least a catalyst.
But it is not merely in the choice of a new written register that Greek
 348 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

writers of fiction seem to follow or to allude to practice in the West.

The ancient romances, even the more rhetorically elaborate ones by
Achilles Tatios and Heliodoros, had been crowded with narrative
detail, often of a fairly spectacular sort. In the twelfth century a greater
fastidiousness, and a correspondingly greater interest in form and in
the text itself as rhetoric, led to a dilution of the 'action-packed' formula
and to a concomitant focus on the main characters as human beings
acted upon rather than acting. This interiorization of the action of the
romance was taken to its furthest extreme in the twelfth century by
Eustathios Makremvolites. The later romances however are once
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again packed with incident, and in Kallimachos, Velthandros, and

Livistros prominence is given to incidents of a kind scarcely encountered
before in the Greek romance.
The ancient romances certainly do permit miraculous escapes, and
magic makes a brief appearance in a minor episode of necromancy in
the Aithiopika of Heliodoros. But by and large the attitude of the
ancient writers to magic is a rationalist one: the special effects in
Achilles Tatios' romance are carefully explained away; and Kalasiris in
the Aithiopika is not above faking magical effects. The Hellenistic
writers made the most of their opportunities to strain their readers'
credulity, but for all that their imaginative world was firmly anchored to
a real geography and a romanticized history. A partial exception may
be made for the Hellenistic Alexander 'romance', which even in its
early form contained its share of marvels, and seems to have been
continuously read and copied throughout the Byzantine period.14
The 'new' element is most obvious in Kallimachos, where it has also
been most discussed.15 'Folktale' motifs suddenly appear: a task is laid
before three brothers to determine which will inherit a kingdom; a
magic ring is given to the hero by his brothers; the lovers meet in the
castle of an ogre, described with a wealth of supernatural detail; the
ogre himself has held a kingdom to ransom and devoured all the
heroine's relatives to gain possession of the beautiful Chrysorrhoe;
finally there is a magic apple that can cause and revoke the appearance
of death. It is probably fruitless to speculate about the precise sources
of these elements. Some, particularly the dragon-slaying story, are
likely to have come from the Greek oral tradition, in which that
particular story is still current both in songs and in tales.16 Others, such
as the magic ring and apple, are more widely diffused in the narra-
tive literature of the West and also of the Islamic East. What is
incontrovertible, however, is that very similar lands of narrative
incident crowd the pages of Arthurian romance, from Chrétien and
Marie de France onwards. There, too, scholarly attention has for some
time been directed away from open-ended speculation about the Celtic
 COURTLY ROMANCES IN BYZANTIUM 349
folklore from which these elements must have been drawn, to the
literary use made of them by writers of romance.17 It need not be
coincidence that Greek writers began to turn towards the world of
magic and folklore at the same time as they also began to recognize the
equation, already fully established in the West, between fiction and the
vernacular. It is also entirely typical of the covert allusiveness of which
Byzantine writers were often capable, that no single element of
Western folklore was directly incorporated into a Greek romance. It
was only the concept of drawing on this kind of resource that was taken
over by the Greek writers.
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Although the 'folkloric' element is much more intrusive in Kalli-

machos than in the other Greek romances, the new relaxation of the
somewhat rigorous and literal standards of realism which obtained in
the twelfth century is also exploited to considerable effect in the two
other romances under consideration, Velthandros and Livistros. In the
former the shift from the hero's wanderings through an identifiably real
Anatolia, to his quest for the source of the mysterious river of water and
fire in the Castle of Love, is managed by a gradual and at first
imperceptible transition. It is also striking that the arrival of Eros
the King at the castle and the beauty contest which follows are
not presented, as are the corresponding elements in other Greek
romances, as taking place in a dream but as part of the real experience
of the hero. On the same level, in Velthandros, after the return to the
real world which follows his initiation in the Castle of Eros, is
the striking dramatic moment where, in defiance of literal realism,
Chrysantza recognizes the hero, whom in the real world she has never
met before.
In Livistros and Rhodamne the world in which the action takes place
is more literally presented, in obedience to the model of Makrem-
volites' romance in the twelfth century, which is here followed quite
closely. But even here there is an element of imaginative wonderland in
the presentation of Rhodamne's allegorically triangular castle, and in
the magical means by which she is abducted and later restored to the
hero. Once again there is no single element which could plausibly be
identified as 'Arthurian' or even as specifically Western. But these are
all elements of a kind intimately associated with the Western romance
from the twelfth century onwards, and have no real equivalent in the
older Greek tradition.

STRUCTURAL PARALLELS

A similar process of innovative assimilation can be detected in the

structure of the original Greek romances. All three of the texts under
 350 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

discussion share a common plot structure, according to which a hero

sets out in search of adventures, falls in love which is consummated half
way through the romance, then is separated from his bride and has to go
through further trials to win her again permanently. Precisely this
structure had been used in two of the influential French romances of
Chrétien de Troyes. In Eric et Etude and in Yvain the marriage of the
hero and his bride takes place less than half way through the text, but it
takes many more adventures before the hero reaches the spiritual
maturity to live happily with his lady.18 In the first case the hero's excess
of uxoriousness leads to a rift which takes many adventures to heal; in
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the second the hero is parted from his wife against his will but then
becomes so engrossed in the life of adventure as to forget to return after
the promised interval of a year.
There are no compelling thematic similarities between these
romances of Chrétien and the vernacular Greek poems. But the
similarity of structure is unmistakable, and assumes much greater
importance when these two romances are set alongside the rest of
Chretien's oeuvre and indeed of early vernacular literature in Western
Europe generally. Eric et Enide and Yvain apply to the romance a
particular form of bipartite structure that has been noted in such
diverse medieval poems as Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, and the
twelfth-century French romans d'antiquité, as well as in the vernacular
French Vie de St Alexis, the Chanson de Guillaume and the Nibelungen-
lied}9 The defining characteristic of this structure is the building
of a story out of two halves which are formally symmetrical and
thematically complementary rather than causally linked according to
Aristotelian principles.
In the Greek romances we are faced with a very specific form of
bipartite structure, that of love found and consummated in the first
half, then tested and finally validated by a new series of adventures
resulting in permanent reunion. All the thematic elements that go to
make up this structure had already been present in the Greek romances
of Hellenistic times and again of the twelfth century, but in none of
these are the themes set out with the formal symmetry of Eric et Enide,
Yvain, or the fourteenth-century Greek romances.
It may be suggested that this structural organization, common to
these three later Greek romances, affords the most effective vehicle for
the essential theme of all the Greek romances, from Hellenistic times
onwards. The quest for love and permanence through a series of
reversals of fortune, becomes enshrined in the formal arrangement of
the text itself. This innovation, which leads to the most formally perfect
development of the Greek tradition of the romance, is not fortuitous,
nor is it purely the invention of the fourteenth-century Greek writers.
 COURTLY ROMANCES IN BYZANTIUM 351

Rather, they must have recognized in the romances of Chrétien or in

others deriving from them a possibility of structural organization that
would enable them to give an entirely new artistic expression to a set of
themes inherited from their own tradition.

PROPER NAMES AND FICTIONAL GEOGRAPHY

The same attempt at conscious integration of Western elements can
also be seen at work in the names given to the principal characters in two
of the three romances under consideration, Velihandros and Livistros.
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The tendency for the protagonists to have names which are semantic-
ally suggestive of the ideal qualities of their bearers goes back to the
earliest known Greek romance, Chaíreos and Kallirrhoe by Chariton of
Aphrodisias: the hero's name suggests joy and greeting; the heroine's
means literally 'flowing with beauty'; and this convention had largely
been maintained in the romances of the twelfth century. But, in
addition, the twelfth-century authors had used proper names as a way
of affirming the generic affiliations of their romances with those of their
predecessors.
This kind of homage to tradition is also carried over into the
fourteenth-century romances. The names of Kallimachos and Chry-
sorrhoe have been derived by splitting the name of Chariton's first-
century CE heroine, Kallirrhoe, to give the first component to the hero
and the second to the heroine. In the case of the proper names in
Velihandros and in Livistros, the same process is still at work but here,
as has often been noticed, with a difference. If the second component of
Velihandros' name is orthodox enough, on the model of Thersandros
(from Achilles Tatios' romance) and Aristandros (from the frag-
mentary romance of Manassis written in the twelfth century), its first
component has an unmistakably foreign ring. The same must be said of
the second components of the names Chrysantza and Phaidrokaza
in the same romance, and doubts have been raised even about
Rodophilos, the name of the hero's father.20 Stranger still is the case of
Livistros, in Livistros and Rhodamne, who comes from the land of
Livandros, and is described as of Latin race, whose rival is a black king
of Egypt called Verderichos, presumably Frederick, in a world other-
wise peopled by such traditionally named characters as Klitovos/
Klitovon, Rhodamne, and Myrtane.21
In the case of Velihandros, the name of the hero's father provides the
principal clue. Rodophilos has reasonably enough been taken to be a
superficial Hellenization of Rodolfo/Rudolphe. So it may well be, but
the important thing is that as well as sounding Western, it has
the appearance in Greek of such traditional names as Rhodope,
 352 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

Rhodanthe, and such endings as -machos, -sthenes, -andros. 'Rodo-

philos' points to tradition in the same way that the names in the twelfth-
century romances and Kallimachos had done, but here two traditions
are woven into one.
The same has happened in the case of the hero. Velthandros has been
ingeniously identified as Bertrand, but this is by no means the whole
story. The second component of his name is entirely traditional in
Greek, and even its foreign-sounding first component alludes to the
Greek root velt-, as in veltion (beltion), the comparative degree of the
adjective 'good' in the learned language. Such a name would be entirely
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appropriate for a hero named after the example of Manassis' Arist-

andros (where arist- is the root of the superlative degree of the
same adjective). The conflation of traditional Greek roots (yelt- and
-andros) which at the same time seems to transliterate a Western name
(Bertrand, et cetera) exemplifies the same process of double allusion as
was discernible in the case of Rodophilos.
Of the names in Livistros, that of Klitovos, the first-person narrator,
declares an obvious affinity with his counterpart in Achilles Tatios'
romance, Kleitophon. The names of the girls, Rhodamne and Myrtane,
belong more or less with such names as Rhodanthe in the twelfth-
century romance by Theodoras Pródromos, Rhodanthe and Dosik-
les,22 and Myrtale in Daphnis and Chloe. However, the increased
proportion of names linked with flowers may also have something to do
with the influence of Western romances such as the Roman de la Rose
and Fleur et Blanchefleur. The real puzzle here is presented by the name
of the hero himself. One would expect Livandros rather than Livistros,
to be the name of a person, but the similarity of these names makes it
clear that Livistros is to be thought of as named after a country.
Although the hero is twice said to be 'of Latin race', there are good
reasons to seek this country in the East rather than in the West.
Firstly, although the geography of the poem is extremely vague and
makes no pretensions to realism, two real places are mentioned
unambiguously: Egypt, to which Rhodamne is abducted, and
Armenia, of which the fictional province of Litavia is Klitovos' home.
Add to this the fact that when Livistros and Klitovos cross the sea to
Egypt on magic horses it is possible to see from one shore to the other,
and that this crossing is at one point called a ford {poros), and we seem
to have a conscious inversion of the Biblical crossing of the Red Sea. It
can hardly be the Mediterranean that separates the lovers in this case. If
the country from which Livistros comes is ruled by 'Latins' and can be
reached from Egypt by way of the Red Sea; if, moreover, somewhere
on his wanderings in search of Rhodamne the hero encounters an
Armenian prince, Klitovos, the conclusion that Livistros' homeland is
 COURTLY ROMANCES IN BYZANTIUM 353
envisaged as being on the eastern side of the Mediterranean becomes
inescapable. Crusader Lebanon (the Greek name Libanos/Livanos
had been in use since Roman times) offers two attractions for an
author intent on the same kind of synthesis of Western and traditional
elements as we detected in the name of Velthandros: allusion to a
crusader state allows him, in suitably veiled form, to express his
admiration for Westerners and by implication for their literature; it
also allows an even subtler pointer to his ultimate Greek model in
Leukippe and Kleitophon by Achilles Tatios. That romance had begun
with praise for the city of Tyre, which later was included, with much of
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Lebanon, in the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem.

CONCLUSION

I have not attempted a full survey of the vexed and complex question of
the relation between the Eastern and Western romances in the four-
teenth century. Instead, I have confined myself, after a brief introduc-
tion to the problem, to proposing new solutions which, if accepted, will
considerably fill out the picture of subtle and selective assimilation of
Western vernacular literature by Greek writers in the fourteenth
century. At a general level, the gradual acceptance in the West of the
vernacular as the appropriate medium for fiction, essential to the
later development of modern literature as we understand the term
today, seems to have impressed itself upon the Byzantines, after the
reluctance of the twelfth century and the hiatus of the thirteenth
(from which no vernacular or secular writing survives). The world of
adventure, and the relaxation of the inflexible law of chastity between
the hero and heroine that had been a generic convention of all
the earlier Greek romances, and in particular the entirely new role
assigned to the supernatural, are all thematic components that may
plausibly be derived from the West. But once again derivation is far
from being passive 'following': it is a type of story, or of thematic
element, which the Byzantine writers seem to have admired in the work
of their Western counterparts.and grafted on to their own tradition.
Similarly the structural organization of the three Constantinopolitan
romances examined above, in which for the first time in Greek
the 'bipartite' structure of much Western medieval literature is con-
sistently adopted, takes something from the West in order to give
expression to a view of love and fate which is purely Hellenistic and
Byzantine. And the clues provided by the proper names in two of the
romances suggest that Byzantine writers of romance acknowledged the
part played by the crusader states in the East, in transmitting a
 354 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

vitalizing, but to the Byzantines always subordinate, element from the

courtly romances of the West.

NOTES
1. Quo enim Arturi Britonis nomen fama volans non pertulit et vulgavit: quousque
Christianum pertingit imperium? Quis, inquam, Arturum Britonem non loquatur,
cum pene notior habeatur Asiatics gentibus quam Britannis; sicut nobis referunt
Palmigeri nostri de orientis partibus redeuntes? Loquuntur ilium orientales,
loquuntur occidui, toto terrarum orbe divisi. Loquitur ilium Aegyptus; Bosforus
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exclusa non tacet. . . . Celebrat actus ejus Antiochia, Armenia, Palaestina. (R.S.
Loomis, 'The Modena Sculpture and Arthurian Romance', Studi medievali, NS, 9
[1936], 10.)
2. For text and discussion, see P. Breillat, 'La Table Ronde en Orient. Le Poeme grec
du Vieux Chevalier', Mélanges d'archéologie et d'histoire, 55 (1938), 308-40. For a
new interpretation of this text see F. Rizzo Nervo, 'Il "Mondo dei Padri" nella
Metafora del Vecchio Cavaliere', Quaderni del Siculorum Gymnasium (University
of Catania), 15 (1985), 115-28.
3. For a fuller discussion of these texts and bibliography, see R. Beaton, The Medieval
Greek Romance (Cambridge, 1989), pp.132-42.
4. See G. Spadaro, Contributo sulle fonti del Romanzo greco-medievale 'Florio e
Plaziaflora' (Athens, 1966), p.14.
5. See E. Follieri, 'La versione greca volgare del Teseida del Boccaccio', Rivista di
studi bizantini e neoellenici, 7 (1953), 67-77.
6. M. Pelaez, 'Un frammento del romanzo francese in prosa di Tristano', Studi
medievale, NS, 2 (1929), 198-204.
7. M. and E. Jeffreys, 'Imberios and Margarona: The Manuscripts, Sources and
Edition of a Byzantine Verse Romance', Byzantion, 41 (1971), 127.
8. See, for example, K. Setton, 'The Byzantine Background to the Italian Renais-
sance', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 100 (1956), 38-40; and
J. Irmscher, 'Les Francs - représentants de la littérature en Grec vulgaire',
Byzantinische Forschungen, 7 (1979), 57-66.
9. For an up-to-date review of the evidence for dating these romances, see Beaton,
The Medieval Greek Romance, pp.101-2, 190, 196.
10. Ibid., pp.143-59.
11. C. Cupane, '"Eros-Basileus": la Figura di Eros nel romanzo Bizantino d'Amore',
Atti del Accademia di Arti di Palermo, Ser. 4, 33 (1974), 243-97; 'Il Motivo del
castello nella narrativa tardo-bizantina. Evoluzione di un' allegoria', Jahrbuch der
österreichischen Byzantinistik, 27 (1978), 229-67.
12. See in particular H.R. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Brighton and
Minnesota, 1982), and R. Holub, Reception Theory (London, 1985).
13. M. Pichard (ed.), Le roman de Callimaque et de Chrysorrhoé (Paris, 1956) (with
facing French translation); E. Kriaras (ed.), 'Velthandros and Chrysantza' in id.,
Vizandina Ippotika Mythistorimata (Athens, 1955), pp.87-130; J.A. Lambert
(ed.). Le roman de Libistros et Rhodamné (Amsterdam, 1935) (with French
introduction and summary).
14. I am grateful to Dr. D.W. Holton for drawing my attention to specific correspon-
dence between episodes of Velthandros and of Livistros, and the later Byzantine
versions of the Alexander 'romance'. However in view of the late date of these
versions (from the late fourteenth century onwards), and of the apparent influence
of the romances on some of these texts, I am inclined to see the romances as being
the source of all these elements in the later Alexander story.
15. See G. Megas, 'Kallimachou ke Chrysorrois Ypothesis', in Mélanges Merlier, Vol. 2
(Athens, 1956), pp.147-72; and I. Diller, 'Märchenmotive in Kallimachos und
 COURTLY ROMANCES IN BYZANTIUM 355
Chrysorrhoe', Folia neohellenica, 2 (1977), 25-40.
16. See M. Alexiadis, I Ellmikes Parallayes yia ton Drakontoktono Iroa: Paramy-
tholayiki Meleti (Ioannina, 1982).
17. See, for example, the essays in D. Bethurum (ed.), Critical Approaches to Medieval
Literature (London, 1960).
18. Cf. J. Stevens, Medieval Romance: Themes and Approaches (London, 1973),
pp.73-5.
19. See W. Ryding, Structure in Medieval Narrative (The Hague and Paris, 1971),
pp.39-43; 118-24; 124-5.
20. For a summary of discussions and bibliography, see Kriaras (ed.), Vizandina
Ippolika Mythistorimala, pp.97-8.
21. Cf. Lambert (ed.), Libistros et Rhodamné, pp.45-8.
22. An etymology for the name of the heroine in this romance is proposed by E. Kriaras,
'To onoma "Rhodamne"', Ellinika (Thessalonika), 22 (1969), 436-40.
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