Medieval Romance and Material Culture ed. by Nicholas Perkins (review)

As the title signals, these fifteen essays highlight the reciprocal relationship between romance and material culture. Focusing on romances circulating in Britain and Ireland from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, the volume emphasizes English tales yet also treats French and Scottish works, a lai, and the Victorian reception of a fifteenth-century compilation. Contributors emphasize diverse aspects of material culture: many consider manuscripts; others examine objects such as ivory caskets, bodies, relics, or images. The varied perspectives bring thematic breadth: physical space, gender, manuscript culture, and courtly pastimes figure prominently, and essays often evoke questions of identity. This scope results in a rich collection of value to a wide audience of scholars.

Perkins opens the volume with an essay that serves as an introduction and a study of The Erle of Tolous. He demonstrates how reading oaths and exchange materially adds layers of complexity. After discussing the book’s history and reception, Perkins concludes with summaries of the collection’s articles. He also explains his rationale for the sequence of essays, beginning with the treatment of physical space and then moving to cooperation, exchange, and conflict; the formal and textual shape of romance; other media; and adaptation and reception.

For this review, I will group articles more broadly, with one set dealing with intra- and extra-textual material objects, and the second centering on manuscripts. The first category includes most essays, including Perkins.’ Elliot Kendall focuses on images of exchange, conflict, and cooperation in The Avowying of Arthur, arguing that cooperation is complex, adaptable, and benefits both the knight who cooperates and the community. Megan G. Leitch highlights conflict, analyzing the role of chess, especially in the Stanzaic Guy of Warwick and Caxton’s The Foure Sonnes of Aymon, both of which reveal the political and social implications of homicide in high-stakes chess matches.

Physical space and significant objects within texts or in the outside world are central in the articles by Rosalind Field, Siobhan Bly Calkin, Neil Cartlidge, Anna Caughey, and Richard Allen Rouse. Field investigates objects and gifts at courts in Brittany and Ireland in the Romance of Horn, linking material culture to emotional regimes. Calkin studies relics and images in The Sege of Melayne and Sir Ferumbras, showing the material power of devotional objects. Cartlidge explores the choice of Ireland as a setting in the Lai de Melion, contending that the werewolf’s transformations give concrete form to instability in political and ethnic identities. In the Scottish romances of Caughey’s study—the Buik of Alexander, Lancelot of the Laik, and Clariodus—knighthood is established through being looked at while fighting, which favors the defense of the nation. Rouse examines fifteenth-century London as the context for St. Erkenwald, The Siege of Jerusalem, and Titus and Vespasian, focusing on walls and cultural cleansing to reveal that the texts help to configure London as a ‘New Jerusalem.’

Two essays look at physical images of characters or romances. Morgan Dickson considers the iconography of three knightly harpers: Tristan, Horn, and Hereward. She shows how each depiction creates an identity and makes the fascinating case that the harper in a Bodleian Library manuscript image is Iseut rather than Tristan. Henrike Manuwald studies depictions of the Folie Tristan on the Cluny and Hermitage ivory caskets, positing that each encourages a unique ‘reading’ of the scenes through its framing of the story.

The five remaining studies involve manuscripts. Ad Putter examines the bob’s function in the bob-and-wheel narratives Sir Tristem, Sir Gawain, and Chaucer’s Sir Thopas. Raluca Radulescu analyzes King Robert of Sicily, reading the story in its manuscript context to reveal multiple layers of possible responses. Aisling Byrne studies eight romances translated into Irish in the fifteenth century, highlighting the lessons of translated romances and raising questions about their transmission. Mark Cruse teases out parallels between Le Roman d’Alexandre and Marco Polo’s Livre du grand Khan in...