section_path: Renaissance period: 1500–1700/Heroic romances
section_name: Heroic romances
paragraph_text: Heroic romances
  
  Heroic Romance is a genre of imaginative literature, which flourished in the 17th century, principally in France.
  
  The beginnings of modern fiction in France took a pseudo- bucolic form, and the celebrated L'Astrée, (1610) of Honore d'Urfe (1568–1625), which is the earliest French novel, is properly styled a pastoral. Although its action was, in the main, languid and sentimental, there was a side of the Astree which encouraged that extravagant love of glory, that spirit of " panache", which was now rising to its height in France. That spirit it was which animated Marin le Roy de Gomberville (1603–1674), who was the inventor of what have since been known as the Heroical Romances. In these there was experienced a violent recrudescence of the old medieval elements of romance, the impossible valour devoted to a pursuit of the impossible beauty, but the whole clothed in the language and feeling and atmosphere of the age in which the books were written. In order to give point to the chivalrous actions of the heroes, it was always hinted that they were well-known public characters of the day in a romantic disguise.