'Myne owne aduenture': Stephen Hawes and Medieval Romance

Stephen Hawes’s fusion of chivalric romance and personification allegory has long been recognized as his chief claim to originality in English literary history. The generic fusions of his work, however, have often led him to be viewed merely as a distant precur-sor to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene rather than as an innovative poet in his own right. This article resituates Hawes’s poetic originality in its early Tudor contexts and brings his poetry back into conversation with the metrical romances, devotional trea-tises, and dreams of spiritual warfare that shaped his creative aspirations.