Sarah Clegg's argument is simple and devastating: the things critics say about romantasy today — trash, smut, making women stupid — are word-for-word what 14th-century clergymen said about medieval fairy romance. The criticism hasn't evolved in nine centuries. That's not a coincidence; it's a data point. Medieval romance originated in French courts in the late 1100s and spread with startling speed — not just across countries but down the social scale, reaching farm workers and impoverished nuns within decades. The content will be familiar to anyone who has read Sarah J Maas: crystal palaces, terrifyingly handsome fairy knights, unearthly splendour, and a great deal of sex. The 13th century had its shadow-daddies too. One romance author justified the whole enterprise by noting that writing about the real world brings 'grief and torment' — a sentence that could open any modern romantasy marketing pitch. The gender politics are the sharpest part of Clegg's case. Medieval romance was frequently written by women — Marie de France in the 12th century is the canonical example — and had a large, enthusiastic female audience that even Chaucer documented, not neutrally. The stories consistently flipped expected gender roles: powerful fairy queens rescuing distressed knights, not the other way around. Lanval, the 12th-century narrative poem Clegg cites, ends with the fairy queen riding off to her realm with the grateful knight seated behind her. The women were doing the saving. This wasn't accidental subversion; it was the genre's engine. The sexual freedom these stories provided was structurally important, not incidental. In a society that policed female desire through the logic of chastity, fairy sex operated as a loophole — it was generally accepted that it 'didn't quite count,' leaving mortal women technically still virgins. The coercive darker elements of fairy encounters served a similar function: the less consensual the scene, the less the woman could be blamed for wanting it. Clegg doesn't moralize about this; she maps it accurately. Modern romantasy's controversial darkness operates by the same mechanism, serving readers from more conservative backgrounds for whom the fantasy of being overwhelmed functions as guilt-release. Clegg is also careful not to overstate the genre's literary ambitions. She loves the 13th-century Claris and Laris — 'more than 30,000 lines of pure fairy nonsense' — with the affection of someone who knows exactly what it is and doesn't need it to be Dante. The point isn't that romantasy is secretly high literature. The point is that the vitriol directed at it has never been proportionate to its actual literary failings; it has always been proportionate to who enjoys it. George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones is stuffed with sex and receives no comparable contempt. The difference is audience. The book traces the decline of the form after the late 1500s to the changing nature of fairies themselves — shrinking into the flittering miniature creatures of Shakespearean afterthought, less plausible as lovers. But Shakespeare's Titania and Oberon come directly from the romance tradition, and Don Quixote is a romance parody (fairy-free, Clegg notes mournfully). The lineage persisted even as the form faded. What Clegg is really arguing is that modern romantasy isn't a new genre at all — it's a resumption, after a four-century interruption, of something that was working perfectly well before. The honest limitation here is that Perilous Enchantment is an argument-book rather than a survey. Clegg is making a case, not mapping a field, and the medieval texts she cites are chosen to support the thesis rather than complicate it. Readers wanting deep engagement with any single romance — Lanval, Guingamor, Claris and Laris — will need to go elsewhere. What Clegg delivers instead is the connective tissue: the cultural logic that makes the same genre keep reappearing, keep attracting the same audience, and keep receiving the same contemptuous dismissal from people who've skimmed it for the naughty bits.
