Boundaries in Medieval Romance ed. by Neil Cartlidge (review)

REVIEWS 270 The catalogue on the whole is a solid contribution to the history of art and to Bernini studies. It provides excellent contextualization for a subject that has never before been treated so thoroughly, ardently details the development of Bernini's personal style in portrait sculpture, and highlights the skill of the master through lavish color and black and white illustrations, including full page details which best display his artistic genius. It is recommended for libraries, Bernini enthusiasts, and portraiture scholars, especially because of its unprecedented and comprehensive look at seventeenth-century sculptural portraiture in Rome. JENNIFER WEHMEIER, ART HISTORY, UCLA Boundaries in Medieval Romance, ed. Neil Cartlidge (London: D. S. Brewer 2008) 198 pp. In European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton 1973), Ernst Robert Curtius noted that “the Middle Ages loved all kinds of crossings and mixtures of stylistic genres” (424). The overriding logic behind Boundaries in Medieval Romance is an implicit rewriting of that statement to read: “the Middle Ages loved all kinds of crossings.” Specifically, the romancers of the Middle Ages seem to take a particular delight in establishing boundaries while simultaneously undermining them—boundaries not just geo-political, but also linguistic and generic. These boundaries, of course, are meant to be traversed and foiled. They are meant to be crossed. The complexity of medieval boundaries is, for us as twenty-first century scholars, complicated by traditions we are working in, as inheritors of the scholarship of the nineteenth century. The geo-political, linguistic, and generic designations that we use, sometimes thoughtlessly and sometimes with a deep sense of irony, are in many ways derived of the project of structuring the Middle Ages as, if not identical to, at least relatable to the then-contemporary, now-historical period of rampant nationalism. Any project on medieval boundaries, then, is faced with two tasks: to understand boundaries in the Middle Ages, and to deconstruct the boundaries imposed on the Middle Ages by a later era (even our own) while striving not to repeat the same misjudgments. Boundaries in Medieval Romance succeeds admirably at both tasks. The effect is a nearly-disorienting constant re-framing of terms and concepts, as our points of view are altered and transformed. “Boundaries” are broadly defined in the introduction and twelve essays within this work to include not just those mentioned above, but also the real against the fictive, the physically and mentally normative against the distorted or abnormal, and—tantalizingly—the boundary of time. Helen Cooper, in “When Romance Comes True,” tackles precisely the problem of time and romance, or what happens when the managers of history look to past literature to orchestrate the present. One of the most common concerns in this style of what we could, only half-jokingly, term “medieval propaganda” is the question of lineage and inheritance (think of Lancaster, York, and the Tudors) and the claims of rulers to be descended from what, to us, are characters in texts. Romance does not cause history, in this formulation, but rather gives birth to new historical facts, which then in turn re-frame past narratives into something resembling future-histories. REVIEWS 271 The second essay, by Rosalind Field, reframes the question of time by considering genre as she addresses “The Curious History of the Matter of England” in relation to nineteenth- and twentieth-century formulations of muddy medieval generic distinctions. Her essay links the question of what the present makes of the past with the problematics of generic distinctions, which is the subject of the essays by Marianne Ailes and Phillipa Hardman, Elizabeth Berlings, Simon Meecham-Jones, Elizabeth Williams, and Judith Weiss. While Boundaries in Medieval Romance is ostensibly concerned with insular romances of any language, questions of genre—and the attendant question of translation—on occasion swing the focus to those locales with which the British tradition has the most intertextual contact. The crossing of what are today national and cultural boundary lines take place on the level of the plot (as in Berlings’s and Meecham-Jones’s essays, which deal with encounters with the French and the Irish, respectively), as well as on the level of textual creation and the influence of history, which...