Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period ed. by Jon Whitman (review)

This ambitious volume considers the relationship between romance and history from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Cervantes. Its sixteen chapters give attention to medieval and early modern Latin, English, French, Italian, and Spanish texts, assembled under the guiding question of “what kinds of history … such texts evoke” (8). This organizing principle admits quite a bit of ambiguity. The idea of “history” not only varies within the romances under consideration, but also shifts across different critical approaches. Such methodological differences can make it difficult to track any one idea about history across the entire set of essays. But the variety is also valuable. History and historicism have often been invoked as shibboleths that separate medieval thought from that of the Renaissance or divide one critical approach from another. In using “history” instead as a unifying term, Whitman lends perspective on the relationship among the different “kinds of history” that emerge beneath different critical lenses.

To organize the volume, Whitman must invoke literary historical categories even as he brings preconceived models of history under scrutiny. Accordingly, he uses a self-consciously constructed scheme, borrowing Jehan Bodel’s “three matters” of Rome, Britain, and France, while modifying and supplementing them to suit the material (8). After the editor’s introduction (Part 1), Part 2 of the collection gathers two essays under the heading “The Matter of Rome (and Realms to the East): Approaches to Antiquity.” The first of these, Christopher Baswell’s “Fearful Histories,” describes the fraught, often unsuccessful efforts of Alexander romances to use architectural structures to contain and control threats to linear history. The second, by Catherine Croizy-Naquet, considers how the prose Roman de Troie and the poetic Faits des Romains use literary techniques to establish their historical perspectives. She proposes that, whereas the former aims for “sober and unadorned prose,” the latter uses imaginative techniques to access the difference of the past (41). Both essays maintain that literature takes it upon itself to conceal and reveal different aspects of history, but Baswell and Croizy-Naquet differ on the extent to which they show the past pushing back against its literary container.

Part 3, “The Matter of Britain: Social and Spiritual Drives,” encompasses an extremely diverse range of texts and approaches. Robert W. Hanning’s essay shows cultural history transforming into literary history, exploring how Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account of King Arthur’s reign influences the “representation of socio-political and personal reality” in Chrétien de Troyes’s Cliges, Guillaume Le Clerc’s Fergus of Galloway, and the Mort le roi Artu (56). Particularly helpful is Hanning’s discussion of juvenes, young men driven by restless energy—and their literary evolution into chevaliers, motivated by love. Meanwhile, Adrian Stevens focuses on historical context: the political motivations of Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. The significance of “history” shifts as the volume continues. It emerges as an ideological construction in Friedrich Wolfzettel’s account of Grail legends, and as a quality of a text’s own aesthetics—its representation of character and causality—in Edward Donald Kennedy’s exploration of the conclusions of the prose Brut, Hardyng’s metrical Chronicle, and the Alliterative Mort Arthure. Helen Cooper concludes the section by considering the nature of an author’s immersion within literary history. She proposes that Malory’s Morte Darthur might be seen as the result of a deep, empathetic familiarity with Arthurian material that allowed Malory to “internaliz[e] it and recast it mentally” (132).

The second half of the volume focuses on questions of veracity, verisimilitude, and the creation of history. Part 4, entitled “The Matters of France and Italy: Acts of Recollection and Invention,” begins with a piece by Jean-Pierre Martin on the construction and use of the past in the chansons de geste. This is one of only a few essays in the volume to address not just history...