Abstract: Identifying the Breton lays in Middle English as a coherent corpus is a challenge for several reasons because they are rather difficult to distinguish from the romance genre. Very tellingly, in her contribution to the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature dedicated to romance, Rosalind Field does not consider these lays as a separate group; rather, she inscribes most of them within the romance genre. In her analysis, there is no such subcategory as “Middle English Breton lays,” but instead short romances that occasionally resort ...
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