Landscape in Middle English Romance: The Medieval Imagination and the Natural World by Andrew M. Richmond

Abstract

Reviewed by: Landscape in Middle English Romance: The Medieval Imagination and the Natural World by Andrew M. Richmond Sarah Harlan-Haughey andrew m. richmond, Landscape in Middle English Romance: The Medieval Imagination and the Natural World. Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. ix, 287. isbn: 978–1–108–83149–9. $99.99. This volume offers a survey of late Middle English romances with a view to understanding how these texts treat contemporary perspectives on the natural world. Andrew Richmond argues that writers and consumers of these texts were aware of humans’ damaging impact on the natural world, and that the texts themselves reflect anxieties about unpredictable weather resulting from the Little Ice Age. This overarching thesis is woven through five interlinked sections, each of which offers valuable close readings of various romances—some of which have received little critical attention. The introductory chapter makes the strongest case for this twofold thesis and prepares the ground for the subsequent chapters with some particularly helpful definitions and disambiguations, as well as a survey of recent ecocritical work in Middle English literary studies, helpful for ecocritical scholars already working on this material and for those looking for an introduction to this interdisciplinary critical approach. The next two chapters offer twinned examples of Richmond’s methodology, both showing how literary landscapes (in the first chapter) and waterscapes (in the second) are layered over a contemporary audience’s ‘real-life experiences and anxieties’ about their surroundings (p. 2) and exploring how the ‘natural’ is always bound up with human economic concerns. For example, the first chapter offers a comparative study of William of Palerne, Sir Isumbras, Havelok, Sir Degravant, and the Tale of Gamelyn; these works’ descriptions of landscape focus on economically important features, such as mines, quarries, agricultural landscapes, and sea harvests—late romances like Gamelyn are particularly concerned with the anxiety that humans can so easily [End Page 104] lose control of their own surroundings. The second chapter explores the polysemous nature of the seashore in romance texts like the Sir Eglamour, Sir Amadace, and the Constance romances. The seashore is a place of play and chance, Richmond argues, but it is also a place where opportunists can take advantage of human suffering and capitalize on disasters like shipwreck. This analysis helps us see clearly the paradoxical nature of the seashore for late medieval authors. A particularly virtuoso close reading of the appearance of Guinivere’s undead mother from Tarn Wathelene in The Awntyrs off Arthure follows—this should become required reading for any scholar interested in the complex role and symbolism of water in Arthurian texts (pp. 86–95). The third chapter uses the methodological momentum built up in the previous two to explore land and seascapes that seem to be located a little further from home, but which actually help us understand how strong the imprint of British landscapes remained in the minds of both poets and audiences, even when they were ostensibly traveling in their imaginations through Jerusalem or the Far East. For example, Alexander the Great gets bogged down in some very British-seeming fens in Kyng Alisaunder (p. 125). Richmond tackles two difficult and often morally repugnant texts of MS Laud Misc. 622; he does not sidestep the treatment of the Jews in Titus and Vespasian and the supposedly evil inhabitants of Gog and Magog in Alisaunder, but the focus on environment allows him to explore other aspects of the romances—both texts feature hubristic leaders attempting to modify and reengineer their environments, thus providing food for thought for their audiences. These texts juxtapose a ‘Christian understanding of an hierarchical universe’ with ‘the audience’s everyday experiences of the unpredictable, at times antagonistic, environments of late medieval Britain’ (p. 115). The clash between the two perspectives remains unresolved in both poems, revealing a ‘window onto the daily concerns that even the most exotic landscapes of foreign romance could not allow late medieval English audiences to escape’ (p. 132). The fourth chapter connects the dots between Middle English romance and the ballad romances that continued and extended many of these narrative traditions into later centuries. This reader particularly appreciated the author’s treatment of these ballad-romances as just as...