Le merveilleux et la magie dans la littérature (review)

140 Reviews eastern Mediterranean familiar to successive Crusaders and the castles of northern Europe. The celebrated thesis of T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), published in 1936 and republished in 1988 with a fine introduction by Denys Pringle, alerted international scholarship to the argument that 'all the best of the Latin fortifications of the Middle Ages in the East was informed with the spirit of the architects of central and southern France' (Lawrence [1988 ed.], p. 88). Yet half a century on, the derivative nature of the European is taken for granted by Thompson in particular without any examination of the precise chronology of Arab, Greek, and ultimately Crusader fortifications in the East. It is one thing to show, as Thompson does elegantly, that Edward I's Caernarfon had polygonal towers and dark horizontal banding on the walls beside the river Seiont in a deliberate copy of Tneodosius' walls of Constantinople. Here there is no doubt which fortification was the earlier. There is room for more debate about interrelationships between East and West in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was not all a westwards dissemination of ideas, any more than in prehistory. But only Cathcart King attempts, on purely architectural grounds, any thoughtful approach to the whole question of the Crusades. These four books constitute complementary works of much merit for those wishing to be stimulated to more thought about the English castle. Architecture and archaeology in Thompson, military architecture and history in Cathcart King, and a widely based social and administrative comprehension in Pounds, have created very different books. None is a fully contextualized study of the English castle. None is even a study of the castles of the British Isles. In a worldfirstof French domination in Britain and then of the genuine universal aspects of the age of chivalry, one has a right to expect that the wide geographical, cultural, and military experience of the castle-building classes might lead a writer on beyond the confines of England. Anglocentricity dies hard. R. Ian Jack Department of History University of Sydney Chandes, Gerard, ed., Le merveilleux et la magie dans la liuirature (Centre d'6tudes et de recherches sur le merveilleux, l'6trange, et l'irr6el en literature, 2), Amsterdam & Atlanta, Rodopi, 1992; paper; pp. 253; R.R.P. ? This is a mixed bag of tricks in more ways than one. For a start, not all the articles are relevant to the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Only those which are, are taken into account here. The essay of Robert Baudry (from the University de Lubumbashi), 'Magie noire, magie blanche et merveilleux', is a general survey of magic around the Reviews 141 world, and as such is well placed at the head of the collection. He establishes the dependance of marvellous tales on magic and surveys magic processes of European as well as other cultures throughout the world, especially in Africa. Sympathetic magic is shown to be a world-wide phenomenon, as is the division of magic into 'black' and 'white' (bad/good). His notes are useful for their indication of introductory books on magic, although these are all in French. He also profits from his sojourn in Africa to warn of the danger of being too logical when faced with the description of magic occurrences. The article contains a condensed history of magic in the course of which the author invokes briefly some of the famous magicians of the Middle Ages: Pope Gerbert (Sylvester II, 920-1003 AD.), Albert the Great (1193-1280), and Roger Bacon (1214-94). Anything to do with the Grail legend, of course, is sure to attract its quota of eccentrics, but Jean-Michel Bonet's article, 'La magie dans le Conte du Graal de Chretien de Troyes: Le lit de la merveille', is equal to the bizareness of anything I have ever had the misfortune to read on the subject. With diagrams to illustrate the inner psychic development of the main characters corresponding to events and circumstances in Chr6tien's story, Bonet brings forward fantastic, unsupported notions to develop his thesis. A typical sentence will do to illustrate the style of the piece: 'Le palefroi dont la tete est blanche et noire signale que...