Abstract: To this day, there is no consensus as to the social background of the fourteenth-century French epics. Comparing the fourteenth-century re-writing of Renaut de Montauban with its late twelfth-century counterpart, this paper will demonstrate the growing importance of cities, burghers, and money, but will also show how a new idea of the castle emerged that seemed to belong more to the world of literature and myth than to reality, and which might also have been grounded in an urban context.
