Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England (review)

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Reviewed by: Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England Glenn Wright Saunders, Corinne , ed., Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England ( Studies in Medieval Romance, 2), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2005; cloth; pp. x, 193; RRP £45; ISBN 1843840324. One greets an edited collection with the expectation of uneven quality and cohesiveness in the contributions. Nor does the news that the project has been occasioned by a conference do much to improve the picture. This volume, comprising papers delivered at the 2002 Conference on Romance in Medieval England in Durham, is not wholly free of the liabilities of the genre but acquits itself quite well overall. Corinne Saunders' nimble introduction sets forth the theme of overlapping intersections of culture – French/English, Anglo-Saxon/Anglo-Norman, Celtic/classical, courtly/popular, clerical/eremitic – with reference to Sir Orfeo, probably the best possible choice for this purpose. 'To begin to understand the nature of romance in medieval England', Saunders writes, 'is to imagine this kind of complex process of cultural encounter as occurring with regard to all aspects of romance: language, sources and story matter, literary form, conventions, motifs and thematic emphases' (p. 6). This has the double advantage of setting an ambitious agenda for the volume while providing a frame within which a great deal of otherwise dissimilar work on romance can be seen to fit. Still, the extent to which the essays take on board the 'cultural encounters' theme is decidedly a case-by-case affair. Ivana Djordjević's examination of the role of Bevis's mother in the opening section of the Middle English Beves of Hampton certainly does. Using the tools of [End Page 201] translation studies, Djordjević argues that temporal and cultural distance between adapter and source has the effect of reducing the mother to the conventional figure of the malmariée. There are some difficulties in the execution. The assumption that the dynastic consequences of a failure of succession represents a theme to which an early-fourteenth-century English translator would have been wholly 'oblivious' is unwarranted, and reflects the author's desire that her primary text should exemplify the virtues of her methodology. Likewise, Djordjević conceives Beves's literary environment in terms of an overly stark romance/fabliau dialectic, and becomes distracted by the inessential question of how best to characterize the text's resulting misogamy. Nonetheless, the essay admirably demonstrates the applicability of concepts like 'repertorization' – whereby 'the special (and specific) textual relations created in the source text are often replaced by conventional relations in the target text' (p. 18) – to Middle English romance, and indicates a mostly untapped seam of scholarly production for those with the requisite linguistic skills and socio-historical acumen. Two essays address England's encounter with its own pre-Conquest past. Tony Davenport has disinterred from Lincoln's Inn Library (MS Hale 185) a late-twelfth-century Latin ecclesiastical history of Somerset that relates in fabulous style the accession of the Wessex king Ine and the wooing of his wife Æthelburgh. Folkloric elements abound, and Davenport reasonably suggests that these resources are likely to be employed where the historical record presents some unexplained discontinuity. Davenport's edition and translation of the Ine story are rationale enough for the article, even if its suitability for the present volume seems to rest entirely with the observation that similar interpenetrations of folktale and narrative history (e.g., Havelok) have received romance treatments. Robert Rouse considers how the Matter of England romances construct English identity with reference to an idealized Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon law, pointedly juxtaposed with the 'legal vacuum' of Denmark, Wales, and other alien spaces. Useful insights emerge from reading the Matter of England in legal terms, though a fuller analysis would need both to take account of internal spaces of lawlessness, like the greenwood of Gamelyn, and to examine how the dynamics of home and abroad differ in other romance settings. A valuable step in the latter direction is provided by Rosalind Field, who disambiguates the relationship between mainstream chivalric quest and the exile-and-return narrative proper, then identifies a cluster of Anglo-Norman romances comprising a distinctly insular subspecies, 'set in kingdoms separated by water...