Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance ed. by Neil Cartlidge

Abstract

Reviews 257 modernists should be advised, however, that Braga’s concerns lie less with the genre’s immediate intellectual and literary contexts than with a larger dynamic, which he attributes to the perennial Western search for the lost paradise of Genesis. Although the reason-experience dichotomy provides a useful intellectual framework, it is sometimes cumbersome. It does not serve to order his diverse corpus into distinctive French and British traditions, since many texts appear in both parts. Detailed discussions of imagination’s place in the thought of succeeding rationalists or empiricists do not yield sufficient interpretive insights. And the treatment of verisimilitude under the empiricist rubric leads to some overly schematic characterizations of the French fictional tradition. Since Braga is at his best when detecting mythical antecedents or charting the displacement of marvelous worlds, one wishes he had foregrounded the mythical and psychological underpinnings of his argument. Nonetheless, this book offers an insightful exploration of anti-utopia’s early modern antecedents and of their connections to the larger story of modernity’s repression of ‘la pensée enchantée.’ Dartmouth College (NH) Kathleen Wine Cartlidge, Neil, ed. Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance. Cambridge: Brewer, 2012. ISBN 978-1-84384-304-7. Pp. x + 248. £50. This book explores the complexities behind the seemingly clear-cut polarity of hero versus villain in medieval romance. It examines the contradictions in and evolution of select characters and character-types, both intradiegetically and from a literary-historical perspective. Most essays in the collection concentrate on English literature, referring intermittently to French works as influences and models. However , six of the fourteen chapters provide meaty analysis of medieval French and Anglo-Norman material, namely the chapters dedicated to “Turnus” (Penny Eley), “Hengist” (Margaret Lamont),“Mordred” (Judith Weiss),“Merlin” (Gareth Griffith), “The Anti-heroic Heart” (Stephanie Viereck Gibbs Kamath), and “Sons of Devils” (Neil Cartlidge). In clear and careful close readings, Eley shines her scholarly spotlight on the long-overlooked character of Turnus. She deftly explores possible religious, social, historical, and political reasons why the heroic Turnus of Virgil’s Aeneid morphs into an antihero for audiences of twelfth-century Christian, feudal France in the Roman d’Eneas.With impressive breadth, Lamont traces how the ninth-century villain Hengist emerges as a nineteenth-century hero thanks to Wace (Roman de Brut) and other poets who grappled with the cultural and genealogical amalgamation underlying a nascent English national identity. Weiss’s skillful survey of four centuries of revisionist retellings tracks the moral degeneration of Mordred—from Arthur’s fellow (non-consanguineous) warrior, to Arthur’s traitorous nephew who incestuously desires Guinevere, to Arthur’s son by incest with his sister—and touches on countless medieval characters modeled on Mordred who mimic his deeds. In his stand-out essay anchored on Robert de Boron’s Merlin, Griffith reveals a treasure trove of rich representations and reinterpretations of Merlin: that shapeshifting prophet-magician, conceived by demonic rape (or adultery), who acts as a morally ambiguous independent agent, straddling the sacred and the sinful, at times threatening to usurp even authorial power. Kamath’s essay analyzes the allegorical Livre du Cuer d’Amours Espris wherein the author René d’Anjou casts himself as the hero Heart who fails in service to Love, bested by the anti-hero Refusal. Although the essay fits less naturally into the volume, it opens a welcome window into the emotional life of the late-medieval aristocratic male and adds a dimension of introspection lacking in other medieval narratives. The chapters dedicated to character-types present thought-provoking material (“Crusaders,” “Saracens,”and most fascinatingly“Ungallant Knights”where James Wade considers the codicological context of stories in household miscellanies), but devote little attention to French literature—excepting “Son of Devils” wherein Cartlidge examines the offspring of demonic unions (Marie de France’s Yonec, Robert de Boron’s Merlin, Robert le Diable) and probes such important issues of medieval identity as the trauma of recognizing one’s own sinfulness. Cartlidge provides a useful, if brief, introduction, but to appreciate the thematic threads that bind the essays, one must read the book. There is no comprehensive bibliography and the skeletal index inexplicably includes“kitchen implements, as weapons...