When the second edition of Heliodorus's An Æthiopian Historie (1569; 1577) went to press, the English translator of the forgotten late classical romance, Thomas Underdowne, added a “Letter to the Gentle Reader.” In it, he confesses to being of “riper yeeres” and “crave[s] pardon” for his earlier “boldness” of translating Heliodorus. As he says, “I am not ignorant that the stationers shops are to full fraughted with bookes of small price … and that the losenesse of these dayes rather requireth grave exhortations to vertue, then wanton allurements to leudnesse, that it were meter to publish notable examples of godly Christian life, then the most honest (as I take this to be) historie of love” (Heliodorus 1577 sig. Aiii^r−v). Underdowne's keen awareness of the stationer's shops brisk business in romance—stories rife with allurements to “leudnesse”—fuels his urgency to justify how Heliodorus's “most honest” history of love models “examples of godly Christian life.” The letter's simultaneous self-conscious recognition of romance's commercial value as well as its dubious morality poses the dilemma that encapsulates Steve Mentz's axis of argument in Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction.

Tracing the winding development of that elusive early modern literary form—romance—Mentz draws from print culture history, genre studies, and Reformation scholarship in order to posit romance (so often books of “small price”) as a middle genre, one that rides uneasily between the “moral anarchy” of chivalric romance and the “amoral cynicism” of the Italian novella, a genre self-consciously marketed to what he terms a “middlebrow” audience, one neither exclusively courtly nor solely popular. By studying the imagined, diverse reading practices as revealed by peritextual materials, Romance for Sale contends that the economic viability and hybrid readership of prose romance profoundly affected new habits of reading and writing, contributing to the emergence of what Mentz labels “the Author in Print.”

Heliodorus's Aethiopica, whose popularity peaked in the 1580s and early 1590s, is crucial to Mentz's narrative. Its emphasis on “conspiring with fate,” a strategic passivity combined with active dissembling, Mentz contends, makes its plot more sympathetic to basic tents of English Protestantism. Because Greek romance demands greater faith, patience, and reliance on providence compared to the epic martialism of chivalric romance, it might (as Underdowne himself suggests) retain the genre's appeal yet provide example for the “godly.” By honing in on narrative motifs of shipwreck, for instance, Mentz portrays how Sir Philip Sidney in The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia weighs the relative merits of reason and faith in human experience. He recounts how Musidorus's insistence on active, reasonable reactions to disaster makes it difficult for him to accept supernatural control. Pyrocles, by contrast, exemplifies interpretive élan. The image of him atop the mast of a sinking ship, energetically waving his sword to attract rescue, reveals him to be a new model romance hero with his patient, yet active, endurance.

After Sidney, later Elizabethan prose fiction authors make strategic generic choices, Mentz proposes, based on complicated relationships to professional, commercial, and religious pressure. Robert Greene, whose populist career provides a radical alternative to Sidney, also follows a Heliodoran model. His heroes and heroines also emphasize human helplessness. Together, the work of Sidney and Greene reveal an antiepic turn in English narrative, while other writers such as John Lyly in Euphues and George Gascoigne in the Adventures of Master F.J. provide further insight into why Elizabethan prose fiction looks to Heliodoran romance as an alternative to the Italian decadence epitomized by the novella. Lyly, for instance, shows how Naples corrupts Euphues, which Mentz reads as a figurative locale for the problems of the novella form itself. The fiction of Thomas Lodge, by contrast, enacts a “transformation from sinner to saint” that looks backward to romance's medieval, Catholic, and continental roots (162). By assaulting the Protestant, Heliodoran models of Greene and Sidney, Lodge also escapes from his own professional mentor, Greene. Thomas Nashe, the last Elizabethan writer Mentz considers, represents a skeptical modification of the Heliodoran-flavored romance tradition. Nashe, Mentz argues, creates characters whose “strategic dishonesty” helps them to “endure the world's inconstancy” (184, 201). Nashe anticipates Cervantes in his self-conscious use of the romance form as he too borrows from its formal structure while mocking its follies. Mentz concludes by returning to the literary afterlife of Greene. Greene's dubious moral example, his penury, his undermining of cultural mores, and his realization that readers create meaning contribute to making him the exemplar for emerging authors in print. His lingering influence announces the central position that prose fiction would take in English literary culture.

Romance for Sale extends the conversation begun by scholars such as Richard Helgerson and Laurie Newcomb whose reading of Elizabethan prose fiction's influence on habits of reading and writing challenges traditional theses regarding the rise of the modern novel. Through his examination of a Heliodoran vogue that modeled new opportunities for commercialization while diffusing criticism, Mentz's study provides compelling new contexts for prose romance and for authorial careers. His study of how authors strove to situate themselves in their peritexts provides fresh insight into how popular romance sold itself. Yet, in a book titled “romance for sale” that emphasizes romance's marketplace cache and the concomitant rise of print authorship, it is odd to find little mention of the material conditions surrounding the sale of romances. An examination of who was publishing these texts, their sale price, or how native prose romances competed with older translated medieval romance as well as continental imports (such as the Palmerin cycles) would deepen an understanding of the cultural forces at work in the production and consumption of romance beyond individual authorial interventions. The scope of Mentz's study is ambitious—covering romance as commodity, the emergence of professional authorship, the habits of an anonymous middlebrow readership, religiously motivated generic change, the influence of a Heliodoran moment, as well as the professional jostling for recognition among late Elizabethan writers. But like the tangled plot lines he follows, Mentz's own narrative threads do not always lead to a focused conclusion. It is not evident, for example, how Protestant critiques map onto romance's market value or which more substantially initiates generic change. Mentz's lively conjunction of market and morality as factors shaping Elizabethan writers of prose fiction, however, offers original perspective into the struggles of Thomas Underdowne and numerous Elizabethan writers and translators who anxiously sought models for their uncertain fictions.