The Expansion and Transformations Of Courtly Literature ed. by Nathaniel B. Smith, Joseph T. Snow (review)

REVIEWS corrected. Despite them, Professor Satow's book is welcome evidence of Japanese university interest in Chaucer's work. THOMAS W. Ross Colorado Springs, Colorado. NATHANIEL B. SMITH and JOSEPH T. SNOW, eds., The Expansion and Transformations OfCourtly Literature. Athens: University ofGeorgia Press, 1980. Pp. xii, 235. $15.00. "The Expansion and Transformations ofCourtly Literature" was the general topic of the Second Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society held at the University ofGeorgia in 1977, and it serves as the title for the volume under review; the book consists of a selection of twelve papers from among those delivered at the congress, together with an introductory essay by the editors, Nathaniel Smith and Joseph Snow. The essays cover a broad range ofliterature. In the first paper, the late Eugene Vinaver (to whose memory the volume is dedicated) restates some of his earlier conclusions on Arthurian romance; next, William Calin reviews the by now familiar shortcomings of D. W. Robertson's analysis of medieval love; Friederike Wiesmann-Wiedemann examines the character of King Mark in various versions ofthe Tristan story (he is basically good in Eilhart, basically villainous in the other accounts); Terence Scully interprets Chretien's Erec in terms of the poem's final episode; and Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner isolates a "hospitality" conven­ tion in several twelfth-century French romances. Ofthese five essays, the first three are grouped under the rubric "Courtly Literature and the International Legends," whereas the last two come under the heading of "Twelfth-Century Changes." The next six papers deal with later works, and are all grouped under "Expansion and Transformations." Lowanne E. Jones studies four narrative forms somehow inspired by the trouba­ dour lyrics, namely the novas (short story in couplets), the allegorical narrative, the prose life ofindividualtroubadours, and the prose explana­ tion ofindividual poems. Sara Sturm-Maddox examines the love lyrics of 179 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Dante and Petrarch, and also Dante's prose explanations in the Vita nuova, while John M. Bowers writes of love in Chaucer's Troilus, and Donald Maddoxdiscusses a drama,L'estoire de Grise/dis, written in 1395. We move to the turn of the sixteenth century in Florence Ridley's paper, which analyzes and classifies the poetry of William Dunbar, and to the end of the sixteenth century in Winifred Gleeson Keaney's discussion of Book VI of Spenser's Faerie Queene. The last paper, by William Melczer, is a call for scholars in differentdisciplines to study in concert the various aspects of specific "courts," that is, political and cultural centers. The editors have felt called upon not only to perform the usual introductory task of finding unity in a disparate collection of papers, but also to define the nature and purposes of the International Courtly Literature Society by arriving at a working definition of courtly litera­ ture, which in turn contains a definition of courtly love. In a way, these two purposes are contradictory, for on the one hand the editors stress the need for coherency of meaning (hence their new definition), and on the other hand they defend the lack of such coherency in the papers they are recommending to our attention. After admitting "for the moment" that there are "many courtly loves," they say that each of the essayists in the volume who uses the term courtly love "knows what he and others mean by it." Unfortunately, this is not the case. Vinaver, for instance, in a rather obscure statement cited with approval by the editors, says that "courtly love" is the best way that has been found to characterize the peculiar kind of argumentation about love manifested in the works of Chretien de Troyes. In so speaking, Vinaver has actually come up with a new definition of courtly love while at the same time maintaining that it faithfully reflects what everyone else has meant by the term. The book has other examples of authors who know what they mean by courtly love and who assume that all others agree. Keaney, for instance, takes it for granted that courtly love is coterminous with "pure love" (as explained by Andrew the Chaplain and Alexander Denomy), and seems to think that various...