Why would a book on romances try so hard to make you dislike romances?

There are good medieval romances and there are bad; human authors being human authors, that's inevitable. But why start with the bad ones? This book opens with the long-winded monotony of Guy of Warwick and the muscle-boundness of Gamelyn and the sheer brutality of Richard the Lion-Hearted. It makes awful reading. Eventually, we get to some good stuff -- Sir Orfeo, The Wedding of Sir Gawaine and Dame Ragnall. But author Ramsey's own writing style is too dry to sustain you until we get to those parts.

And the really good stuff -- Chaucer's romances -- are barely touched on.

I'd also argue that there is too much foreign material (e.g. non-English versions of the Tristan legend) for a book that says it is about "Popular Literature in Medieval England."

This isn't a completely worthless book. Some of its comments on "Floris and Blanchefleur" were new to me, and it gave a decent overview of the Horn legend. But I am compelled to say that readers would be better off not trying to read this as a continuous text. Instead, if you need to look up, say, "Emaré" or "Eger and Grime," just go to the index and look them up and skip the rest of the hard slog.

[Correction November 3: added "am" before "compelled" in the last paragaph.] ( )