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

The thirteenth biannual conference “Romance in Medieval Britain” took place at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford; the papers presented are published as Medieval Romance and Material Culture. This book, edited by Nicholas Perkins, includes fourteen chapters-essays that offer an eclectic examination of “how medieval romances respond to material culture, but also how romance itself helps to constitute and transmit that culture” (1). Using a host of texts and perspectives from the twelfth century into the Renaissance period and ending with Victorian interpretations of medieval romances, these essays “reveal many ways in which ‘mere’ objects become complex things in romance, and also how a focused attention on romances’ material makeup…can continue to yield insights” (10).

Perkins introduces the thematic vein running throughout the essays in the Introduction, “The Materiality of Medieval Romance and The Erle of Tolous.” He uses The Erle of Tolous as one example of “the symbiotic relationship with other artistic media” (21), namely the ring as love token in gift-giving medieval traditions. Perkins goes on to explain how each of the media vehicles (manuscripts, tapestries, tiles, or ivories) examined in this book can serve modern scholars as “clear evidence of the range and reach of romance stories throughout medieval imaginative life” (3). Reading novel perspectives of how these medieval texts were created and then received, Perkins argues that if in the past many romances were seen as under-literary, and “their relationship to the material could be explained as a clumsy reproduction of the bits and pieces of everyday life—a naïve fascination with armour, feasts and horses rather than displaying the philosophical or self-referential qualities that would grant them access to a (New) critical canon” (4). But modern scholarship in this compilation does address the “twin problems of romance reading—the idea that romances are both under-literary and other-worldly [that] frequently created obstacles for material-minded writing about romance” (5). This book explores a newfound shift to understanding the greater political, social, and cultural milieus of their literary value.

The succeeding collection of essays is nicely broken into contextual sections. The second through fifth chapter explore physical space as context. Rosalind Field uses specific lines from the Anglo-Norman poem Romance of Horn as vantage to the exile-and-return hero whose adventures in various locations expose the “rich details of courtly life, its material culture, and, its range of emotional behavior” (23). Field puts forward Horn and Sir Gawain as comparable heroes whose adventures in one location to the next boost the quality of the descriptive courtly life and societal values. Robert Allen Rouse examines text in its place, attempting to “reconstruct what a particular narrative may have meant to a community of readers in a particular place at a particular time”; in so doing, he exposes the “porous nature of the cosmopolitan port-city [London] as liminal contact-zone” (41)—focusing especially on how a society might create a popular “fantasy of a homogeneous urban Englishness” (42). He uses palimpsestic urban layers (pagan, Celtic, Roman, Christian, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, English, etc.) to understand London space mutating into medieval age. His argument becomes intriguing as he names the medieval Jewish spaces as “obscured or converted to serve new religious and political ideologies” (18) and emerging sensibilities of English identities, using St Erkenwald, The Siege of Jerusalem, and Titus and Vespasian. In turn, Siobhain Bly Calkin considers Christian devotional objects as they “undergo translation into Saracen spaces” (60), using The Siege of Melayne (destruction of devotional images) and Sir Ferumbras (Crown of Thornes and Crucifixion nails) to show how those objects transform through their “dislocations [that] produce miracles” (73). Neil Cartlidge performs an engaging “analysis of the implied cultural geography of the Lai de Melion” (75), and discusses how the Irish landscape of Wicklow—neither otherworldly nor Celtic per se but rather a colonial space—“visibly figure[s] in the bodily metamorphoses” of the eponymous werewolf-protagonist. This romance adventure takes place...