Boundaries in Medieval Romance (review)

The essays in Boundaries in Medieval Romance began as papers delivered at the 2004 Medieval Romance Conference, and if the quality of work assembled in this volume is anything to go by, the conference was a huge success. The contributions, edited by Neil Cartlidge, represent solid and provocative readings of both frequently studied and much neglected romances. In his preface, Cartlidge observes that since "boundaries, and the crossing of boundaries, seemed to feature remarkably often in the approaches taken to the texts that were considered… it was relatively easy to define a theme for this Proceedings volume" (p. vii). By unifying the essays around the idea of liminality, the contributions work together to demonstrate the centrality of boundary-crossing to medieval romance. While so many published conference proceedings read as hodgepodge groupings of only vaguely related work, this volume is remarkable and refreshing for its coherence.

The borders considered in this volume are geographical, political, cultural, and metaphorical. Essays contemplate the frontiers between history and fiction, reality and the imaginary, as well as the demarcations "between different kinds of literary traditions, modes and cultures; and boundaries between different kinds of experience or perception, especially the 'altered states' associated with sickness, magic, the supernatural, or the divine" (p. 1). Taken as a whole, Boundaries in Medieval Romance suggests that the romance genre is intensely preoccupied with limits and liminality, and that a defining generic feature may be romance's playful tendency to toy with boundaries. This is not surprising for a literary genre notorious for its fluidity and its tendency to evade definition. Romance is slippery. It may contain elements of hagiography, chronicle, historical biography, tragedy, comedy, parody, lyric poetry, the magical and miraculous, the real and the fantastic, the historical and the mythical, and amorous and chivalric adventures in varying degrees.

Several contributions directly engage with the generic indeterminacy of romance and with the problematic nature of romance taxonomies. Judith Weiss persuasively argues that the genres of epic, romance, and comedy dialogically coexist in Boeve de Haumtone, resulting in a tangled generic web that is typical of early Insular romance. In order to explain the presence of comedic elements that undermine, and often parody, the depiction of romance courtliness and epic prowess in the poem, Weiss provides a fascinating examination of twelfth-century developments in the chanson de geste and the romance, stressing the textual innovations that engendered the comic treatment of courtly and martial elements in Boeve.

Simon Meecham-Jones explores the competing generic classifications of The Song of Dermot and the Earl. The designation of the poem as romance, epic, chanson de geste, or chronicle directly impacts assessments of the poem's merits and, perhaps more importantly, its reliability as a witness to a pivotal historical moment—the Norman incursion into Ireland. Through a nuanced analysis, Meecham-Jones demonstrates how the poem recasts historical events according to the organizing structures of romance. It is a persuasive expostulation of the insidiousness of romance models and narrative patterns and their concomitant ability to influence the perception of historical events.

Corinne Saunders compellingly argues that the motifs of sickness, medicine, and curing signal romance's boundaries with other genres and subject fields such as natural philosophy, hagiography, and medical, devotional, and theological discourses, as well as the frontiers of the living and the dead, the magic and the marvelous, the physical and the providential, the actual and the symbolic, and the moral and the physical. In this sophisticated essay, Saunders highlights the varied, hybrid nature of pathological etiologies in romance: "romances depict illness, physical suffering and healing within the context of contemporary notions of both illness and cure as symbolic and God-sent, and of the continuum between mind and body" (p. 185).

Essays by Ivana Djordjević, Elizabeth Berlings, Rosalind Field, and Marianne Ailes and Phillipa Hardman also investigate the murky generic boundaries of romance. The kinetic interaction between romance and religious discourse is the subject of Djordjević's essay. Attentive to this nexus of generic fluidity...