While some medieval vernacular prologues have been studied intensively in relation to the narratives they introduce, the general characteristics of the prologue have not received the attention they deserve. This study surveys seventy-one epic prologues and fifty-eight romance prologues from the eleventh to the fourteenth century. It shows that, by virtue of consistency in structure, discursive modes, position, and function in the epic and romance, the prologue is an independent genre that occurs in an accompanying function. Within the prologue genre, we distinguish epic and romance registers containing generically specific motifs such as appeals to the audience in the epic prologue and sententia treating the theory of translatio sapientiae in the romance prologue.
These prologues represent performance and diffusion, composition and sources, subject matter and moral worth. The prologues of each genre, moreover, provide us with complementary but distinctive representations. The epic prologue represents it as a song that is performed before an audience and that concerns the exploits of a heroic member of a noble family, whose story appeals to the audience's collective memory. In contrast, the romance prologue depicts it as a written composition by a specific author based on written sources that is diffused and a written text as well as by reading aloud. Variations specific to romance include the themes of history or estoire, accounts of individual heroes, demonstrations of artistic virtuosity and instruction to lovers: all are represented as morally improving their audience.
Furthermore, studying these prologues allows us to observe the consequences of the process I call romancing--the writing down of vernacular narrative in a romance tongue, ie., French and Anglo-French: the gradual assimilation of motifs of the epic prologue to those of romance; the increasing importance of representation of both epic and romance as books. Thus, a comparative study of epic and romance prologues offers a chronicle of representations of vernacular narrative that takes us from images of oral composition and diffusion to oral diffusion based on written composition and finally to representation and reception of written texts as books.