Quondam et Futurus
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Ladie's Favor

Medieval romances are narratives representing the adventures and values of the aristocracy.  Romances may be written in prose, in which case they tend to resemble "histories," with more pretense to being truthful about the past, or they may be written in verse, in which case the narrators rarely make more than perfunctory efforts to simulate historicity.  

Characters nearly always are, or are revealed to be, knights, ladies, kings, queens, and other assorted nobles.  Plots often involve conflicts between feudal allegiances, pursuit of quests and endurance of ordeals, and the progress or failure of love relationships, often adulterous or among unmarried members of the court.  Romances typically stress the protagonists' character development over any minor characters, and nearly all seem like "type characters" to modern readers used to full psychological realism.  

Marvels, especially the supernatural, routinely occur in romance plots, whereas they are viewed with skepticism in histories, though they also are positively necessary to saints' lives, a narrative form which resembles both histories and romance.  The term "romantic" is almost never used in Medieval times.  Romances are the ancestor of the novel.

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