1. Romance in Latin and in Vernacular

1. Romance in Latin and in Vernacular

Medieval story-tellers in turning to the vernacular found wider opportunity. The Latin poetic that they all studied in school, practised in _historia_, _fabula_, _argumentum_, and at greater length in saint’s legend, was too much absorbed in descriptive elaboration to teach them much of narrative. Outside the cloister, at the regular stations of the pilgrimage routes, waited audiences of increasing size and diversity; and the development of feudalism established the castle hall as a social center. The development of vernacular narrative answered with the more social art of romance. The narrative future was increasingly for the vernacular. Meantime Latin narrative continued not only for its more special audience, but in various interplay. _Exempla_, sketched or summed in Latin, were preached in vernacular. An ugly old legend of folklore, moralized in Latin for an _exemplum_, Chaucer gave back to the wider audience in the exquisite art of his Prioress. Romances and legends of saints interpenetrated. The complicated development of the Grail legend must be followed in both Latin and vernacular. Nevertheless poetic was beckoned into new narrative paths mainly by the wider appeal through the vernacular.

Something, of course, was carried over from the _poetriæ_,[4] oftenest the conventional lore of style. By contrast we are made the more sharply aware of the escape and adventure of individual bent and native inspiration. _Aucassin et Nicolete_ has another appeal by another method. Its style, in spite of occasional conformity, is not in the tradition of the _poetriæ_. Chrétien, though conforming more, draws his psychology rather from observation of social habits and even of individual character than from the classified lore of appropriateness to type. Dante not only commits the most serious enterprise of medieval poetic to the vernacular; he utterly ignores the Latin school lore. At the end of the middle age, the Renaissance already tinging his thought, Chaucer passes through a whole course of Latin conventions, adapting critically as he goes, and ranges beyond.