Cultural Translations in Medieval Romance ed. by Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cultural Translations in Medieval Romance ed. by Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch Nicole Clifton victoria flood and megan g. leitch, eds., Cultural Translations in Medieval Romance. Studies in Medieval Romance. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2022. Pp. viii, 270. isbn: 978–1–84384–620–8. $120. Thirteen essays from the 2018 Romance in Medieval Britain conference at Cardiff University appear in this cohesive collection that explores translation between both languages and cultural contexts. All the medieval languages of the British Isles are represented: English, French, Irish, Latin, Norse, and Welsh. Shared languages, themes, and approaches link groups of essays, so that the collection flows smoothly, with discernable sections on Welsh; gender and sexuality; structural, cultural, or historical linkages between Old French and Middle English romance; and late developments in the genre. Flood and Leitch’s introduction lays out the central issues of the volume: frameworks in which to understand medieval translation, and the ‘mobility’ of romance. Frameworks begin with the translatio studii et imperii, a fundamental concept for medieval writers and readers, but which most commonly applies to Latin-to-vernacular translations, whereas medieval romance often shifts from one vernacular to another without strong implications for imperium. Flood and Leitch draw attention to recent work arguing that translated texts must be understood in the context of the ‘cultural conditions and assumptions of target cultures,’ including ‘shared sites of imaginative investment’ (p. 6); these are the conditions, assumptions, and sites that the thirteen essays explore. Mobility includes not only physical movement of manuscripts and readers, but also social and generic movements made by romance as the genre became more expansive. Helen Fulton’s essay, ‘Romantic Wales: Imagining Wales in Medieval Insular Romance,’ opens with questions about the ways romances construct Welsh settings. Before the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, ‘the Welsh were co-producers’ of a romantic Wales, alongside writers in Latin and French (p. 24). After Edward I conquered Wales, the Welsh aristocratic audience for romance disappeared, and the Wales that appeared in English texts was a rugged, uncivilized wasteland. Jessica J. Lockhart follows Fulton’s questions with analysis of the Erroneous Watchman Device as it appears in Branwen uerch Lyr and two Latin texts, De Ortu Waluuanii and Historia Meriadoci. Lockhart argues that romance marvels draw on riddles to create texts that reward ‘interpretive gameplay’ (p. 54). Victoria Flood turns Fulton’s approach backwards, asking what French romance tropes offered late medieval Welsh writers in ‘The Supernatural Company in Cultural Translation: Dafydd ap Gwilym and [End Page 99] the Roman de la Rose Tradition.’ Flood suggests that the Roman’s Garden of Pleasure influences both characters and settings in Dafydd ap Gwilym’s poetry. Attention to Celtic material continues in Helen Cooper’s essay on William of Palerne in its English, French, and Irish versions, and the changes it underwent over at least four centuries of reading, copying, and printing. Cooper asks why William ‘needed less cultural translation’ (p. 87) than other texts. Noting that positively-portrayed women remain central in all its versions, Cooper concludes that its ‘exceptionality . . . . would seem to rely on its quality as story’ (p. 100). Carl Phelpstead likewise focuses on gender constructions in his essay on Guruns strengleikr (The Lay of Gurun). The text displays complicated triangular relationships among the four main characters: Gurun, his beloved, her dwarf, and a harper. Phelpstead relates the dwarf’s evaluation of Gurun to Norse notions of masculinity, concluding that the lay ‘allows a Norwegian audience to make sense of a new world of courtly values in terms of their existing ideology of gender and sexuality’ (p. 116). Neil Cartlidge analyzes word choices in the ‘Sadius and Galo’ section of Walter Map’s De Nugis curialium to show that Map’s use of romance tropes constructs masculine sexual identities very differently from those of vernacular romance, and thus ‘invites a reconsideration of the implied sexual dynamics’ in vernacular texts (p. 119). Turning to Middle English romance adaptations, Rebecca Newby tackles the problem of closure in Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon and the ways in which its Middle English translators resolve the Anglo-Norman romance’s less-than-courtly ending. Venetia Bridges addresses the central contradiction of...