Ipomadon

Medieval huntsman.
'Ipomadon's favourite pursuit was hunting, and to see his greyhounds run. He would not listen to stories of chivalry and this troubled the 'Proud' very much.'
Medieval knight with a boy holding his horse.
'Jason, greet your lady for me and tell her that you have spoken to me when I was a white knight, and now a red knight—for I cannot stay.'

Ipomadon is a Middle English translation of Hugh of Rhuddlan's Anglo-Norman romance Ipomedon composed in tail-rhyme verse, possibly in the last decade of the fourteenth century.[1] It is one of three Middle English renditions of Hugh's work: the other two are a shorter verse Lyfe of Ipomydon and the prose Ipomedon, both of the fifteenth century.[2] Each version is derived independently from the Anglo-Norman Ipomedon, which Hugh wrote 'not long after 1180', possibly in Herefordshire.[3] It is included in a list of the popular English romances by Richard Hyrde in the 1520s.[4]

The earliest Middle English version is found uniquely in MS Chetham 8009 (Manchester), probably composed in West Yorkshire in the north of England.[5] The tale of Ipomadon is "packed with elaborate description and detail"[6] and follows the adventures of a young knight, Ipomadon, who has a passion for hunting and who chooses to hide his identity from the lady he loves for much of the romance, culminating at the end of the tale in a scene where the hero, having defeated a knight in battle, then claims for a while to be the very knight he has defeated.[7]

  1. ^ Ousby, Ian. 1993, reprinted 2003. The Cambridge guide to literature in English. Cambridge University Press, p 474
  2. ^ Purdie, Rhiannon. 2001. Ipomadon. Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society.
  3. ^ Purdie, Rhiannon. 2001. p lxi.
  4. ^ Sanzhez-Mardi, Jordi. 2004. Reading romance in late medieval England: the case of the Middle English Ipomedon. In: Philological Quarterly. Winter 2004.
  5. ^ Purdie, Rhiannon. 2001. p xi.
  6. ^ Ousby, Ian. 1993, reprinted 2003, p 474.
  7. ^ Purdie, Rhiannon. 2001.