Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance: A Tribute to Helen Cooper ed. by Elizabeth Archibald, Megan Leitch, and Corinne Saunders (review)

Professor Helen Cooper of the University of Cambridge is a pioneer in the field of medieval literary—including romance—studies. She holds a special place of influence at the heart of the works of those who contribute to the collection Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance: A Tribute to Helen Cooper, edited by Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne Saunders. Each essay within the book pays direct homage to Cooper through engagement with her scholarship, and the essays are all written by colleagues, friends, and former research students of Cooper's. And, as R. F. Yeager notes in his essay, some contributors used interactions with Cooper to inspire the essay that they produced: 'The germ for this essay originated in a dinner conversation with Helen Cooper—one she may not remember—many years ago' (p. 103).

While the overall topic of this collection is medieval romance, each essay takes time to consider different meanings or new interpretations of well-known medieval romances. Over twelve essays, the collection aims to showcase in-depth textual analysis undertaken by all contributors. While some are more successful than others, the overall aim of the book, to expand on 'current critical issues central to understanding romance' (p. 19), is fulfilled by the end through very nuanced writing and interesting topic choices. Also, the division of the book into four different sections allows for the reader to see the broad range of Cooper's influences on medieval literary scholarship. Importantly, the essays can also be readily applied to fields outside of medieval literary studies. Chapter 2, for instance, considers chivalry in the context of expressed anxieties about warfare (Marcel Elias). Andrew Lynch's chapter on how both medieval and nineteenth-century writers consider chivalry's adaptability and limitations as a cultural idea is also a particularly interesting contribution. The opening chapter by Neil Cartlidge unravels some of the complexities of Middle English, which could be useful for those considering contextual or pedagogical issues. Lastly, Barry Windeatt's chapter on gestures within medieval romances, which uses twelve tables to highlight the frequency of certain emotional gestures—hand-wringing for example—in his survey of twelve medieval romances, could be useful for historians of emotions interested in gestural expression as indication of emotion in literary works.

The main issue with this book is how field-specific it is, with some essays being quite difficult to understand. The introduction, by editor Megan G. Leitch, was very disjointed and at times hard to follow. Readers from outside the field might find some of the chapters quite challenging to navigate, as the language is sometimes more complex than necessary. Particular chapters left their directions and meanings a little obscure to the reader as they do not have clear introductions or conclusions (Chapters 4 and 8). Chapter 3, by Christopher Cannon, invokes Karl Marx, Pride and Prejudice, and Sigmund Freud to discuss the tragedy and comedy in Thomas Malory's 'Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere', but there is no consideration of scholarship on medieval humour and comedy, which would have been more appropriate. Moreover, as this book is also a tribute to a leading female scholar in the field, it is also disappointing that eight out of the twelve contributors are men.

However, works like this make it clear that medieval texts such as Malory's Morte D'Arthur can be interrogated multiple times and from fresh perspectives. The amount of space Malory takes up in the volume reveals how crucial collections like Romance Rewritten are for deconstructing large, often intimidating, medieval works, and for understanding the complexities of the medieval world; five chapters are dedicated to considering a variety of themes, problems, and medieval perspectives that appear in the work. Moreover, a number of the essays...