The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction, 1150–1220 by D. H. Green (review)

REVIEWS of Walter and Griselda, comparing Walter with the Florentine tyrant Walter of De casibus 9.24, and briefly dealing with Chaucer’s Monk’s and Nuns’ Priest’s tales. He thinks that Chaucer backed away from Boccaccio ’s humanism by returning learning to the clergy in the person of the Monk (p. 235). Ginsberg does not specifically mention that the antiintellectual Monk of the General Prologue has become unaccountably learned in his own tale, but he does call him ‘‘a horse-borne contradiction ’’ (p. 237). Chapter 7 takes up Petrarch’s Griselda, which ‘‘exemplified his own understanding of himself as a writer,’’ Ginsberg claims, but he admits that Chaucer would not have understood this, ‘‘without knowing the Familiares and Epistolae Seniles, or more generally his historical construction of the self’’ (pp. 261–62). I find Ginsberg’s arguments hard to understand, and, once understood (according to my lights), hard to accept as pertinent. But I hope that I have given a representative sample of the contents of his book and his style of discourse. Henry Ansgar Kelly University of California, Los Angeles D. H. Green. The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction, 1150–1220. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii, 292. $65.00. When Wace wrote of the fashionable Arthurian material of the 1150s that ‘‘not all was truth, not all was lies,’’ ‘‘ne tut mençunge, ne tut veir,’’ he was addressing a concern at the heart of the literary scene across Europe in the second half of the twelfth century, the establishment of a middle ground for fiction between the ‘‘truths’’ of history and the ‘‘lies’’ of the minstrels. As this scrupulously detailed study argues, the emergence of the romance is no less than the emergence of self-referential and self-confident fiction. Green takes as the defining feature of romance the fictional contract between author and audience by which writers were freed from the need to claim historical or theological truth. However, literature is not as a consequence treated as an autonomous realm. In his closely detailed PAGE 397 397 .......................... 10906$ CH11 11-01-10 13:59:39 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER reading of the romances of Angevin England, France, and Germany in the twelfth century, Green never loses sight of the external pressures, the needs and interests of the aristocratic audience, the propaganda for courtliness and chivalry, the political agendas served by the various Matters of medieval narrative. As shown by Schmolke-Hasselman, it is Anglo-Norman England with the seminal work of Geoffrey of Monmouth and then the vernacular of Wace, Thomas of Britain, and Benoı̂t, that provides the context for the achievements of Chrétien and his German followers, the focus of this study. For Green, the breakthrough of the twelfth century was the alliance between the laity of the courts of Germany, France, and England and the clerical authors who applied the learning of the schools to the service of their secular audiences (he rejects Vitz’s reading of Chrétien as an unlearned minstrel). The inquiry into the factors that would have made fictionality perceivable to the original audience, thus enabling the fictional contract, leads to a consideration of orality, form, and authoritative sources. A close discussion of the interpretation of the double formula of audire aut legere/hoeren udir lesen/herkne or rede argues, as did Green’s earlier book, that this is not an either/or antithesis, although readers are more likely to recognize the presence of fictionality than listeners. Readers of Chaucer will recognize the simultaneous awareness and coexistence of both forms of reception (this is not the only place where the discussion of twelfth-century courtly authors illuminates Chaucer). Picking up on Joyce Coleman’s work on aurality, but balancing it with an emphasis on private reading, Green recognizes the duality of the reception of medieval literature and that fictional orality does not rule out the reality of oral recital. Form is important in that fiction reveals itself in a shaping of events, improving on the untidy contingency of life and history. The patternings of ordo artificialis, typology, the double cycle, and the folktale are discussed through close analysis of the...