Ipomedon: A Twelfth-Century Romance in the French of England

The first modern English translation of Hugh of Rhuddlan’s Ipomedon.

The Anglo-Norman Ipomedon, composed in the late twelfth century by Hugh of Rhuddlan, is a witty, notoriously scabrous romance, set in the Mediterranean. In a version of the Fair Unknown motif, the work’s eponymous hero, the son of the king of Apulia, falls in love with the queen of Calabria, conceals his identity and serves in her retinue. He undertakes a number of adventures, including participating in a three-day tournament, each day under different colours, before revealing his true identity and marrying her. Alert to the conventions of Arthurian romance from which it pointedly takes ironic distance, Ipomedon invokes the Continental romans d’antiquité in its protagonists’ names and in its surprising claim to be the source material for the chronologically earlier Roman de Thèbes. It was popular amongst its contemporary readers, being translated later into three different Middle English versions.

This book offers the first modern English translation; it also provides explanatory notes, and a full introduction, discussing the author, its audience, dating, sources and analogues, themes, humour and narrative style. It will make this important text, of great interest to medieval romance studies, available to a wider audience.