a because, in its art and literature, it turned to passion and adventure from the cool rationalism of the eighteenth century.
The third meaning of romance has no obvious connection to love stories or adventure. The Romance Languages are those languages that are of "Roman" origin, having evolved from Latin in the Middle Ages. They include French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, several other local languages or dialects, as well as Romanian. French has, indeed, connotations of "romance" to us, but Romanian scarcely does. In fact, the term romance was originally applied to the languages. In Charlemagne's day, around the year 800, romanice meant the everyday dialects from which the Romance languages derived, as opposed to classical Latin. By about the year 1100, this word had evolved to romanz.2 As a literary term, then, "romance" originally had nothing to do with subject matter or style. It simply meant writing done in the vernacular language, as opposed to Latin. Since Latin was the language of scholarship and the Church, the "romance" vernacular was used mainly for popular work intended to be read or sung to a general audience as entertainment. This popular work tended to be tales of love and of adventure: thus the modern English meanings of romance.
2L. T. Topsfield, Chretien de Troyes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 11. Today, popular writing tends to be somewhat differentiated by sex. Conan the Barbarian or techno adventure by Tom Clancy are presumed to appeal mainly to a male audience; "bodice rippers" and Danielle Steel novels mainly to a female audience. In "male oriented" adventures, women play a minimal part, and what twelve year old boys call "icky love stuff" appears scarcely at all. In "female oriented" romances, the heroine's love provides the main thread of the story. Movies intended for a mixed sex audience are more likely to combine elements of each.
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