Recent studies of manuscript production and late medieval English book culture have focused primarily on the metropolis of London and particularly the role of civil service bureaucrats in the authorship, copying, and dissemination of some of the period's most prestigious literary works. But such a privileging of London as a literary and scribal center only captures one segment of England's thriving medieval book trade. In Romance and the Gentry, Michael Johnston invites us to take a closer look outside the major city, at another avenue of book production and another audience for books. The “gentry” in Johnston's study are a critically important social stratum within England's intricate and deeply important class system. Less wealthy and powerful than the titled nobility, members of the gentry were nonetheless important landowners and civic officials in their own local context, staking out a somewhat precarious balance between the yeomanry below them and the nobility above—a status to which, with careful fiscal management, they might someday aspire. This emerging class was a new development of the mid to late thirteenth century; it constituted a new audience for the genre of romance and drove the demand as well for romances specifically tailored to their priorities and concerns. And this new demand seems to have been met by book producers not toiling in the clerical offices of distant London but much closer to home in the provincial households of Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire, and elsewhere. The scribes copying these books were sometimes, Johnston argues, the gentry readers themselves (as in the case of Robert Thornton) and sometimes professionals working within the gentry household, maintaining records and correspondence or employed as tutors for the children.

If London has captured our scholarly imagination as a scribal center, it is at least in part due to the relative wealth of surviving evidence from that milieu. Johnston's body of evidence is much more limited, consisting of nine miscellany manuscripts. Where London copies of the Canterbury Tales or Confessio Amantis may impress us with their consistency and professionalism, each of these manuscripts presents very much a special case, but for the majority of them, where their provenance is known, they can be connected to gentry readers and a provincial production. These manuscripts contain a variety of texts in a variety of genres, but within them Johnston identifies certain romances—The Avowing of Arthur, Octavian, Sir Amadace, Sir Cleges, Sir Degrevant, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle, Sir Isumbras, and Sir Launfal—as “gentry romances,” texts that specifically address some of the social concerns and ambitions of the members of the gentry class and that would have held a particular appeal for gentry readers. His case for social class as an important interpretive key in these texts is a compelling one. Their heroes embody certain ideologies that are at times perhaps contentious: that it is possible for a struggling landowner to triumph over the depredations of the high nobility, that a conscientious paterfamilias might successfully provide for his family's inheritance, that a provincial household might display a truer nobility than that found at court, and that a lavish, even spendthrift generosity could be a sound foundation for a gentleman's social advancement above the £40 economic threshold marking the lower boundary of the knightly class. Such themes were not solely of interest to gentry readers, of course, but by viewing these romances together as a united cultural movement, Johnston illuminates a role for the deep investment these texts have in questions of social class, an aspect of late medieval culture that would have been very deeply felt at the time but that can be more difficult for us to pin down today.

If there is one caveat to a study like this one, it is that a reader might become caught up in the author's particular interpretive key—in this case, the emergence of the gentry as a historical phenomenon that found its literary reflection in a particular selection of romances—as the only way of viewing the texts in question, the only cultural work they might have performed. Johnston's range of evidence is impressive, spanning dialectical study, close codicological examination, and provenance detective work, as well as literary analysis of the texts. But the idiosyncrasies of these manuscripts, the product, as Johnston asserts, of their uncentralized and fundamentally local production process, can create a sometimes frustrating circularity or circumstantiality to the identification of any one text as “a typical gentry romance.” Does it deserve such a label because it was owned by gentry readers? (They read texts of other genres, too.) Or because it espouses an ideology that seems to us appropriate to the aspiring gentry? But this is, in the end, not Johnston's point. Much recent scholarship has emphasized the elasticity of the romance genre, in its appeal to the widest possible array of audiences. Gentry readers were not the only audience for these texts, nor yet even their only public (to borrow, as Johnston does, Anne Middleton's distinction between a text's real readers and the readership that a text may imagine for itself). Romance and the Gentry stands alongside such recent studies, exploring what considerable interpretive ground can be gained by interrogating romances with an eye to yet another new way of understanding the concerns and ambitions of their readers. By alerting us to the way that these nine romances in particular might have resonated for gentry landowners, Johnston has gifted us with both a better understanding of the appeal and sophistication of these texts and a renewed mindfulness of the importance of those literary circles outside London's reach.