Abstract
Bringing together papers from the conference ‘Romance: Dimensions of Time and Designs of History’ (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), a conference organised by the editor of the volume, this collection consists of 14 chapters organised in four sections and framed by the editor’s introduction and conclusion. The first three sections focus on the ‘Matters’ into which medieval romance is usually divided, but with additional material: ‘The Matter of Rome (and Realms of the East): Approaches to Antiquity’; ‘The Matter of Britain: Social and Spiritual Drives’; and ‘The Matters of France and Italy: Acts of Recollection and Invention’. The fifth section of the book presents post-medieval texts: ‘Matters of Fabulation and Fact: Shifting Registers’.
In the first contribution to the volume, Christopher Baswell approaches the past through the metaphor of ‘containment’, variously seen in the tombs, tent and maps described in early Anglo-Norman romances, such as Roman d’Eneas (c. 1160) and Roman de Thèbes (c. 1150). Baswell shows that there is a ‘delay or enclosure’ in the codices containing these texts, which also leads to a sense of fear of the past and its histories (p. 31). Much interesting material is discussed in relation to the architecture of Roman d’Alexandre (the starting point of the chapter) and Roman de Toute Chevalerie (late twelfth century), but perhaps most importantly, Baswell discusses the issues of motherhood and fatherhood in the former as other forms of containment and contested territories of identity.
Catherine Croizy-Naquet continues the discussion of roman antique in her examination of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie en prose (twelfth century) and the Faits des Romains (1213–1214), where she discerns an authorial vision of the past through a ‘Christian conception of a finalized and objectivized time regarded from a historical and eschatological perspective’, relegating the former to ‘the period before Revelation, the period of error’ (p. 46). In the latter text, Croizy-Naquet argues, the author uses ‘epic and romance to welcome Roman history’ (p. 50) in a surprising and successful contribution to ‘opening up Roman otherness’ (p. 51).
The section on ‘The Matter of Britain’ takes a broad view of the main pillars of romance literature: Geoffrey of Monmouth; Gottfried von Strassburg and Wolfram von Eschenbach; Robert de Boron; prose chronicles; Thomas Malory. In his analysis of Geoffrey’s Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1136), Robert W. Hanning finds a novel angle in approaching the importance of the role played by juvenes or younger sons of the aristocracy in the narrative and outside as its audiences. He traces the connections between Geoffrey’s focus on juvenes and that of the romance writers (in Chrétien de Troyes’s twelfth-century Cligès, Guillaume le Clerc’s thirteenth-century Fergus and the anon thirteenth-century La Mort le roi Artu). In particular, La Mort presents a cast of old characters (Arthur is 92, Gawain 76, Lancelot 55 and Guenevere 50). The events make more sense if one sees Lancelot disguised as a juvenis at the tournament at Winchester.
Adrian Stevens turns to Gottffried’s Tristan and Wolfram’s Parzival, providing a complex and fascinating political and historical context for their creation in the thirteenth century. He argues that, ‘[a]lthough the Grail kingdom is nowhere explicitly linked in Wolfram’s text with the historical kingdom of Jerusalem, there are several carefully contrived parallels between them’ (p. 85). Among these, the possible connection with the Templars through Wolfram’s use of the neologism templeis (in Parzival, templeisen) to refer to the temple knights (of Solomon’s Temple) is intriguing.
In approaching the Grail legend in medieval French romance, Friedrich Wolfzettel reminds us of the paradox of the very transformation of the Grail (here, a myth) into a ‘historical symbol’ that would bring about ‘the end of history’ (p. 92). Wolfzettel explores the contextual ideologies that predicated the use of the Grail in the construction of a providential genealogy which ‘highlights the crisis of the chivalric class’ (p. 94), thus closing gaps in history through seemingly smooth descent. Particularly illuminating is his thesis that the Old French Vulgate (c. 1220–1230) attempts to ‘restore the open history of chivalric biography’, with Lancelot getting ‘biographical consistency’ over any other Arthurian knight (p. 97). Perceforest (fourteenth century) modulates these ideologies in novel ways, such as by making the Grail a lesser interest, particularly in its spiritual significance.
The following two chapters tackle the engagement of Middle English romance and chronicle with history. Edward Donald Kennedy highlights the central place occupied by the prose Brut chronicle tradition, its adaptation in the fifteenth-century verse chronicle by John Hardyng and the fourteenth-century poem Alliterative Morte Arthure, in shaping a specific relationship between the reading of Arthurian stories – with their focus on kingship and succession – and fitting in with late medieval political agendas. Helen Cooper turns to Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century Morte Darthur, the last medieval Arthurian romance, to discuss its innovation (in prose style, but also as a backwards glance over the medieval history of Arthurian writing), standing on the cusp between the end of the Middle Ages and the start of pre-modernity.
The last two sections in the volume are dedicated to European manifestations of Arthurian romance tropes in post-medieval sixteenth-century literature (predominantly in France, Italy and Spain, with one example from England). Jean-Pierre Martin examines the interface between chanson de geste and Arthurian romance, highlighting how the former features ‘primordial activity’ and ‘a collectivity whose history it relates’ (p. 149). Riccardo Bruscagli, on the other hand, reassesses the birth of the legendary hero Ruggiero in the genealogies of the Estes family and his appearance in Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1482–1483). Ruggiero becomes an ancestor of a great dynasty of legendary heroes descended from Troy, leading to the birth of no less than the legendary heroes of other lands (including Beves of Hampton in England) in what may appear as an act of imitation by the Elizabethan court, both in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) and in Thomas Hughes’s work, where the ancestry of Troy is emphasised (p. 157). Finally, Praloran’s fascinating study of temporality and narrative structure in late medieval European romance shows how the technique of entrelacement is useful in an examination of Amadis de Gaula (1508), where it is ‘emptied […] of its cognitive function’, leading to a narrative filled with ‘formulaic psychology’ (pp. 177–178). The result is a conception of time that ‘actually hinders the reader’s cognitive process’ (p. 182) – the opposite of the effect of entrelacement in French Arthurian romance.
In the last section of the volume, four contributions tackle the problematic absence of historicity in the treatment of romance, primarily in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581) (chapters by Daniel Javitch and David Quint); in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) (Gordon Teskey); and in Corral and Cervantes (Marina S. Brownlee). While Javitch focuses on Tasso’s ‘conflicted attitude toward romance’, even when it’s ‘delectable’ aspects are deemed useful (p. 198), Quint examines the ‘self-conscious poetic fiction, which makes a good story’ as encountered in Tasso (p. 204). Spenser’s Faerie Queene is approached from the point of view of history, with Teskey concluding, along the way, that ‘allegory works together with romance […] to accomplish the thinking of history’ (p. 221). Finally, Brownlee examines the figures of La Cava and Zoraida in Pedro del Corral’s Crónica sarracina (c. 1430) and the ‘Captive’s Tale’ inserted by Cervantes in his Don Quijote (1605) as bookends of the genre of romance in Spanish. To Brownlee, the two female characters are ‘virtually figures for the hybrid character of romance and history at large’ (p. 229).
This is a fascinating and very informative collection of essays, which succeeds admirably in collectively breaking some new ground in the exploration of topics and texts that are otherwise covered extensively in their respective fields of study. In particular, the cross-cultural, cross-linguistic analyses in the first two sections and the last are illuminating. The editor’s framing chapters also help define the concept of time, history and, crucial to the discussion in many of the chapters, memory. While not all chapters bring new interpretations to the texts they focus on, together they convey a persuasive picture of medieval romance scholarship and the intersections between the historical contexts they inhabited and responded to.