This paper considers how the literary marketplace was reshaped by understudied middle-class readers of, and characters in, romance in late medieval England. It argues that the term ‘middlebrow’, conventionally applied to twentieth-century developments in literary taste alongside the growth of the middle class, can also illuminate how ideological and aesthetic expectations associated with courtliness were renegotiated alongside the late-medieval emergence of the middle class.

As changes in late-medieval English society produced new urban readerships (both male and female), how was the literary marketplace shaped by new bourgeois characters in romance texts and by the books in which they circulated? Concentrating on merchants and on medieval singlewomen, I use the term ‘Medieval Middlebrow’ to address ideas of literary taste, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas of taste as mediated by class-based power. I also address concerns with translatio: as movement of power (in the appropriation of romance and its tropes to offer a critique informed by changing social structures and class politics) and as movement of texts (in terms of the writing of late romances and their readership and circulation). At a time of widening participation in both political life and pleasure reading, this paper considers who gets to read; what they are reading; and how that may shape what is available to be read, and in what forms.

Megan Leitch is now Professor and Chair of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the University of Groningen, after working at Cardiff University in Wales for 12 years. She holds a BA (Hons) from the University of British Columbia in Canada and an MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge, and she is co-editor of the journal Arthurian Literature and past president of the International Arthurian Society British Branch. She has published monographs on treason in the literature of the Wars of the Roses and sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature, and is now working on a new book project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.