The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance ed. by Roberta L. Krueger (review)

REVIEWS her project is ambitious in its scope across historical periods and geographic boundaries. Her first chapter, for example, ranges from the Babylonian Talmud to the trial of Joan of Arc, her second chapter from the Acts of Paul and Thecla (c. A.D. 185–95) to the thirteenth-century Legenda aurea, and the third includes German, French, Italian, and English romances. Although the range of her analysis is impressive, its breadth precludes a more local analysis of the particular cultural forces, politics, and institutions shaping the differences and continuities in virginity testing. Kelly is a good storyteller and her book is packed with anecdotes and short tales of the weird and the marvelous that call out to be repeated. Through the variety of examples that she includes, Kelly makes an entirely convincing case for the cultural construction of the belief that virginity can be physically tested, but I would have liked to see a more ambitious central claim for which particular factors contribute to this ongoing construction. Finally, while she alludes to performativity in her chapter on the ordeal, recognizing the relevance of such an approach to her chosen topic, in fact, despite her title, performance theory plays a disappointingly small part in her project. Nonetheless, this book addresses a fascinating subject and presents a wealth of provocative material and analysis. Emma Lipton University of Missouri-Columbia Roberta L. Krueger, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xix– 296. $60.00 cloth, $22.00 paper. This new volume in the Cambridge Companions to Literature series offers a useful addition to medieval scholarship and an introduction to the complex topic of medieval romance. Roberta L. Krueger has chosen, very ambitiously, to treat romance as a pan-European phenomenon. The essays thus form a wide-ranging collection, addressing origins and forms, manuscripts and social contexts, and the development of romance in France, Germany, Italy, Britain, and Spain. The choice is entirely justified in that romance found its origins in twelfth-century France but rapidly spread across Europe—though, as various of the es417 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:37:22 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER says argue, romance takes many different forms across the several centuries of its writing. Indeed, this fluid genre extends far beyond the medieval period: one might take the discussion back to the classical romance or ‘‘novel’’ and forward to eighteenth-century Spenserianism, the Gothic, Romantic writing, the pre-Raphaelites and Tennyson, Victorian novels of suspense, and twentieth-century romance, which ranges from Mills and Boon and its like, through novels of adventure and fantasy , to the work of writers such as Iris Murdoch and A. S. Byatt. Romance is not just a useful catch-all term, however. Writers from the middle ages on have chosen to define their imaginative fictions as ‘‘romance ,’’ and it is a notion of some importance to genre critics. Yet while its enduring power is evident, definition is slippery. Even to distinguish romance from other genres can be problematic, especially in periods beyond the middle ages, when romances can be plays, poems, and novels . Yet even within the medieval period, to differentiate between epic, saint’s life, conte, lyric, and romance can be complex: ‘‘romance,’’ writes Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, ‘‘is the shape-shifter par excellence among medieval genres, a protean form that refuses to settle into neat boundaries prescribed by modern critics’’ (p. 13). There is then something of the impossible idealism of high romance in a study that attempts to examine medieval romance right across Europe from its inception to its later manifestations. Krueger aptly phrases the growth of romance in terms of a central romance motif, the journey or quest: the book is ‘‘intended as an introduction to the voyages, transformations and interrogations of romance as its fictions travel within and between the linguistic , geo-political, and social boundaries of Europe from 1150 to 1600’’ (p. 1). It is a genre always in transition, in process, in contact with other genres, in dialogue with its readers, in debate with itself. This study is unified by its generally sociohistorical approach, and its focus on French romance and on the twelfth century, with...