Arthur of England: English Attitudes to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (review)

142 Reviews Dean, C , Arthur of England: English Attitudes to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Toronto, University of Toronto P., 1987; pp. xii, 229; R.R.P. C A N $28.50, £17.50. A straightforward prefatory declaration of intention 'to determine how Arthur was regarded in the medieval and Renaissance periods' confirms the sober tide. However, this study claims originality in that it abandons deprecation of the strange neglect of the topic in hand and proposes instead that it has been accorded an exaggerated importance since 'most of the writers in the medieval and Renaissance periods paid no attention to Arthur at all'. Before proceeding to examine the treatment of Arthur in vernacular literary texts, Dean considers his role in medieval and Renaissance historical writing, in folklore and in the documentation of the codes of chivalry, to which he affords a cultural dominance'second only to the teachings of the church'. The evidence presented in this chapter is likely to catch the interest of those already familiar with the approach. Much of the material found in Chapters One ('Arthur and the Historians') and Three ('Arthur and the C o m m o n Folk') and its conclusion that Arthur had no place at all in chivalric theory and no dominant place in events of public spectacle such as tournaments may be a valuable corrective for those who have, in fact, been led by the romances to believe that Arthur was 'the daily model of chivalry'. One wonders, however, who does believe this; that is, for w h o m is this study intended. Writers of popular fiction and popularisers of twilight areas of anthropology and history are unlikely to be converted by this dose of sobriety, although one suspects that it is they who are responsible for generating the overemphasis on Arthur that Dean sets out to deflate, even while paradoxically contributing to it himself by phrases such as, 'his tremendous resurgence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' (p. 170). Serious Arthurian scholars, while grateful for the labour which has set Arthurian references in context and for the clarity of the writing, are unlikely to feel that their attitudes must be radically revised and may sometimes be exasperated by a tendency to set up straw adversaries. If, for instance, manuals of Middle English literature have their inevitable chapter on Arthurian romance, it is because that is a convenient generic term for a group of texts that in practice constitute a major element in medieval English fiction, not because they wish to suggest that Arthur is the major character thereof (p. 90). Sometimes, too, counter opinions seem unwarrantably neglected. In presenting Geoffrey of Monmouth as the prime instigator of Arthurmania when he created Arthur as his principal hero in accord with Norman fascination with the lives of great men rather than working to the Benedictine historiographical principle of demonstrating the workings of God's purpose, Dean cites Hannan's 1966 study Reviews 143 but ignores Leckie's more recent argument of 1981 for a reading of the latter kind in The Passage of Dominion. Jennifer Strauss Department of EngUsh Monash University DeWindt, E. B., ed., The Liber Gersumarum of Ramsey Abbey: A Calendar and Index ofB. L. Harley MS. 445 (Subsidia mediaevalia, 7), Toronto, P.I.M.S., 1976; pp. 455; 2 plates; R.R.P. C A N . $45.00. The reviewing of a calendar is not an enviable task. Ideally, in order to make a judgement as to the accuracy of the contents, the reviewer should take random entries and check them against the original manuscript. Since this is not possible in the present context the general accuracy of the material has to be accepted as read, although it should be pointed out that in n. 5 there are two errors of transcription from the plate facing p. 22: there is no in posterum after Et non licebit three lines from the end, nor does Thomam appear in parentheses in the original. The plate itself, incidentally, relates to entries 12 and 13, and not 13 and 14. Attention, therefore, needs to be turned to the author's...