Romancing Treason: The Literature of the Wars of the Roses by Megan Leitch (review)

Romancing Treason investigates the genre of English romance from 1437 to 1497, the decades just before, during, and after the Wars of the Roses. It has a tight textual scope, dealing with chivalric romances that display some concern with, or clear anxiety about, treason: fears and conflicts over not just betrayals of the king or one’s feudal superior, but also the broader values of social cohesion and right political order. Leitch argues that the treason-focused romances of this time provide a unique perspective on deep-seated conflicts about the nature of polity, and with it, literary culture. As such, this literature “concentrates on treason as a source of anxieties about community and identity, and as a way of responding to those concerns within a secular ethical framework. The lens of treason brings a distinct literary culture into focus; a culture that both reflects, and reflects upon, the troubles of its time” (7).

Leitch’s work is in dialogue with other recent studies of fifteenth-century romances, and most directly with the work of Helen Cooper (who was Leitch’s D.Phil. and Ph.D. supervisor), especially the last chapter of Cooper’s The English Romance in Time, and other publications on “counter-romance” of the period. In chapters 1 and 2, Leitch begins by outlining the overall argument. Writings of the period display concern not just with the traditional hierarchical “vertical” aspect of treason (betrayal of one’s superior), but equally with “horizontal betrayal” (9), the lateral dimension of treason understood as the violation of social trust with one’s peers and community. This is the first major component of the book’s argument, that “horizontal ideas of treason”—that is, “an idea of treason as the betrayal of a personal trust, such as within a family or another affinity group where (mutual) loyalty could be expected” (24)—are uniquely characteristic of literary romances in these decades. The second component is a new secularity. At the same time that treason became a cultural keyword and an “accepted anti-principle” (29), romances also began leaving out any ameliorative or recuperative gestures toward divine order, godly justice, or providential justifications. The romances display a new “this-worldly” focus on treason, a “pragmatic side-stepping of providence” (51, 53). And so where romances of earlier traditions are God-infused and providentially oriented, in contrast the romances of the mid-fifteenth century “bear witness to a cultural imaginary particularly invested in secular ethics and legal procedures. Their treasons and treacheries are horizontal as well as hierarchical, and they apply the language of the narrower institutional idea of treason to this wider set of transgressions to intensify their instructive condemnations” (57).

Literary analyses proper begin in Chapter 3, starting with the prose romances Siege of Thebes and Siege of Troy, both adapted from Lydgate. The revisions of these texts accentuate the acts and lexis of treason, marking a further shift from the “truth”-centered lexis of romances earlier in the fourteenth century. In so doing, the changes emphasize “an ethic of social conduct that takes a secular legal form” (69). Also briefly analyzed are the English prose Melusine and the English verse Romans of Partenay. These adaptations stress treason-words that are not present in their French originals, and like the adaptations from Lydgate, they reveal a pattern of anxiety surrounding treason, as events in the narratives are re-expressed “into accusations of treason” (86).

The heart of the study comes in Chapter 4, which brings the argument to bear on Malory’s Morte Darthur. Here Leitch adds further nuance. Not only does Malory participate in this cultural shift toward the broader and secularized significance treason, the Morte also uses it as a strategy of troublesome meaning-making: “the text [of the Morte] construes and seeks to control treason while remaining troubled by its ineradicability. The text’s vocabulary of treason operates as a hermeneutic system, a heuristic modeling...