The Matter of Scotland by R. James Goldstein (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER thuriana and Popular Culture," by Mary Alice Grellner. Each essay presents three to five pages packed with specifics like Szarmach's rental and pur­ chase prices for specific films and slide presentations (p.137) and Hatty's listing of foreign and domestic Arthurian films (pp.148-5 0). Fries's"Women in Arthurian Literature " differs from the other essays in "Specific Approaches ": she discusses the three chief roles women play in Arthurian literature: "hero,...heroine,...counterhero " (p.155).Her perceptive essay,while it sketches her approach to teaching the topic,also displays a seasoned scholar's feminist approach to Arthuriana. Overall,the separate parts ofApproaches to Teaching the Arthurian Tradi­ tion focus on practical approaches to teaching while at the same time at­ tending to"'the sense ofwonder ...that runs through all ofArthuriana' " (KevinJ. Harty,quoted on p.34).Scholarly insights also appear,only a few of which I have noted here. The book will be highly useful for others who,like myselfin 1986,seek help in planning an Arthurian course.It will also reward mature scholar­ teachers who seek new insights into,for example, "Women's Roles in Mal­ ory " or"Vinaver's Text vs.Caxton's." The book takes a distinguished place at the table of MLA"Approaches to Teaching World Literature." D.THOMAS HANKS,JR. Baylor University R. JAMES GoLDSTEIN.The Matter ofScotland. Regents Studies in Medieval Culture.Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,1993.Pp. xvi,386.$4 0.0 0. The author opens with the heartfelt remark that his"book has been long in the making." He should be reassured.The time was needed and well spent. What he has achieved is the most thorough historical contextualization of The Bruce and The Wallace to date.Stated briefly,that may seem a worthy but not overly ambitious achievement.When one realizes that this goal might alternatively be translated as answering the broader question,What is"truth," poetical and historical?,Goldstein's concern with time passing becomes more understandable,and the expending of that time becomes justified by necessity. After all,The Bruce was written by John Barbour,genealogist of the 202 REVIEWS Stewart line of kings. He opens by promising "suthfastnes" over and over again, yet, even as he does so, conflates into one character the lives of his major hero Robert Bruce; his grandfather Bruce the Competitor and (strictly) his father Bruce of Carrick. To explain this feature alone involves the thorough investigation of at least four different versions of historical "truth." Goldstein first uses the modem approach, tracing the Wars of Liberty as a chain of cause and effect, mirroring the actual. Since that is precisely the view of history which does not account for Barbour's ap­ proach, he then turns to other definitions and sources. The first move was obvious to medieval writers. If you translate history into words, you translate it into another code with other causes and effects. As Pruseck notes of the early Chinese historian, "He knew that he had before him sources and relics which stood in a complicated relationship with the real happenings and that these sources and the facts included in them were a category of their own, the mutual connections of which were not defined." One's prime aim, therefore, is to make the new categories clear and so help your audience to understand the causes and effects within the differentiated artifact. Both Bruce and Wallace are works of persuasive rhetoric, though in dif­ ferent ways. The former seeks first and foremost to persuade the court of Robert II in the late fourteenth century to remember the courage and patriotism of its ancestors a century earlier. The warning was necessary because, in the previous reign, those nobles had allowed Scotland to return to English power. Cause and effect in this mode and context demand that Robert the Bruce become a symbol of liberty. To that end his early life (mostly spent serving the cause ofEngland) has to be deleted. It is replaced by the more patriotic example of his grandfather, so providing a family hero as permitted by the conventions of Romance, whose fictive life is purified of...