George Saintsbury’s Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory is the second volume in his series Periods of European Literature, covering the medieval period from roughly the twelfth to the fourteenth century. The book gives substantial attention to Old French literature — the chansons de geste, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the Roman de la Rose — as central works in the European literary tradition.
Saintsbury’s combination of broad coverage and confident critical opinion makes his surveys stimulating reading. Download this public-domain scholarly text as a free EPUB.