Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation (review)

Reviews 285 entries such as the 'limits ofhuman knowledge' are listed under the subheadings ofSoliloquies and Consolation in the general index. In other hands this could have been a very dry tome; Ifinishedit feeling refreshed and enthusiastic to return to the original and secondary sources. A n edition, indeed, which is 'most necessary for all m e n [and women] to know'. Rosemary Dunn School of Humanities James Cook University Weiss, Judith, Jennifer Fellows and Morgan Dickson, eds., Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2000; cloth; pp. xii, 196; 3 b/w plates; R R P £40.00/US$75.00; ISBN 0-85991 597-2. This volume presents selected papers from the sixth biennial conference on Romance in Medieval England, held in 1998, and provides a snapshot of the current state of research and preoccupations in thefield.The fluidity of texts and contexts, and indeed of the romance genre itself, is a c o m m o n thread in the papers and one which Judith Weiss highlights in her introduction to the volume. She also stresses the importance of exploring theoretically issues of translation, a topic addressed explicitly in thefirstpaper in the volume, and incidentally in some others, several ofwhich consider Anglo-Norman or both English and AngloNorman texts. In 'Mapping Medieval Translation' Ivana Djordjevic discusses some methodological problems of medieval translation studies, pointing out that translators in the Middle Ages worked within a poetics entirely different from those of classical or m o d e m practitioners, around w h o m modern theories and classifications of translation are usually built. Djordjevic teases out some of the problems particular to translating romances from Anglo-Norman to English. She looks to Sir Bevis of Hampton to exemplify the intricate socio-linguistic and socio-cultural issues that surround the creation of such English Romances. Rosalind Field's ' Waldef and the Matter of/with England' deals with a neglected text that she argues is pivotally situated within a cohesive body of Anglo-Norman romance narrative. Waldef shov\& not be considered a mish-mash, but rather a markedly intertextual work, that in its portrayal ofan anarchic England 'rejects the providential optimism of romance ideology' (p. 38). Other exercises in rehabilitation are W A . Davenport's 'SirDegrevant and Composite Romance' 286 Reviews and Roger Dalrymple's '"Evele knowen ye Merlyne, jn certeyn": Henry Lovelich's Merlin'. Davenport highlights the eclecticism ofSir Degrevant, with its medley ofplot elements, shifts ofregister, and modulations ofpace and tone, ranging from violent action to leisurely exploration of love themes and courtly refinement. W e find here, perhaps, a lesser practitioner of the kinds of fusions and contrasts to be found in Chaucer's Squire's Tale or the work of the Gawainpoet . Dalrymple urges some reconsideration of Lovelich's much maligned work, which he claims strongly reflects the writer's urban London milieu, and may characterise him 'as a kind of crude metropolitan Malory' (p. 167). Morgan Dickson studies the theme of disguise in some Anglo-Norman romances, arguing that this markedly 'Insular' plot-device privileges the self (the hidden, but true identity) and allows for the hero's self-definition and development of character. A later manifestation of the disguise theme is explored in Rachel Snell's essay on "The Undercover King', where the late fourteenth-century King Edward and the Shepherd forms the focus of her discussion. King Edward and kindred 'king-and-subject' romances form a distinctive English sub-genre ofthe fourteenth andfifteenthcenturies, at once more comic in design than earlier romances involving disguise, such as those ofHorn or Havelok, yet at the same time reflecting some ofthe urgent social issues of England in time ofwar, plague, and peasant rebellion. Elizabeth Archibald discusses problems in defining the Breton lay, its transformation in English versions, and employment of the term in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A unique late-thirteenth-century list of lay titles in a manuscript preserved at Shrewsbury School attests to the continuing popularity of the genre. Chaucer's description of The Franklin's Tale as a Breton lay, she argues, is predicated upon his audience's knowledge of the Breton lay as a story of adultery, and further...