Readings in Medieval English Romance ed. by Carol M. Meale (review)

REVIEWS Troilus innocent of sexuality" (p. 125); and especially, "Courtly language, like Troilus himself, knows and yet doesn't know. Disavowing both its origin and the 'fyn of his entente,' the lover's metaphoric discourse becomes stagnant and absolute, except at those uncanny moments when the en­ crypted lost object returns to efface boundaries and restore forgotten knowledge" (p. 127). And the same delicious and rewarding subtlety is present at all points in the reading of Sir Gawain, which toward the end comes to this point: "The poem leaves us in a state of epistemological ambivalence: should we cele­ brate the self-referential text, that is, take our pleasure in the fetish that veils an absence, or should we identify rather with Gawain's melancholic lament over 'the lathe and the losse' that the poem has revealed?" (p. 149). This dilemma brings Margherita right back to the plight of the medieval­ ist herself: "Gawain thus becomes a type of the medievalist traumatized by historical difference and lack, who is not altogether certain that the ro­ mance text, the green girdle, is sufficient to cover over this originary ab­ sence. For that matter, 'theory' itself is often spoken of in our field as a kind of rhetorical dalliance, a fetishistic deferral of the medievalist's linear and epic journey back into the past" (p. 149-50). This is the place the book brought us to in the first place, and the point to which it constantly returns, even before the summary of the argument attempted in the afterward. As analytical discourse, as sensitive poetic reading, as historical theorizing, and as a glimpse into the historical state of our profession, this book more than merits our attention; it deserves our thorough consideration, our debate with its premises and its conclusions, and, ultimately, our applause. PAUL THEINER Syracuse University CAROL M. MEALE, ed. Readings in Medieval English Romance. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994. Pp. 238. $53.00. Developed from papers at the 1992 conference on "Romance in Medieval England," the essays here assembled illustrate four important lines of in­ quiry for romance studies. None of these essays will redirect the field, but 251 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER many are valuable contributions to the historical positioning, codicology, genre study, and thematic analysis of Middle English romances. Romance's concerns resonate surprisingly with more overtly historical texts in John Scattergood's "The Tale of Gamelyn: The Noble Robber as Provincial Hero." Scattergood's juxtaposition of the much-maligned Game­ lyn with legal records, letters, sermons, and complaints amply illustrates the work's contemporary engagements and its preservation of a "provincial voice" (p. 160) that is "not so much from the greenwood as from the backwoods, resistant to a centralism it mistrusts" (p. 178). Colin Rich­ mond's "Thomas Malory and the Pastons" finds Malory's cadences and behaviors mirrored in the writing and lives of the Paston circle, and works these into a larger argument about the literary texture of chivalric life-its persistent tendency to dramatize and fictionalize itself. Less convincing in its attempt to find the historical place of romance is Diane Speed's "The Construction of the Nation in Medieval English Romance," which claims a postcolonial identity for Havelok by asserting that it (and similar romances) fulfill the functions described by Homi Bhabha, Timothy Brennan, Bene­ dict Anderson, and others for the postcolonial novel. Speed's inspiration is perhaps to resist the dichotomy that modernists tend to assert between postcolonial complexity and a misapprehended medieval simplicity, but her attempt to align romances with novelistic realism and secularism does not serve the cause well. Havelok is not much like a novel; indeed, its distinctive premodernity might substantially revise postcolonial theorists' versions of literary history. A more successful attempt to situate romances in their historical moment is Arlyn Diamond's "Unhappy Endings: Failed Love/Failed Faith in Late Romances." Taking the romances to be artifacts of their times, Diamond argues that the genre's shift from twelfth-century "social optimism" to "the pessimism of Chaucer's period" indicates "a loss of faith in the social structures within which such narratives were gen­ erated" (pp. 71, 81). The point is not new, but...