Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition (review)

When people in late medieval England thought about the narratives that they called romances, the names that sprang to mind most readily were Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick. It is thus useful for the modern scholar to be reminded, as this volume reminds us, that the story of Bevis maintained its popularity in the written record for over five centuries, editions in verse continuing to be printed into the eighteenth century, and that it had a European vogue, its Anglo-Norman and Middle English versions inspiring adaptations in continental French, Welsh, Irish, Old Norse, Faroese, Italian, Yiddish, and Russian; our editors assure us (p. 6) that Sicilian puppeteers were still telling the story of Buovo into the twentieth century. The biases of academia being what they are, it is perhaps not surprising that a work of such widespread and tenacious appeal should have been neglected by scholars for so long, and the appearance of this volume, the eighth in Brewer's series Studies in Medieval Romance, is accordingly welcome. The origin of this collection of essays is a one-day symposium on Bevis held in Southampton (the hero's home town) in 2004, and the editors have crafted from that event a resource that is strategic and well-shaped.

In spite of the pan-European survey of Bevis versions that is helpfully provided in the introduction, the form of the name that appears in the title of this volume—"Bevis of Hampton," not Boeve de Haumtone, Bown, Bibus, Bevers, Bevus, Beuve, Bovo, Buovo, nor Bova—is English, and it is the student of the Middle English Bevis who will find this book most useful. And it will be useful, for it is not only a collection of critical essays about the Bevis tradition but may serve also as a handbook for further study of that tradition. Thus the editors provide a short plot summary, based on the Anglo-Norman version but noting significant differences in the Middle English version, and a bibliography of Bevis scholarship from 1838 to 2008. The first half of the collection focuses on the Anglo-Norman Boeve, the origin of the story, as well as some of the developments of that tradition in northwestern Europe, and the second half more specifically on the Middle English Bevis. Embedded in the center of the book is Jennifer Fellows's "The Middle English and Renaissance Bevis: A Textual Survey," a most useful corrective to the standard critical edition, that of Eugen Kölbing for the Early English Text Society, published in the late nineteenth century and based on the Auchinleck MS—a text which, as Fellows demonstrates, departs significantly from the main Bevis tradition in many ways. This chapter includes, as an appendix, a comprehensive list of manuscripts and print editions of the English verse Bevis to 1711.

Besides serving as a reference tool for studying Bevis, this volume also presents the story as a case study in translation across languages, genres, and historical periods. Chapters by Erich Poppe and Regine Reck on the Middle Welsh Ystorya Bown a Hamtwn and on the incomplete Early Modern Irish version of Bevis (which they call Stair Bibius), and by Christopher Sanders on the Old Norse Bevers saga, demonstrate how translation across languages also involves significant adaptation to the literary expectations of new audiences. Inevitably, much of the focus in this book is on translation from the Anglo-Norman Boeve to the Middle English Bevis, and this case proves to be rich and complex. Thus Marianne Ailes's argument for "The Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone as a chanson de geste" implies that the translation involved not only a shift in language but also a shift in genre. Ivana Djordjević examines the English "Translator at Work" as this mysterious figure not only adapts and revises plot elements but also juggles with, chooses or rejects, and reshapes formulas and epithets. And Melissa Furrow explains how, in the...