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Reviewed by:
  • The Exploitations of Medieval Romance
  • Randy P. Schiff
The Exploitations of Medieval Romance. Edited by Laura Ashe, Ivana Djordjević, and Judith Weiss. Studies in Medieval Romance, 12. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010. Pp. x + 191. $105.

While medieval romance is notoriously difficult to define, most observers would agree that such works channel the desires of composers and audience alike. With a focus on exploitation drawn from the 2006 Romance in Medieval Britain conference at the University of York's Center for Medieval Studies (p. vii), Laura Ashe, Ivana Djordjević, and Judith Weiss have assembled engaging analyses of the cultural work of Insular and Continental romance. Meditating on what amounts to the uses of romance, the volume's theme is quite broad. The individual essays provide often stimulating analysis of Anglo-Norman, Old French, and Middle English romances, while the collection proves particularly valuable in the assessment of translation and adaptation across vernaculars. While some of the essays do not seem to this reviewer to exploit the full range of literary critical work on late-medieval romance, the authors make frequent and apt use of historical and textual criticism in producing this rewarding collection.

Two essays reflect on general questions regarding romance. In "Patterns of Availability and Demand in Middle English Translations de romanz," Rosalind Field offers a fascinating proposal for differentiating among modes of translation when classifying Middle English romances. Maintaining that much more Anglo-Norman material was available to medieval scribes and authors than is usually assumed, Field stresses that medieval Insular communities were profoundly bilingual. Field argues compellingly against visions of Middle English translation as operating across national or class divides, and proposes instead a model of translation as the "updating" of antecedent material for a newer Insular generation (p. 88). In her introduction to the volume, Laura Ashe asserts that, while self-conscious fiction-ality "re-emerged" in the West with twelfth-century romance, works in the genre nevertheless channel the "ideologies and identities" of their historical context (p. 1). Ashe analyzes Chrétien de Troyes's exploitation in Cligès of Insular romances' concern with legitimate lineage and proper kingship, along with his cultivation of a timeless Arthurian atmosphere that empties such received motifs of political meaning. Speculating that the "serious play with hybridity" in Cligès could support antihistoricist arguments that medieval romance is primarily self-referential (p. 8), Ashe proceeds to link the volume's essays with a project of using translations, analogues, and medieval commentary to illuminate the ways in which texts' meanings are grounded in "this world" (p. 8).

Two essays deal primarily with otherworldly forms of exploitation. In "The Fairies in the Fountain: Promiscuous Liaisons," Neil Cartlidge analyzes the fabliau Le Chevalier qui fist les cons parler as an explicit critique of the courtly pretensions and exploitative female sexuality of Marie de France's Lanval. Arguing that Chevalier and Lanval, along with the Lai de Graelent, share in a tradition of hypersexualized water fairies, Cartlidge contends that the fabliau's granting of speech to women's genitalia and anuses satirizes Lanval's lady as an essentially passive object of male wish fulfillment. In "Subtle Crafts: Magic and Exploitation in Medieval English Romance," Corinne Saunders investigates the interplay of natural and demonic forces in romantic depictions of sorcery. While her insightful analyses of the plots of romances such as William of Palerne, Lybeaus Desconus, and Melusine might resonate more with clearer engagement with recent scholarship on these poems, [End Page 524] Saunders's focus on shape shifting offers a powerful window into late-medieval anxieties concerning the necromantic arts.

Two essays examine Gui de Warewic and its reception. In "Saracens and Other Saxons: Using, Misusing, and Confusing Names in Gui de Warewic and Guy of Warwick," Ivana Djordjević explores the exploitation of geography and ethnic vocabulary. Asserting that the original author of Gui de Warewic used topographical and ethnic names to bind Gui's tenth-century England to the twelfth-century Crusading world, Djordjević proceeds to analyze the flattening of this framework in the poem's Anglo-Norman and Middle English reception. Djordjević illuminates the Gui poet's generation of a hybrid world, which features the unsettling conjunction of African...

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