Medieval English Romances (review)

Reviews 155 exemplifying the workings of a primitive people in the fabric of Maine's Ancient Law. Each of these themes is deftly complicated by Smith's attention to the interplay of secular and ecclesiologicd arguments - as reciprocdly informing andogues - and by his attention to the changing nature of explanation. This dteration in explanatory emphasis is (roughly speaking) seen as one from moral criteria to structural and from the consequences of intended to those of unintended action. Smith's treatment of H u m e and Karnes illustrates this as well as the other themes of the book. H u m e is portrayed as wanting to bury the gothic bequest as inelevant and to see the world that followed as its unintended consequence, his own world as the unintended consequence of puritan fanaticism. Hume's was a politicaUy subversive history if one sees the vdue of the gothic, or any other, bequest as present centred and politicd. Yet it is Lord Karnes who represents the apotheosis of destructive scepticism by arguing that the bicameral system of Parliament had its origins in the Anglo-saxon world, but only because sufficiently large hdls could not be found to house the meetings cdled by kings. Yet still the Norman Yoke struggled on to the end of the eighteenth century. In T o m Paine, for example, who still wanted to have an Alfredian cake and eat it (p.102). If Karnes suggests Conrad Russell, The Levellers and the carriers of the Norman Yoke suggest the epistemic breaks andrevolutionarychanges of writers such as Foucadt It might be true to say that there is hardly a conclusion about medievd Ufe and its significance which does not have an echo from a partidly different context The book is a sdutary reminder not just that received history is what historians make it but that the interplay between historiographicd and other commitments is rarely as straightforward as w e are apt to think; that historiographicd insight is not the preserve of the professiond historian - Major Cartwright notwithstanding. Cond Condren School of Politicd Science University of N e w South W d e s Speed, D., ed., Medieval English Romances, Sydney, University of Sydney Department of English, 1987; 2 vols; pp.256, 197; R.R.P. A U S $20.00. The six Middle EngUsh romances presented in this admirable edition include two old favourites (Havelok and Sir Orfeo) and four that deserve to be more widely known than has hitherto been possible: two that have not been easily available except in the 1930/1964 collection of Middle English Metrical Romances edited by French and H d e (Chevelere Assigne and Sir Cleges), and 156 Reviews two others of which there has been no edition since 1903 in the one case (Rauf Coiljear) and 1867 in the other (The Grene Knight). They are arranged in chronologicd order of composition and exhibit wide variety of subject matter (history, myth, folk-tde), tone, and style (short couplets, two kinds of dtiterative verse, two kinds of tdl-rhyme stanza). The collection comes in two parts: the texts, bibliography and introductions in part one; the criticd apparatus in part two, consisting of explanatory and textud notes and a full and carefd glossary that records 'every form of every word in the texts' and provides etymons 'to assist in lexical identification and stylistic assessment'. Thetextsare 'edited conservatively from the origind manuscripts', a cldm borne out by eloquent defences of a number of M S readings that have been rejected or queried by earlier editors; (e.g. curteyse in Havelok 2694, here taken as an adjective in the phrase make courteous = 'raise to courtly rank'; blifulest as a form of blipefulest in Sir Orfeo 527; posse as a SE form of post in Chevelere Assigne 281. The textud notes on these lines indicate that the edition is d m e d at serious students of Middle English but Dr. Speed is to be applauded for her recognition that such students in the 1980s cannot be assumed to know Latin or even to have read the Bible and, accordingly, for having provided in the explanatory notes the translations of, and the comments on, biblicd dlusions...