High and late medieval narrative (1100–1500) is, like contemporaneous lyric poetry, European literature in the strong sense—in the sense of sharing a set of common forms and themes, deriving from the Romance literatures, that are the result not merely of similar responses to structurally homologous cultural milieus, as with medieval epic, but also of pervasive cross-regional and cross-linguistic literary interaction. Even more than in lyric, Romance-language narrative of the time achieves its influential status by appropriation of the themes and forms of Asian literature (Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic). These issues can be investigated by successively considering three narrative genres of the period—romance, allegory (especially Langland), and the frame-tale collection (especially Boccaccio). Langland’s poem reveals the clash between religious orthodoxy and popular reception. Boccaccio’s fiction is crucial to the development of the European novel.