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  • Romance and Rhetoric: Essays in Honour of Dhira B. Mahoney ed. by Georgiana Donavin and Anita Obermeier
  • Brenda Deen Schildgen
Romance and Rhetoric: Essays in Honour of Dhira B. Mahoney. Edited by Georgiana Donavin and Anita Obermeier. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. EUR 70.

Festschrifts always pose difficulties for editors because the person who inspired the essays was often so generous in his or her encouragement to younger scholars that the topics they explore range broadly. A product of intellectual and cultural experience on three continents, Dhira B. Mahoney’s own work focuses on Malory and Arthuriana, the subject of her PhD dissertation at UC Santa Barbara (1974); on rhetoric, a result of her work in Composition at her home institution, Arizona State University; and on Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan, and the rhetoric of prologues and epilogues. She has taught across the spectrum of the English canon with special attention to Old English, Middle English, the history of the language, and literary studies that include feminist, postcolonial, and rhetorical approaches to medieval literature. This collection of thirteen essays in her honor reflects both the inspiration of Mahoney’s career dedicated to medieval English literature and the results of her encouragement. The range of subjects treated demonstrates ongoing interest in her favorite topics and how her mentorship has spurred new avenues of inquiry.

The introduction, written by the editors Georgiana Donavin and Anita Obermeier, provides an overview of Dhira Mahoney’s career, from her birth in India to her BA and MA in English at Oxford, then to her PhD, also in English, at UC Santa Barbara. An award-winning teacher, Mahoney has been unstinting in her generosity to professional duties, having served as an officer in the International Courtly Literary Society and the Medieval Association of the Pacific, of which she was President from 2000–2002. She has served on the board of many journals, including Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, Arthuriana, and ACMRS. The introduction then provides an overview of Mahoney’s publications, including her edited volume on the Grail cycle, many essays on Malory, and later work on [End Page 380] women writers such as Margery Kempe and Christine de Pizan. Work on the Grail culminated with The Grail: A Casebook (2000), which, according to the editors, is Mahoney’s best-known work.

The essays in the volume are divided into four sections, inspired by Mahoney’s specific areas of interest. These are titled “Prologues and Pictures,” “Women and Rhetoric,” “Lyric, Song, and Audience,” and “Arthurian Literature: Composition and Production.”

“Prologues and Pictures” includes Ann Dobyns’s “Exemplars of Chivalry: Rhetoric and Ethics in Middle English Romance,” which discusses the Thornton Manuscript. Dobyns argues that this collection of histories, romances, and religious and medical works compiled for a gentry family provided both edification and entertainment. Maria Dobozy’s “Jans der Enikel’s Prologue as a Guide to Textual Multiplicity” examines the prologue of a German world chronicle to support an argument for the powerful role of patrons and workshops in the production of this text. Corine Schleif’s “Gifts and Givers that Keep on Giving: Pictured Presentations in Early Medieval Manuscripts” examines how texts use images to recognize a donor, but it is also an encomium to Dhira Mahoney for what Schleif calls “the most important form of gift that one scholar can give to another” (p. 51), that is, reading his or her work.

In “Women and Rhetoric,” the second section, Georgiana Donavin’s essay examines John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, while Elizabeth Archibald and Rosalynn Voaden take up Margery Kempe. Archibald’s essay argues that Christine de Pizan and Margery Kempe are “Sisters under the Skin,” whereas Voaden posits that Kempe was an “underground preacher.”

The third section, “Lyric, Song, and Audience,” clearly an effort to pull some differing strands together, includes Phyllis Brown’s “Rhetoric and Reception: Guillaume de Machaut’s ‘Je Maudi.’” This essay ranges across a vast array of fourteenth-century vernacular literature that Brown considers in light of contemporary comparative literature studies. Applying and intelligently correcting Pascale Casanova’s ideas from The World Republic of Letters and taking into consideration a long rhetorical history of “curse poetry,” Brown...

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