Christianity and Romance in Medieval England (review)

D. S. Brewer's relatively new series, 'Christianity and Culture: Issues in Teaching/Research', under general editors Dee Dyas and Helen Phillips, presents collections of new essays by prominent scholars that explore the role of religion in various aspects of culture in the past. The contributions offer a broad coverage of the major subjects in a particular area or period, and aim to provide teachers and researchers with the best new and current scholarship on the subject. The series is published in association with the Christianity and Culture project, which aims at exploring how past religious cultures can be studied and taught nowadays.

A particular feature of the series is that the essays present and discuss issues directly related to the teaching of the material, and a lot of effort has been put into suggesting resources for teaching each subject, in this case the Christian context of English romance. The final two essays in this collection specifically discuss practical aspects of pedagogy in this challenging field.

This volume attempts to re-examine the relationship between Christianity and romance, a key genre of the Middle Ages. Understandably, the essays here are not meant to reach a unanimous agreement or to come up with a single view of a complex situation. However, each of them aims - pertaining to its specific field of study - to present the reader with an up-to-date discussion of the current state of knowledge and the contemporary insights into medieval insular romance. The stress is put on the opportunities for interpreting the romances while reading them in their Christian cultural context. To this end, it 'may mean steering readers from a modern back-formation of piety and allegory where none exists, as well as providing a reliable and well-informed sense of the knowledge and cultural capital represented by Christianity for the original writers and audiences of romance' (p. x).

The patron and dedicatee of the volume, Derek Brewer, was an advocate of the Christianity and Culture project from its onset and he would always eagerly offer his advice. His essay, 'Romance Traditions and Christian Values in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', included in this collection, was still being written at the time of his death and unfortunately he did not finish it. His approach here is that modern preconceptions prevent us from reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the terms that its contemporary audience would have taken for granted: 'that our hermeneutic of suspicion makes us find difficulties in the wrong places and for the wrong reasons' (p. xxi). Of all the essays in this volume, this one takes medieval Christianity seriously, i.e. it is treated here as an ethic to go by rather than a matter of doctrine or of historical practice, although these two aspects are duly considered.

It is worthwhile, to get a sense of its coverage, to quote the titles of all the main contributions in this valuable volume. The volume is divided into four sections: 'Christianity and the matters of romance'; 'Issues and debates' 'Reading romances'; and 'Teaching romance' and each section contains three essays, apart from the final one, which has two. The list of essays is as follows: 'Medieval Classical Romances: The Perils of Inheritance' (Helen Phillips); 'Celticity and Christianity in Medieval Romance' (Stephen Knight); 'Crusading, Chivalry and the Saracen World in Insular Romance' (Phillipa Hardman and Marianne Ailes); 'How Christian is Chivalry?' (Raluca L. Radulescu); 'Magic and Christianity' (Corinne Saunders); 'Subverting, Containing and Upholding Christianity in Medieval Romance' (K. S. Whetter); 'Female Saints and Romance Heroines: Feminine Fiction and Faith among the Literate Elite' (Andrea Hopkins); 'Athelston or the Middle English Nativity of St Edmund' (Rosalind Field); as well as the above-mentioned essay by Derek Brewer. The two final essays pertaining to the aspects of teaching are 'Questioning Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Teaching the Text through its Medieval English...