Head to the Beach with MIP
Posted by Becky Straple-Sovers on July 21, 2023
There's nothing like reading a good romance at the beach... by which we mean Sir Torrent of Portingale, of course!
Written to entertain fifteenth-century audiences with a taste for action-packed tales of romance, chivalry, and adventure, Sir Torrent of Portingale is also a great beach read for the twenty-first century. At its heart is a story about two lovers: Torrent, a young knight from Portugal, and Desonell, the resourceful daughter of a tyrannical king. This romance has everything. The protagonists travel from Portugal to Norway to Jerusalem and everywhere in between. Torrent fights so many dragons he loses count, and doesn't even bother to count the giants! The text abounds with magic swords, horses, and rings; lions, griffins, and leopards (oh my!); and a feisty princess who wants to marry Torrent against her father's wishes.
James Wade, editor of the text, calls Sir Torrent of Portingale "a rollicking tale of love and adventure." In his introduction to the text, Wade says that the author "serves up deeds of derring-do episode after episode, his staple aesthetic being fearless chivalric heroics in the face of fearsome and surely insurmountable odds... the Torrent-author revels in putting his protagonists in seemingly insurmountable situations and watching them somehow struggle out. This struggle, after all, and the eventual triumph of good over evil, is what romance is all about."
Make your summer reading medieval in all the best ways with Sir Torrent of Portingale, available from MIP as a paperback or ebook or open access from TEAMS: Middle English Texts Series!
Sir Torrent of Portingale
Throughout this tale of love and adventure, there are fights with dragons, giants, and savage beasts; perilous sea journeys and shipwrecks; magic horses and swords; sieges and duels; and more. Amidst it all a family tries to find its way back together. This edition collates the surviving manuscript and print fragments to offer a coherent and readable text with an introduction, extensive commentary, and notes. James Wade has produced a starting point for the critical reappraisal of this romance and its literary and cultural contexts.
TEAMS: Middle English Texts Series
Medieval Institute Publications publishes the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series, which produces scholarly texts designed for research and classroom use. Its goal is to make available to teachers, scholars, and students texts that occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but have not been readily available in print or online editions. The series does not include authors, such as Chaucer, Langland, or Malory, whose English works are normally in print. The focus is, instead, upon Middle English literature adjacent to those authors that are needed for research or teaching. The editions maintain the linguistic integrity of the original work but within the parameters of modern reading conventions.
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