Friendship and Love in the Middle English Metrical Romances by Anna Hubertine Reuters (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER introduction-against an essay of mine that proposes that Christine was too conservative in her own time to be characterized as proto-feminist, proto-revolutionary, or role model (as some scholars have recently done). Yet the polemical tone is misleading because Quilligan does wind up confirming my factual points, though fine-tuning them to her own per­ spective. In so doing she provides a far more detailed and sophisticated literary and psychological reading than could be done in an explicitly historicist essay. Despite our differences-centering on the specific contem­ porary meaning of Christine's work-I do not hesitate to recommend this book as a valuable contribution to medieval literary criticism. A bibliography would have been helpful in tracking down inadequately documentedreferences, such as that toFredricJameson on page 210, which is evidently different from the source noted on page 203, or for the omitted title ofmy essay and the main title of the book in which itoccurs, referredto extensively on pages 135-38.3 A bibliography might also usefully have listed the location ofmanuscripts of the Cite or of other works important to Christine, such as the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais. SHEILA DELANY Simon Fraser University ANNA HUBERTINE REUTERS. Friendship and Love in the Middle English Metrical Romances. European University Studies, ser. 14, vol. 226. Frankfort am Main and New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Pp. 245. $46.80 paper. To my knowledge this dissertation is the first book-length study of love and friendship in the Middle English metrical romances.There have been many articles and studies of individual romances, and themes of love and friend­ ship have been used as ways to group and classify romances, but there has been no attempt to systematically describe the genre by analyzing the corpus in terms of these relationships. In her study Reuters surveys nearly forty narratives to develop a model of the love and friendship they depict, and of the genre itself. '"A City, a Room: the Scene of Writing in Christine de Pisan and Virginia Woolf," in Writing Woman: Women Wn"ters and Women in Literature, Medieval to Modern (New York: Schocken, 1983). 268 REVIEWS It has become almost conventional to begin a study of the Middle English metrical romances by remarking on their diversity and the diffi­ culty of defining the genre. Reuters approaches the problem in terms of the narratives' content: relationships of love and friendship. She rather cur­ sorily rejects attempts to find principles for analyzing the romances accord­ ing to their formal characteristics (Dieter Mehl) or structures of discourse (Susan Wittig, Carol Fewster), asserting that love and friendship are "pri­ mary narrative material" whose advantages for purposes of categorization are obvious. She then suggests a typology of romance based on how the love or friendship is initiated. A love relationship may be "forward," either the heroine or the hero taking the initiative; or it may be "mutual," both lovers acting equally. Romances may also be categorized according to the social status of the partners: some tell of bonds between people of equal rank (restorative-concordant), while in others one of the partners must rise to attain the status of the other (innovative-discordant). Regardless of the dynamics of the relationships, they all pass through three stages: establish­ ment, separation, reunion; and all have significance in three spheres: personal, social-political, and religious. Different variants develop these elements in distinctive ways, but in the reunion stage, friendship or marital harmony, social order, and religious orthodoxy always coincide. Other aspects of the model include the association of "principles" with the variants. The "trouthe-rewthe principle" underlies the fairy-mistress vari­ ant, the "conquest principle" underlies the forward-hero variant, etc. There are also "leitmotifs" associated with the variants, for example: "work" and "word," "will" and "deed" in the friendship romances. The chapters are organized according to the dynamic ofthe relationship: first romances of "forward" heroines and "reluctant" heroes in general (for example, King Horn), then "forward" heroines who are fairy mistresses (Triamour in Sir Launfa/), next romances of "forward" heroes and "reluc­ tant" heroines (like Eglamour of Artair), followed by poems on rela­ tionships of mutual love (like Floris...