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Women’s Pride and Men’s Prowess: Directing Chivalric Masculinity in Guy of Warwick
Felice, the heroine of the Middle English Guy of Warwick narratives, can be placed at one end of the spectrum of proud ladies in love, playing a relatively conventional and conservative role by facilitating Guy’s chivalric achievements and marrying in accordance with dynastic interests.1 Guy of Warwick survives in five independent redactions in Middle English, across three manuscripts and two sets of fragments. I focus here on the most extensive versions: Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ MS 19.2.1 (the Auchinleck manuscript); Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 107; Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.2.38 (henceforth CUL). I generally cite the Auchinleck version first and foremost, following most other commentators and the manuscript’s earlier date. For a full discussion see Alison Wiggins, ‘The Manuscripts and Texts of the Middle English Guy of Warwick’, in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, ed. by Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), pp. 61–80. All citations of the Auchinleck and Caius manuscripts are from The Romance of Guy of Warwick: The First or Fourteenth-Century Version, ed. by Julius Zupitza, EETS, e. s., 42, 49, 59 (London: Paul, Trench, and Trübner, 1883), though the Caius manuscript has now been dated to the late fifteenth rather than the fourteenth century (see Wiggins, cited above). All citations of the CUL manuscript are from The Romance of Guy of Warwick: The Second or Fifteenth-Century Version, ed. by Julius Zupitza, EETS, e. s., 25–6 (London: Trübner, 1875). After initially rejecting Guy, Felice sets him a series of increasingly difficult conditions he must meet in order to become her lover, and ultimately her husband – interestingly, Felice seems to shift from considering Guy as a lover to viewing him as a potential husband as he proves himself worthy of raising the stakes, perhaps indicating the factors that might have shaped medieval women’s decisions to pursue particular relationships.2 In the early sections of Guy of Warwick their relationship is referred to primarily in terms of love and/or sex, and Felice seems to see Guy’s initial advances as sexually motivated rather than as seeking marriage. In Auchinleck, Guy and Felice start to refer to their relationship in terms of marriage only in the stanzaic Guy. This begins after 7306 lines of the couplet Guy; the texts are probably by different authors, and were pieced together in the compilation of the manuscript: see Alison Wiggins, ‘Imagining the Compiler: Guy of Warwick and the Compilation of the Auchinleck Manuscript’, in Imagining the Book, ed. by Stephen Kelly and John J. Thompson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 61–73. In Caius the only references to marriage come after Felice’s father enquires about her marital plans, lines 7339–44. In CUL, this shift occurs much earlier, as Felice announces her plan to become Guy’s wife only if he proves himself the best knight in the world at lines 807–20. When he meets her final condition of proving himself the best knight in the world, the couple are married, concluding the first part of the romance. The subsequent sections detail Guy’s religious penitence (though the extent to which this is really a shift in priorities, given that he continues to prove his prowess in battle, has been debated),3 See, for example, Robert Allen Rouse, ‘An Exemplary Life: Guy of Warwick as Medieval Culture-Hero’, in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, pp. 94–109 (pp. 102–4); Paul Price, ‘Confessions of a Godless Killer: Guy of Warwick and Comprehensive Entertainment’, in Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, ed. by Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows, and Morgan Dickson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 93–110. leaving Felice behind with their son Reinbrun. Because Felice’s role is concentrated in the first half of the romance, I focus primarily on these early sections.
The more conventional aspects of Felice’s role come in part from the fact that she, unlike the other proud ladies discussed in this chapter, appears to have good reason to reject Guy’s advances: his lower social status. This legitimises her romantic a(nti)pathy, as differing status was an accepted – and, indeed, expected – reason to reject a marriage.4 See Cathy Hume, Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), p. 16; Noël James Menuge, ‘The Wardship Romance: A New Methodology’, in Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. by Rosalind Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 29–43 (p. 37). This concern is often discussed in relation to the Paston family’s dissatisfaction with Margery Paston’s clandestine marriage to Richard Calle, the family’s bailiff: see Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Norman Davis, EETS, s. s., 20, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; first publ. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), i, 341–3 (letter 203), 409 (letter 245), 541–2 (letter 332). See the further discussion of social status and resistance to love in Chapter 3. Felice may therefore seem less clearly aligned with the motif of the proud lady in love. Indeed, she is not directly referred to as proud in the Middle English versions of Guy: while versions of the Anglo-Norman Gui refer to her ‘fere de corage’ [‘proud heart’],5 Gui de Warewic: roman du XIIIe siècle, ed. by Alfred Ewert, Classiques français du moyen âge, 74, 2 vols (Paris: Champion, 1933), i, line 69; trans. in ‘Gui de Warewic’, in ‘Boeve de Haumtone’ and ‘Gui de Warewic’: Two Anglo-Norman Romances, ed. & trans. by Judith Weiss, FRETS, 3 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), pp. 97–243 (p. 98). I generally refer to Ewert’s edition and Weiss’s translation of the Anglo-Norman Gui, both based on London, British Library, MS Additional 38662. Although Ivana Djordević argues that it is reductive to focus only on the Anglo-Norman Gui in Ewert’s edition, she acknowledges that the other versions are largely inaccessible: see Ivana Djordjević, ‘Guy of Warwick as a Translation’, in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, pp. 27–43 (pp. 29, 36). Parts of Gui de Warewic from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 50, however, are included in The Fourteenth-Century Guy of Warwick, where Zupitza supplies it in place of Auchinleck’s missing leaf: line 93 includes the reference to Felice’s ‘fere de corage’. this is omitted in Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.2.38 (CUL), does not appear in the Auchinleck manuscript because the first leaf is missing, and is ambiguously translated as ‘she was a woman of grete corage’ (93) in the Caius manuscript (which may or may not indicate pride).6 Neither the Middle English Dictionary or Peggy Knapp include ‘pride’ as a meaning of ‘corage’ (of the meanings they list, ‘heart’ seems the only one potentially appropriate to Felice), but the OED does: ‘Corāǧe n.’, Middle English Dictionary, ed. by Frances McSparran et al., Middle English Compendium (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2000–18) <https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED9682> [accessed 19 July 2023]; Peggy Knapp, ‘Corage/Courage’, in Time-Bound Words: Semantic and Social Economies from Chaucer’s England to Shakespeare’s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 13–27; 3. c., ‘Courage, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary, ed. by Michael Proffitt et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) <https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/43146> [accessed 27 May 2023]. Yet Felice’s rejection of ‘Erles, Dukes, fro the worldes ende’ (Caius, 96), her scorn of Guy, and her insistence on all but impossible conditions before she will agree to marry him align her with the other proud ladies in love. While Felice represents a less extreme form of the proud lady, recognising her connections with this motif uncovers the more subversive aspects of her character, such as her striking autonomy, as well as indicating the central and affirmative role the proud lady could play in the construction of chivalric masculinity.
The conditions that Felice requires Guy to meet before she will agree to love him and be his wife directly motivate Guy’s chivalric prowess, as she first asks him to become a knight, then to prove himself in battle, then to become the best knight in the world. Felice presents this final demand as representing Guy’s own interests, saying that if she were to accept him without further trial, ‘ich þi manschip schuld schone’ (Auchinleck, 1145). While recalling romance perceptions of marriage as detrimental to chivalric reputation,7 See Neil Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage: Literary Approaches, 1100–1300 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), p. 102. her words also focus specifically upon ‘manschip’, indicating this romance’s particular interest in chivalric masculinity. Felice’s final command might seem extreme, as Guy indicates when he initially despairs of ever achieving it, as well as when he blames her for the death of his knights while pursuing her condition.8 See Auchinleck and Caius, lines 1555–66, and CUL, lines 1155–60. The British Library Gui does not blame Felice for the knights’ deaths, but the Corpus Christi Gui does. Scenes like this may prime the reader for the reversal of priorities in the second half of the romance. However, the point seems to be that Guy is capable of achieving this condition, and this seems to justify Felice’s demand. In Guy of Warwick, the proud lady and her resistance to love act as a catalyst for the creation of chivalric masculinity, illustrating the more conservative function this motif can serve.
The way that Felice’s romantic a(nti)pathy motivates Guy’s prowess is particularly important because this enables him to compensate for his lower status. His achievements prove him to be a worthy and valuable partner for Felice, and her subsequent acceptance of him thus indicates the value placed upon chivalric reputation in assessing romantic or marital offers. In this respect, Felice’s resistance to love and deferral of marriage align with dynastic and masculine priorities and may function as a form of dangier by creating a space in which she can negotiate the terms of their partnership. This all contributes to the less subversive representation of romantic a(nti)pathy in this work. Indeed, Felice’s role to some extent overlaps with the figure of the ‘actively desiring heiress’ in that they both facilitate fantasies of social advancement, though their relationship to desire is different: Felice eventually responds to Guy’s desire but does not initiate their romantic connection.9 Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 223; on these fantasies, see p. 225. Felice’s conditions also support her family’s priorities: her father, Rohaud, belatedly concerns himself with his dynasty in the CUL manuscript, telling Felice
Hyt were tyme, þou toke an husbonde
Aftur my day to kepe my londe.10 CUL, lines 7015–16. Caius, but not Auchinleck, alludes to dynastic priorities, as Rohaud reminds Felice ‘thou art heire to all my londe’ (line 7340), but the CUL reference is the most explicit.
The ability to ‘kepe my londe’, a quality the proud ladies are often urged to seek in their potential partners, is exactly what Guy’s supreme prowess proves him capable of doing.11 This also offers the ‘reassuring colouring’ Cooper argues frequently accompanies social climbing in medieval romance: The English Romance in Time, p. 225. Dynastic concerns of this kind may have been particularly significant within some of the reading contexts for the Guy of Warwick narratives. Although the concept of ‘ancestral romance’ is questionable, particularly in relation to Guy, which circulated widely, Marianne Ailes notes that the Earls of Warwick ‘did “adopt” Gui early on’.12 Marianne Ailes, ‘Gui de Warewic in its Manuscript Context’, in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, pp. 12–26 (p. 25; see pp. 23–4 for a discussion of the problems with ‘ancestral romance’). The Beauchamps of Warwick and their circle have been tentatively associated with a number of Guy of Warwick texts, including the Caius and CUL versions of the Middle English Guy.13 See Wiggins, ‘Manuscripts and Texts’, pp. 75–6, 64; Martha W. Driver, ‘“In her owne persone semly and bewteus”: Representing Women in Stories of Guy of Warwick’, in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, pp. 133–53 (p. 139). On the Beauchamps’ connections with other Guy of Warwick texts, see A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Speculum Guy de Warwick and Lydgate’s Guy of Warwick: The Non-Romance Middle English Tradition’, in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, pp. 81–93 (pp. 87–8); John Frankis, ‘Taste and Patronage in Late Medieval England as Reflected in Versions of Guy of Warwick’, Medium Ævum, 66.1 (1997), 80–93 (pp. 84, 88–9); Driver, ‘Representing Women in Stories of Guy of Warwick’, pp. 136–9; Ailes, ‘Gui de Warewic in its Manuscript Context’, p. 25. Alison Wiggins notes the dynastic concerns faced by the Beauchamps in the fifteenth century, suggesting that the Rous Rolls and Beauchamp Pageants
should almost certainly be seen in the context of the struggles of Anne Beauchamp […] to regain her rightful inheritances. From the death of her husband at Barnet in 1471 almost up until the restoration of her estates in 1487, Anne was excluded from her possessions and ‘kept’ by her son-in-law, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. During this period she wrote numerous letters appealing for the restoration of her rightful inheritances.14 Wiggins, ‘Manuscripts and Texts’, p. 76 n. 46.
If CUL Ff.2.38 (dated to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century) was produced within the Beauchamp circle, as Martha Driver suggests, its particular concern with marrying well ‘to kepe my londe’ (7016) may have been especially poignant, and seemed especially prudent, in this context.15 Wiggins suggests a late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century date, while Johnston argues for the last quarter of the fifteenth century: see Wiggins, ‘Manuscripts and Texts’, p. 64; Michael Johnston, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 120. Johnston does not link this manuscript to the Beauchamp circle, however: he associates it with mercantile readers and suggests it may have been produced on a commercial basis for a patron in the Leicestershire area: ‘Two Leicestershire Romance Codices: Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38 and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 15 (2012), 85–100 (pp. 88–9). Felice’s initial resistance to loving Guy, and the way it motivates his prowess and social advancement, serves dynastic interests as well as the couple’s own desires: romance unites individual fantasy with familial preoccupations here.
However, this alignment can also serve more subversive purposes, as adherence to convention at times seems to become merely a gesture of compliance that belies the real operations of agency and power. The arrangement of Felice’s marriage in particular anticipates the more subversive manifestations of the proud lady in later Middle English romances, whose autonomy sometimes challenges male rule. It is Rohaud who eventually offers Guy Felice’s hand and the Warwickshire lands, a conventional marriage agreement that seems to accord with Rachel Moss’s description of elite marriage as negotiated ‘not between a man and a woman, but between two men’.16 Rachel E. Moss, Fatherhood and its Representations in Middle English Texts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), p. 124. However, Rohaud’s apparent significance is undermined by the reader’s knowledge of Guy and Felice’s prior relationship. The CUL Guy reflects particularly ironically upon Rohaud’s role, as he declares
Now wote y […] full well,
That ye loue me, be seynt Mychell,
That ye wyll my doghtur take.17 CUL, lines 7073–5. The British Library Gui offers a similar emphasis to the CUL Guy: Gui de Warewic, ed. by Ewert, ii, lines 7517–19; trans. by Weiss, p. 179.
Rohaud’s emphasis on Guy’s love for him and his impression that he has arranged the marriage belies the fact that it is Felice, not Rohaud, who has negotiated with Guy. Felice’s active negotiating role and the sidelining of this role in the formal marriage agreement thus align with Amy Vines’s argument that in late medieval romance, ‘despite the heroines’ show of silence and submissiveness, the audience is always aware of the actual circumstances of their behavior’.18 Amy N. Vines, Women’s Power in Late Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), p. 6. But Guy of Warwick takes the implications of this further, as the exposure of Rohaud’s control as a façade raises questions about fathers’ typical roles in arranging marriages. The subtle comedy of Rohaud assuming his own pre-eminence asks whether fathers ought to be so sure of their control over their daughters’ relationships, and whether homosocial bonds are really more important than romantic love, hinting that women may be more actively involved in the marriage process than their fathers might realise. The romance treats this possibility as comic rather than threatening – all parties are, after all, satisfied with the arrangement. But the discrepancy between Rohaud’s knowledge, Felice’s, and the reader’s highlights the subversive possibilities of her role, even as she appears to conform to tradition.
Felice asserts her power in her interactions with Guy, shaping his identity through her conditions: she tells him he will ‘haue þe loue of me, / Ȝif þow be swiche as y telle þe’ (Auchinleck, 673–4; my emphasis). Far from a ‘courted nonentit[y]’ who plays an ‘essentially marginal role in the hero’s life’, Felice constructs Guy’s chivalric reputation and actively negotiates her relationship with him.19 Judith Weiss, ‘The wooing woman in Anglo-Norman romance’, in Romance in Medieval England, ed. by Maldwyn Mills, Jennifer Fellows, and Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), pp. 149–61 (p. 150); Geraldine Barnes, Counsel and Strategy in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), p. 75. As the second half of Guy of Warwick shifts into a penitential mode, the initial celebration of Guy’s secular prowess and, correspondingly, Felice’s role in motivating this is called into question, as Guy himself now rejects romantic love and marriage as part of a renunciation of worldliness. However, Felice still has a role in the latter half of the romance, not only providing Guy with a son and heir, but performing her own pious and moral acts. Felice serves the most socially conservative function of the proud ladies in Middle English romance, and is accordingly the most positively presented, but her agency also anticipates the more subversive functions of the proud lady in love in later narratives.
 
1      Guy of Warwick survives in five independent redactions in Middle English, across three manuscripts and two sets of fragments. I focus here on the most extensive versions: Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ MS 19.2.1 (the Auchinleck manuscript); Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 107; Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.2.38 (henceforth CUL). I generally cite the Auchinleck version first and foremost, following most other commentators and the manuscript’s earlier date. For a full discussion see Alison Wiggins, ‘The Manuscripts and Texts of the Middle English Guy of Warwick’, in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, ed. by Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), pp. 61–80. All citations of the Auchinleck and Caius manuscripts are from The Romance of Guy of Warwick: The First or Fourteenth-Century Version, ed. by Julius Zupitza, EETS, e. s., 42, 49, 59 (London: Paul, Trench, and Trübner, 1883), though the Caius manuscript has now been dated to the late fifteenth rather than the fourteenth century (see Wiggins, cited above). All citations of the CUL manuscript are from The Romance of Guy of Warwick: The Second or Fifteenth-Century Version, ed. by Julius Zupitza, EETS, e. s., 25–6 (London: Trübner, 1875).  »
2      In the early sections of Guy of Warwick their relationship is referred to primarily in terms of love and/or sex, and Felice seems to see Guy’s initial advances as sexually motivated rather than as seeking marriage. In Auchinleck, Guy and Felice start to refer to their relationship in terms of marriage only in the stanzaic Guy. This begins after 7306 lines of the couplet Guy; the texts are probably by different authors, and were pieced together in the compilation of the manuscript: see Alison Wiggins, ‘Imagining the Compiler: Guy of Warwick and the Compilation of the Auchinleck Manuscript’, in Imagining the Book, ed. by Stephen Kelly and John J. Thompson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 61–73. In Caius the only references to marriage come after Felice’s father enquires about her marital plans, lines 7339–44. In CUL, this shift occurs much earlier, as Felice announces her plan to become Guy’s wife only if he proves himself the best knight in the world at lines 807–20.  »
3      See, for example, Robert Allen Rouse, ‘An Exemplary Life: Guy of Warwick as Medieval Culture-Hero’, in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, pp. 94–109 (pp. 102–4); Paul Price, ‘Confessions of a Godless Killer: Guy of Warwick and Comprehensive Entertainment’, in Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, ed. by Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows, and Morgan Dickson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 93–110.  »
4      See Cathy Hume, Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), p. 16; Noël James Menuge, ‘The Wardship Romance: A New Methodology’, in Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. by Rosalind Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 29–43 (p. 37). This concern is often discussed in relation to the Paston family’s dissatisfaction with Margery Paston’s clandestine marriage to Richard Calle, the family’s bailiff: see Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Norman Davis, EETS, s. s., 20, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; first publ. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), i, 341–3 (letter 203), 409 (letter 245), 541–2 (letter 332). See the further discussion of social status and resistance to love in Chapter 3.  »
5      Gui de Warewic: roman du XIIIe siècle, ed. by Alfred Ewert, Classiques français du moyen âge, 74, 2 vols (Paris: Champion, 1933), i, line 69; trans. in ‘Gui de Warewic’, in ‘Boeve de Haumtone’ and ‘Gui de Warewic’: Two Anglo-Norman Romances, ed. & trans. by Judith Weiss, FRETS, 3 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), pp. 97–243 (p. 98). I generally refer to Ewert’s edition and Weiss’s translation of the Anglo-Norman Gui, both based on London, British Library, MS Additional 38662. Although Ivana Djordević argues that it is reductive to focus only on the Anglo-Norman Gui in Ewert’s edition, she acknowledges that the other versions are largely inaccessible: see Ivana Djordjević, ‘Guy of Warwick as a Translation’, in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, pp. 27–43 (pp. 29, 36). Parts of Gui de Warewic from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 50, however, are included in The Fourteenth-Century Guy of Warwick, where Zupitza supplies it in place of Auchinleck’s missing leaf: line 93 includes the reference to Felice’s ‘fere de corage’.  »
6      Neither the Middle English Dictionary or Peggy Knapp include ‘pride’ as a meaning of ‘corage’ (of the meanings they list, ‘heart’ seems the only one potentially appropriate to Felice), but the OED does: ‘Corāǧe n.’, Middle English Dictionary, ed. by Frances McSparran et al., Middle English Compendium (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2000–18) <https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED9682> [accessed 19 July 2023]; Peggy Knapp, ‘Corage/Courage’, in Time-Bound Words: Semantic and Social Economies from Chaucer’s England to Shakespeare’s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 13–27; 3. c., ‘Courage, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary, ed. by Michael Proffitt et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) <https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/43146> [accessed 27 May 2023]. »
7      See Neil Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage: Literary Approaches, 1100–1300 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), p. 102. »
8      See Auchinleck and Caius, lines 1555–66, and CUL, lines 1155–60. The British Library Gui does not blame Felice for the knights’ deaths, but the Corpus Christi Gui does. Scenes like this may prime the reader for the reversal of priorities in the second half of the romance.  »
9      Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 223; on these fantasies, see p. 225.  »
10      CUL, lines 7015–16. Caius, but not Auchinleck, alludes to dynastic priorities, as Rohaud reminds Felice ‘thou art heire to all my londe’ (line 7340), but the CUL reference is the most explicit. »
11      This also offers the ‘reassuring colouring’ Cooper argues frequently accompanies social climbing in medieval romance: The English Romance in Time, p. 225. »
12      Marianne Ailes, ‘Gui de Warewic in its Manuscript Context’, in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, pp. 12–26 (p. 25; see pp. 23–4 for a discussion of the problems with ‘ancestral romance’).  »
13      See Wiggins, ‘Manuscripts and Texts’, pp. 75–6, 64; Martha W. Driver, ‘“In her owne persone semly and bewteus”: Representing Women in Stories of Guy of Warwick’, in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, pp. 133–53 (p. 139). On the Beauchamps’ connections with other Guy of Warwick texts, see A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Speculum Guy de Warwick and Lydgate’s Guy of Warwick: The Non-Romance Middle English Tradition’, in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, pp. 81–93 (pp. 87–8); John Frankis, ‘Taste and Patronage in Late Medieval England as Reflected in Versions of Guy of Warwick’, Medium Ævum, 66.1 (1997), 80–93 (pp. 84, 88–9); Driver, ‘Representing Women in Stories of Guy of Warwick’, pp. 136–9; Ailes, ‘Gui de Warewic in its Manuscript Context’, p. 25. »
14      Wiggins, ‘Manuscripts and Texts’, p. 76 n. 46. »
15      Wiggins suggests a late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century date, while Johnston argues for the last quarter of the fifteenth century: see Wiggins, ‘Manuscripts and Texts’, p. 64; Michael Johnston, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 120. Johnston does not link this manuscript to the Beauchamp circle, however: he associates it with mercantile readers and suggests it may have been produced on a commercial basis for a patron in the Leicestershire area: ‘Two Leicestershire Romance Codices: Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38 and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 15 (2012), 85–100 (pp. 88–9). »
16      Rachel E. Moss, Fatherhood and its Representations in Middle English Texts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), p. 124. »
17      CUL, lines 7073–5. The British Library Gui offers a similar emphasis to the CUL Guy: Gui de Warewic, ed. by Ewert, ii, lines 7517–19; trans. by Weiss, p. 179. »
18      Amy N. Vines, Women’s Power in Late Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), p. 6.  »
19      Judith Weiss, ‘The wooing woman in Anglo-Norman romance’, in Romance in Medieval England, ed. by Maldwyn Mills, Jennifer Fellows, and Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), pp. 149–61 (p. 150); Geraldine Barnes, Counsel and Strategy in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), p. 75. »