The Exploitations of Medieval Romance.

The Exploitations of Medieval Romance edited by Laura Ashe, Ivana Djordjevic, and Judith Weiss. Cambridge: Brewer, 2010. Pp. x + 191. $95.

The Exploitations of Medieval Romance is a collection of papers first presented at the Romance in Medieval Britain conference in 2006 and now published as part of D. S. Brewers Studies in Medieval Romance series. At its heart, this is a collection of essays about the genre of romance, rather than the theme of exploitation. The latter term evokes a range of meanings, principally negative, and it requires some massaging to hold the collection together. Laura Ashe's introduction does the groundwork for this, categorizing exploitation in terms of the appropriation and adaptation, de-authorization, reading and misreading of source material. She asks the central question: "Are differences in transmission or translation reliable signs of new significance, or of the loss of old importance? When is a theme being appropriated for new uses, and when simply deployed for intertextual value? When is intertextuality a form of critique or mockery? How exploitative, finally, are these multiple retellings?"(l 1). Ashe's introduction places special emphasis on Chretien de Troyes's appropriation in Cliges of themes of "dynastic narrative of exile-and-return, inheritance and usurpation, marriage and children"(4). This point serves to remind us of the tenuousness of our expectations about the relationship between French and English romances. That said, the focus of the collection is primarily insular, although not Anglophone. Neil Cartlidge's "The Fairies in the Fountain: Promiscuous Liaisons," an investigation of Marie de France's Lanval alongside the Anglo-Norman fabliau Le Chevalier qui fist les consparler, provides a fitting introduction to the internal exploitations of Anglo-Norman literary culture. Eliding any generic distinction between lay and romance, Cartlidge demonstrates how the fabliau takes up the narrative motifs of Lanval for its own celebration of sexual promiscuity and commodification. At the same time, this intertextuality serves to shed light on how such tendencies were latent in the earlier lay and could not be contained by its courtly aspirations. Ivana Djordjevics "Saracens and Other Saxons: Using, Misusing, and Confusing Names in Gui de Warewic and Guy of Warwick" tackles a different kind of promiscuity in romance, the loose use of geography. Djordjevic demonstrates that the wealth of place names that help to establish a "crusading metanarrative" (30) in the early Gui texts gives way to a gradual "flattening and stereotyping in the hands of copyists, translators, and remanieurs in general" (31) as these names began to lose the topicality they possessed for the original audience. The changes in toponymy wrought by the poem's transmission resulted in fundamental reworkings of the narrative's representation of history, less from a tendency to update its significance than from a struggle to understand what meaning had been lost. Judith Weiss's "The Exploitation of Ideas of Pilgrimage and Sainthood in Gui de Warewic" demonstrates that the early Anglo-Norman version by contrast was already the result of a more determined negotiation between its putative historical subject matter, hagiographical and pilgrimage narratives. For the poet, "narrative plausibility takes a back seat to superficially enhancing his hero's moral standing," even to the extent of exalting the sanctity of a hero who is "not especially saintly" (56).

Melissa Furrow's "Chanson de Geste as Romance in England" similarly shows how the Anglo-Normans adopted the narrative of Charlemagne and the other heroes of chanson de geste as a "justification for the violence at the heart of Christian chivalry (63), most notably through the conflict with the Saracen other. Furrow argues that ubiquity of this form of Christian violence in insular romance is evidence that the romance in England made extensive use of the motifs and ideology of the chanson de geste. She suggests that "there is no reason to see the two terms in England as designating separate genres; instead they both are used to identify a group of texts, in both languages, that must be understood to be of the same kind as far as their medieval readers are concerned" (67). Rosalind Field's "Patterns of Availability and Demand in Middle English Translations de romanz" takes up the challenge implicit in Ashe's introduction of rethinking the relationship between romances in English and French, ironically, by creating a new taxonomy such as Furrow's essay seeks to dispel. However, in dividing the surviving corpus of Anglo-Norman and English romances in terms of the direction of translation, she reveals the contemporaneous nature of the transmission of romances of different origins, rather than a gradual shift from French to English or continental to insular. Field suggests that the general availability of romances in both languages and of both origins raises questions about the choices made by writers in terms of what to translate and for whom. Just such a question is asked by Diane Vincent in "Reading a Christian-Saracen Debate in Fifteenth-Century Middle English Charlemagne Romance: The Case of Turpines Story" Here the chansons de geste form a backdrop for a fifteenth-century translation of Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle. Turpines Story exploits the tradition of Roland's debate with a Saracen giant from the earlier work to bring together fifteenth-century concerns about "exchanges between ecclesiastical authorities and those suspected of heresy" (106). Her argument that the roles of both Roland and the giant Ferakutte--because they were not about "hot contemporary issues" (106)--could be exploited by both Lollard and anti-Lollard audiences might seem noncommittal, but it provides an intriguing suggestion of how medieval romances might have served as a literary catalyst for debate about larger social issues.

Corinne Saunders's "Subtle Crafts: Magic and Exploitation in Medieval English Romance" points out that magic, one of the characteristic motifs of romance, is an exploitative art, and romance writers use it to expose questions of morality, especially between the licit and the illicit. She covers a wide range of examples including Chaucer's Franklin's Tale, Partonope of Blois, William ofPalerne, Lebeaus Desconus, Melusine, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It is a pity that no space is given to Sir Launfal, which would have made this essay a an excellent companion to Cartlidge's discussion, as well as to Arlyn Diamond's "Meeting Grounds: Gardens in Middle English Romance." Diamond reminds us that romance makes frequent use of the garden as a space for "the crossing of boundaries between ranks and genders" (127). Examining William ofPalerne, The Squire of Low Degree, Sir Launfal, and Amis and Amiloun, Diamond demonstrates that the garden is a space in which "members of a household historically perform (or subvert) their assigned roles" (138). Anna Caughey's '"Als for the worthynes of be romance': Exploitation of Genre in the Buik of King Alexander the Conqueror' argues that the fifteenth-century poem "exploits the genre of 'romanys' to include as many different types of writing as possible" (139). Drawing on a variety of sources and genres, the Buik of King Alexander reflects the ambition of its protagonist by developing through a clearly delineated series of distinct genres. This attempt to create a sort of internal miscellany tests the flexibility of romance perhaps more than any of the other texts discussed in these essays, and highlights an underlying anxiety over categorization that haunts the volume. Laura Ashe's "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Limits of Chivalry" raises the possibility that romance has its limitations as a vehicle for the simultaneous promotion of Christian and chivalric ideologies. Ashe demonstrates that chivalry was in origin "an honour code by which the individual may risk and display himself to gain wealth and reputation', not one which attends to self-sacrifice, death, or any other effacement of the individual;" she then makes the provocative claim that "it is not possible to die for chivalry" (163). The Gawain-poet, she argues, exploited the ancient trope of the beheading game "as a means of exposing the emptiness at the core of the chivalric project" (164). The poem contrasts Gawain's external chivalric success in returning safely with his internal moral failure.

Exploitation is then ultimately about the ways in which romances use, transmit, and adapt their source materials. This is not a particularly new approach to the genre, nor does the collection provide a single perspective on how romances exploit their sources, except to demonstrate that the genre owed much of its success to its adaptability. But the individual essays present a dazzling display of individual instances of such adaptability and serve to illuminate how the self-conscious literariness of medieval romances, including some lesser-known ones, created a fruitful interaction between their sources and their social, political, and literary milieux. In many cases, they will point us to new directions of investigation or even lead us fundamentally to rethink the ideological bases of these works.

Scott Kleinman

California State University, Northridge

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Author:	Kleinman, Scott
Publication:	Philological Quarterly
Article Type:	Book review
Date:	Jan 1, 2012
Words:	1442
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