Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, eds., Rethinking the “South English Legendaries”. (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture.) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Pp. 517; 8 black-and-white figures and 6 tables. £70. ISBN: 978-0-7190-8434-8.

Abstract

Reviews Malory adopted stylistic features of the Bible does not hold. Indeed, like the Bible, Malory employs both narrative and syntactical parataxis—stringing together episodes in the nar- rative and phrases and clauses in its syntax without the use of connectors in the narrative or subordinating conjunctions in the syntax. But these techniques are not original to Mal- ory, they were carried over from Malory’s sources, and they are so common in medieval writing that it is difficult to say whether they are features of biblical style specifically, or whether they are features of orality that emerged coincidentally in different places and in different historical periods. What does emerge from this chapter—and what deserves closer analysis—is the debt of the Arthuriad, in whatever language, to the Old Testament’s profound study of the human aspirations and failures that led to the tragedy of empire in the Deuteronomistic history (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings). Although this is not that book, at least Biblical Paradigms points the way for it. Michael W. Twomey, Ithaca College Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, eds., Rethinking the “South English Legendaries”. (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture.) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Pp. 517; 8 black-and-white figures and 6 tables. £70. ISBN: doi:10.1017/S0038713414002309 A ny new work on a tradition as extensive and relatively understudied as that of the South English Legendary/-ies (SEL) is welcome: with “over sixty manuscripts and some three hundred separate items in circulation in various textual combinations and types of books” (3) from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, of which no two are exactly alike, the SELs can certainly lay claim to considerable interest in their own time. This has begun to be matched in modern criticism, and the present volume makes a valuable contribution thanks to its breadth, its combination of new essays and reprinted classics, and its engagement with key predecessors, particularly Manfred G orlach, Klaus Jankowsky, Annie Samson, and Anne B. Thompson (who contributes the volume’s afterword). Throughout, as the title suggests, the volume aims to do justice to the complexity and multifariousness of the SEL tradition, with its combination of saints’ lives and temporale material on other church feasts. It acknowledges, both explicitly and implicitly, the “philological vertigo” (190) induced by sustained contemplation of the SEL’s textual manifestations, and attempts not to master or map these, as some valuable earlier work has done, but rather to think with them, taking account of variety while also considering what holds this “congeries of narrative” (4) together as something we can provisionally call the SEL(s). While the nineteen essays are as wide-ranging as their objects of study, they show a consistent and timely interest in audiences, reception, and manuscript culture; the vexed question of the “Englishness” or nationalistic tendencies of the SEL tradition is another recurrent theme, though as a whole the collection stresses regional, urban, and civic alle- giances rather than a coherent national identity, with particular attention to lay affinities (see, for example, the essays by Chloe Morgan, Thomas J. Heffernan, and Sarah Brecken- ridge, as well as Wogan-Browne, “Locating”). The strong first group of essays, “(Re-)situating the South English Legendary,” lays the groundwork for a more respectful and capacious attention to this “first multi-part nar- rative in Middle English” (212) by considering the tradition as a whole: we get incisive treatment of liturgical sources (Sherry Reames), style (Oliver Pickering), and vernacular manuscript culture (John Frankis), as well as Thomas R. Liszka’s very useful scene-setting chapter, which provides helpful definitions of key terms and an orientation to the phe- nomenon of the SELs. Throughout this section the idea of “open texts” is important (see, Speculum 89/4 (October 2014)