Romance -- no, not love. Apparently not theology, either.

On “Romance”

(It occurs to me that it would have made sense for me to do this on Valentine’s Day. Oh, well. My curiosity actually arose from my reading my World Religions textbook on Monday, however—I was reading in the chapter on Christianity about Schleiermacher and romantic theology. My driving question: how are all the various uses in contemporary English of “romance” and “romantic” related to one another?)

Let me trace the etymology of the word “romance”, with the help of the Oxford English Dictionary. The original, literal meaning of the word is: vernacular French (the language). This is as opposed to Latin (the non-vernacular). Presumably, this is because French—or at least the Latin of which it was at one point a dialect or offshoot (I’m not really a philologist so I’m not quite sure how this works)—was spoken in Rome, or associated with Romans. By extension, the term came to be applied to the whole group of languages descended from Latin.

So “romance” refers to a language, or a class of languages. What happens when you write a composition in that language? Well, then you have a “romance”. In particular, the OED informs us, a romance (by contrast with literary works in Latin, the non-vernacular) is “A tale in verse, embodying the adventures of some hero of chivalry, esp. of those of the great cycles of mediæval legend, and belonging both in matter and form to the ages of knighthood; also, in later use, a prose tale of a similar character.” I assume that this sort of literature was the most typical written in French, at least at one point in history. Le Morte d’Arthur comes to my mind here—a bit of a red herring, considering that (despite the title) this is actually a work of 15th century English literature (and, this is a prose work, not verse). I venture to guess that Mallory based this work, in part, off of older, French verses. So I suppose this gives us a good example of the “in later use” meaning.

A “romance” later becomes simply a novel; a prose work of fiction. (I think this is the meaning of the French roman?) OED tells us that a romance in this sense is more specifically, “A fictitious narrative in prose of which the scene and incidents are very remote from those of ordinary life; esp. one of the class prevalent in the 16th and 17th centuries, in which the story is often overlaid with long disquisitions and digressions.” Next, it says, a romance is “A romantic novel or narrative.” (Don’t you love it when dictionaries use inflected forms of a word to define that word? Actually, we can forgive OED here because it has already defined “romantic” non-circularly, i.e. earlier in the entry.) So, technically, a “romance” is a novel hearkening back to the “good-old days” of chivalry and knighthood, quests, and so on. “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, you surely realize, is therefore a romance film. I’m wondering if there could ever truly be such a thing as a feminist romance. (Of course, the proper response is, keep going in the entry for further evolutions of the meaning of the word [sorry, Julian, I mean the usage of the word, of course, and so throughout this post :-p].)

We’re at OED’s definition #4, now. A “romance” is “A Spanish historical ballad or short poem of a certain form.” This seems to make sense, given the extension of “romance” to refer to other Latin-derived languages than French, and the application of the term to verse in the appropriate language. (Why this form of Spanish verse is a “romance” and not others remains a mystery.) Now, the OED says something I find puzzling: “From Sp. romance, whence also F. romance.” Wait…unless I misunderstand the term “whence”, OED is claiming that the French word “romance” derives from the Spanish word “romance”. This seems odd to me, since the first meaning given in this entry meant the French language, specifically! Perhaps what this means is that “romance” began in French, to refer to French, was extended to certain types of French literature, was then borrowed by Spanish to refer to certain types of Spanish literature, and then borrowed back by French to refer to still more types of French literature. ?? Anyway, “a Spanish historical ballad” doesn’t seem implausibly far afield from our earlier definition, i.e. an Arthurian legend of chivalry (or some such).

This next definition is listed as 4b, which means it is closely related to the foregoing. “Mus. A short vocal or instrumental piece of a simple or informal character.” Is this because the Spanish ballads were set to a certain kind of music, which then became “romantic music”? (The 1881 Grove’s Dictionary of Music is cited here: “Romance, a term of very vague signification, answering in music to the same term in poetry, where the characteristics are rather those of personal sentiment and expression than of precise form.”) I suppose that’s where the writers of OED came up with the adjective “informal” to describe romantic music. (Sarah—how does this definition of romantic music strike you? There’s nothing else about music in the entry.)

Definition #5: (back to literature now), “That class of literature which consists of romances; romantic fiction. spec. a love story; that class of literature which consists of love stories.” Ah-ha! For the first time, romance is connected to love stories. (Presumably, our current understanding of “romantic” having to do with love comes from “romance” as a literary classification—having to do with language, form, and mythical-chivalrous content—happening (on occasion) to contain love stories as well.

Here’s 5b: “Romantic or imaginative character or quality; redolence or suggestion of, association with, the adventurous and chivalrous. spec. a love affair; idealistic character or quality in a love affair.” Perhaps this is what someone like Anne of Green Gables would mean by calling something “romantic”. (Something I’d like to know—can’t “tomboys” be romantic, or interested in romance, since they are [one on possible stereotype] interested in adventure rather than in playing lady to a knight?)

6. A “romance” can also be a lie, a fiction, a story, an untruth, a tall-tale, a false-hood, yes, a “whopper”. It helps if it is “picturesque”. Perhaps ordinary, un-extravagant, un-picturesque falsehoods wouldn’t qualify as romances. By the way, the parenthetical comment at the end of this entry made me blink a few times: “An extravagant fiction, invention, or story; a wild or wanton exaggeration; a picturesque falsehood. Also without article (cf. ROMAN CATHOLIC n. and a.).” Is there some suggestion here that Catholicism is “roman” or “romantic” because it is made-up or extravagantly false? No, silly! The point is merely that “romance”, meaning falsehood, can occur with or without the article, for linguistically related reasons to “Roman Catholic” occurring with or without the article.
Definition #7 is about “romance” making a contribution to various compound words.
Definition #8 is the last one in this entry, where it finally becomes an adjective (in the foregoing it has always been a noun): “Having the character or attributes associated with romance; chivalrous; romantic.” Notice again the close connection with chivalry, moreso than with love or romance in our common usage.

In all this, I haven’t had much help connecting “romance” to the Romanticism described by my World Religions book—i.e., post-Revolution French people’s longing to escape modern urban civilization and its corrupting influence, and to return to an idealized agrarian, village, family-oriented lifestyle—let alone to the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher. (BTW--When we say that Schleiermacher’s theology was romantic, we do not mean that he went about singing silly pop songs about being “in love” with Jesus, or “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend” songs, as is asserted by some to be a fashion of our own contemporaries.) Schleiermacher’s view was that emotion, not reason, was how people connect to God, and that religion is basically a “feeling of absolute dependence”. (Maybe some people would connect feeling absolutely dependent with a “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend” attitude—however, “absolute dependence” in my mind hardly characterizes a healthy romantic relationship, e.g. between husband and wife, lover and beloved).

Perhaps I’ll have to write a letter of complaint to the editors; the entry seems incomplete, and this is supposed to be an unabridged, definitive lexicon.
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"Make me a channel of Your Peace."

-St. Francis