Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts (review)

Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts is an edited collection of thirteen essays developed from the 2008 conference “Romance in Medieval Britain” at the University of St. Andrews. Its focus on Anglo-Norman, English, and Scottish romances is geopolitical rather than linguistic, highlighting the importance of literary, cultural, and historical contexts in our readings of texts from the Middle English Song of Roland to The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour. In their introduction, editors Purdie and Cichon describe the interplay between the genre of romance and the plurality of contexts as a “two-way process: the romances studied here are illuminated by the various contexts in which the volume’s contributors set them, but so too are those contexts enriched and altered by romance’s interaction with them” (1).

The first, most challenging essay, Derek Pearsall’s “The Pleasure of Popular Romance: A Prefatory Essay,” provides the modern context for reading medieval literature. Pearsall examines, briefly, how criticism has altered since his own (now-classic) “The Development of Medieval Romance”: medieval context matters now more than ever, as formal criticism and “aesthetic valuation” have fallen by the wayside. In this essay, Pearsall resurrects valuation, focusing on the fast-paced narratives, familiar stories, and stock phrases that delighted medieval readers in order to remind us of the alterity of that pleasure. Pearsall’s dexterity at seamlessly weaving specific examples into a larger synthesis shines in this essay, and his conclusion provides a provocative challenge to restore aesthetics and formalism to our interpretations of medieval romances.

As Pearsall himself notes, Nicholas Perkins’s essay hints at how a return to formal criticism might be combined with the present preoccupations common among medievalists. “Ekphrasis and Narrative in Emaré and Sir Eglamour of Artois” combines his strong rhetorical analysis with an emphasis on material culture (or “thing theory”) to read the relationship between objects, people, and artwork in order to approach what he terms a “medieval imaginative materiality…whose inseparable affiliations with the tangible and the fictive challenge our notions of context” (60).

Indeed, the first six essays after Pearsall’s all rise to his challenge, blending strong close readings with relevant historical, cultural, and literary contexts. The first half of Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts ranges across medieval English, Scottish, and Anglo-Norman literature, focusing on proverbs and peasant speech (Michael Chicon and Nancy Mason Bradbury); the slippery generic distinctions between romance and chanson de geste for twelfth- and thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman texts (Marianne Ailes) and the importance of understanding not just French sources but also English contexts for the ME Song of Roland (Phillipa Hardman); and the subtle differences between the Old French and Middle English versions of Floris and Blanceflor (John A. Geck). Throughout, numerous concepts continue to arise: cross-Channel culture; the tricky judgment required of assessing the relevance of manuscript context, especially in miscellanies; and generic ambiguity are all touched on and developed by numerous essays.

But, as the introduction’s first line states, “No literature exists in a vacuum” (1). The second half of the book re-frames the relationship of romance and its contexts, from baptism to medicine, from travel narratives to genealogies, and from manuscripts to authorship. As Siobhain Bly Calkin states in her essay on baptisms in The King of Tars and Sir Ferumbras, “Although it is not particularly helpful to sift romance depictions of religious ceremonies for evidence about liturgical practice, it is intriguing to reverse the process and consider the ways in which romances engage the cultural ideas of their day” (105).

Judith Weiss does precisely that in her delightful chapter on “Medieval and Modern Views on Swooning,” as does Robert Rouse in his chapter on the use of space in medieval narratives, especially Guy of Warwick. Yin Liu’s examination of the English Rous Rolls reminds us of the “persistent feature of romance…[to adapt] to new contexts” as she examines the nebulous and frequently under-examined sub-genre of genealogies (159). Emily Wingfield’s essay on the Campbell of Genorchy family’s...