Empire of magic : medieval romance and the politics of cultural fantasy

Empire of Magic is expansive in scope, spanning the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, and detailed in coverage, examining various types of romance - historical, national, popular, chivalric, family, and travel romances, among others - to see how cultural fantasy responds to changing crises, pressures, and demands in a number of different ways.

It is a dramatic restaging of the role romance played in the culture of a period and a world and suggests how cultural fantasy still functions for us today.