As I shuffle through history, I've found various meaning applied to these words that aren't anything to do with out modern conception of 'romance' as a catch-all for love. The most obvious examples I know of are Romance languages/cultures; the romances which preempted the novel and some writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, continued to categorise their long prose stories as; and the 18th-century romantic movement. With the last one particularly I've confused some friends thinking I mean lovey-dovey poetry or music, when really I mean tiger-tiger-burning-bright, in-Xanadu-did-Kubla-Kahn, or Beethoven-y stuff. While I can see a direct line from the heightened emotions of romanticism and the fantastical nature of medieval romances, I'm interested as to when we started using romance as we do today — and what people would've called our broad ideas of romance/romantic before then?