Arthurian Romance in the Global Middle Ages

Arthurian romance is quintessentially a literature of mobility; not only a literature of the transportive and ephemeral nature of love, but also an apex of unnamed long-distance economic networks. These networks provided an understructure for the Arthurian corpus, one that reinforced an appetite for global luxury goods and that fuelled an economy of pleasure. While narrating the physical mobility of knights and the emotional mobility of the desire for, attainment and loss of love, Arthurian romance also celebrated and accelerated the exchange of prestige goods through the networks of the Global Middle Ages. The acquisition and ephemerality of material objects and literary motifs from diverse cultures links the local and imaginative spaces of Arthurian narratives with global commerce.