Romance Reading on the Book: Essays on Medieval Narrative presented to Maldwyn Mills.

TAYLOR, ANDREW

Romance Reading on the Book: Essays on Medieval Narrative presented to Maldwyn Mills. Ed. by JENNIFER FELLOWS, ROSALIND FIELD, GILLIAN ROGERS, and JUDITH WEISS. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 1996. xii +307 pp. [pound]35.

These sixteen essays deal for the most part with Middle English romance or its early modern legacy. In keeping with the title, many of the contributors are engaged in the literary rehabilitation of the romances for modern readers; others are concerned with historical readers, approached primarily through the manuscripts -- interests that reflect those of Maldwyn Mills himself, who edited several of the Middle English romances and defended them with gusto.

As Jennifer Fellows shows in tracing the early printed editions of Sir Bevis of Hampton, there is a long history of mocking the romances as frivolous or artistically inept. It is only comparatively recently that the romances began to receive respectful critical scrutiny, a shift in approach well captured in Derek Pearsall's reading of Sir Orfeo. Pearsall describes teaching the poem some thirty years ago, when he was primarily concerned with philological questions ('the word owy, as a possible Kentish dialect form, was a very exciting feature of the poem' (p. 51)) and openly scornful of the poem's artistry. Some thirty years later, he considers Sir Orfeo 'a small poetic miracle', and his close reading does much to substantiate this claim. Stephen Shepherd traces a similar path, reclaiming the much-maligned Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell as a complex burlesque that plays against Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale and shams, rather than demonstrates, ineptitude.

Margaret Robson confronts a different problem, the 'prissy goodness' (p. 65)of the heroine in Emare. Robson reclaims the romance by reading Emare's masochism as a strategy 'which the heroine adopts as a method of coping with patriarchal restrictions on female desire' (p. 64). Her reading concentrates especially on Emare's use of the magical robe given her by the Sultan's daughter, which is in a sense a message from one woman to another, and on Emare's erotic relation to her father. Elizabeth Williams also touches on the connections between the erotic and the magical in her treatment of the fairy mistress from Lanval to Sir Lambewell, challenging A. C. Spearing's recent study of voyeurism on several points.

John Simons offers a study of Robert Parry's Moderatus, an example of the little-known genre of Elizabethan prose fiction. Here too the drive is to vindication; Simons asserts that this hybrid of pastoral and Spanish chivalric romance is a 'surprisingly sophisticated and self-aware text' that frustrates generic expectations deliberately (p. 248).

P. J. C. Field tackles one of the most pressing cruces for any modern reader of Malory's Morte Darthur, Arthur's command to cast out to sea all boys born on May Day, making him almost a second Herod. Field argues that Malory's treatment of the incident draws on that in a lost, fuller version of the alliterative Morte Arthure which vilified the king, that as Malory continued in his project he came to rely far more heavily on the treatment in his 'French books', and that he simply never got around to revising this early passage.

Two of the essays reconstruct possible historical contexts for the romances. Carol Meale examines MS Ashmole 45, a presentation copy of The Erle of Tolous, which is a rarity, since it appears to have been commissioned by a prosperous bourgeois to give to his wife or prospective wife. Rosamund Allen argues that The Awntyrs oV Arthure alludes to the fortunes of the Neville family and that it may have been written to celebrate Richard Neville's marriage in 1425. There has hitherto been no agreement on the poem's date and little discussion of its immediate audience. Allen's dating of 1424-25 seems plausible and the association with the border country, especially Carlisle, and the interests of the gentry is strong. Allen acknowledges that the evidence to link the poem to the Neville family and Richard's marriage in particular is not conclusive, but what she offers is certainly a reasonable hypothesis.

Three of the essays offer detailed treatments of plain fifteenth-century miscellanies of the kind that preserve so many of the romances. John Thompson explores the make-up of MS Cotton Caligula A.ii; Daniel Huws examines the work of two key scribes, still unidentified, who shaped MS Porkington 10; and Lynne Blanchfield examines the mixture of narrative forms in MS Ashmole 61.

This does not cover all the essays but it gives a sense of their range. As a group, they speak directly of the pleasure and occasional bewilderment of romance reading today and offer valuable hints as to what romance reading entailed in the Middle Ages. The collection is a fine tribute to Maldwyn Mills and his long-standing interest in the genre.