A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance (review)

Cory Rushton closes this interesting volume by observing that "the journey of the popular romance has been from the center to the margins and then back again" (179). In so doing he exemplifies much of what is striking about the book; above all, its literary-historiographical self-consciousness. In recent decades, the study of medieval "popular" romance has expanded apace: as Rosalind Field notes in the opening to her chapter, more than twenty years ago Derek Brewer was moved to comment on the dramatic "explosion of interest" in the anonymous romance (9). This volume thus makes appropriately frequent reference to the collections of Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert (The Spirit of Medieval Popular Romance, 2000) and Nicola McDonald (Pulp Fictions of Medieval England, 2004), and to the numerous books (published in the same series as the present volume) that have come from the biennial "Medieval Romance" conference, now in its twelfth iteration. This conference itself has done a great deal to expand the field, with an explicit focus on insular, non-Arthurian romance, in both English and the French of England. That being so, it is fascinating to note the degree to which the subject still carries the burden of prior scholarly dismissal; almost all contributors to this volume spend at least a few hundred words clearing the ground for their arguments, and Derek Pearsall is more than once made to pay the price for expressing earlier prevailing views in the most memorable and distinctive manner. What makes this such a meaty problem is the relative lack of disagreement between the two scholarly positions adumbrated: when Radulescu and Rushton state in their introduction that "our effort to redeem medieval popular romance forms an integral part of the modern project of recuperating 'medieval popular culture'" (3), they make no controversial claims for the literary or aesthetic merit of the texts under consideration; instead, as others have done, they shift the grounds of interpretation to the historicist and theoretical fields. This is effectively a volume about medieval popular romance and the twenty-first-century academy's approaches to it; with that in mind, some readers will be more troubled than others by the implications of the observation that "scholars of medieval popular romance continue to unearth attitudes and behaviours that are not always completely articulated in these texts and indeed not always acknowledged even as a possibility" (4).

Definition of the texts (and characteristics) that constitute the genre is another area of self-consciousness, though there is little dispute about the nature of our shared uncertainties in clarifying both "romance" and "popular" (not to mention "medieval"). The editors offer a usefully brief summation, that "in this Companion we define 'popular romance' as those texts in Middle English, sometimes with origins in Anglo-Norman versions, which show a predominant concern with narrative at the expense of symbolic meaning" (7). One suspects (sympathetically) that this formulation may have been redrafted more than once; other contributors in turn define their field in different ways, although the overall effect is complementary and reinforcing rather than conflicting. The near-absence of insular French texts is, however, something of a shame, and perhaps chiefly an inheritance from that earlier scholarship the volume is so keen to overturn, which regarded literature in English as necessarily for an unsophisticated audience, inherently "popular" in contrast with the "courtliness" of French. Rosalind Field, who has of course done so much to create and advance the study of insular French romance, is given the opportunity to demonstrate (in typically impressive and convincing fashion) that Anglo-Norman romance can be "popular" too, deploying the narratives of Boeve/Bevis and Gui/Guy to illustrate "the translation of popular romance from one vernacular into popular romance in another" (15). However, this insight is rather lost to view in the remainder of the volume, or reduced to a token gesture toward "their Old French predecessors" (97), and in turn it illuminates the inherent difficulty of defining the genre...