Malory and His European Contemporaries: Adapting Late Arthurian Romance Collections by Miriam Edlich-Muth (review)

Abstract

miriam edlich-muth, Malory and His European Contemporaries: Adapting Late Arthurian Romance Collections. Arthurian Studies LXXXI. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 199. isbn: 978-1-84384-367-2. $99.Miriam Edlich-Muth examines five late Arthurian chronographies, including Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, the Italian Tavola Ritonda, Ulrich Feutrer's German verse Buch der Abenteuer, the Dutch verse Lancelot compilation, and Michael Gonnot's French BN.fr.112 manuscript, in order to show how the adaptation process of each author can offer a better understanding of the texts themselves. Much adaptation scholarship focuses upon identifying a text's sources, noting differences and similarities; however, Edlich-Muth's work digs into how those similarities and differences compare to other late Arthurian adaptations, more specifically an author's presentation of a story's chronology and its characters, as well as the solutions achieved in the problems of creating an adaptation. From this analysis, she outlines certain shared adaptation strategies. Through diligent, detailed, and well-organized comparisons, this work proves that how a text is adapted matters, thus contributing to our understanding of Malory's work most of all, but also opening new doors for discovery about the other late Arthurian chronographies. In this way, Edlich-Muth provides her readers with a different kind of context through which to access Malory and his contemporaries.Edlich-Muth consciously uses the word 'chronography' to describe these collections. In doing so, she resists the more commonly used word 'cycle' as it does not offer the best representation of her comparative method. For her, tracing the chronological developments of the story as they align with the biography of King Arthur provides a better way to distinguish between the chronological and structural consistency of the five texts, as she explains in the Introduction. After emphasizing the value of this better adaptation vocabulary, in Chapter One, she provides the general overview of the source use of each of the five authors. Edlich-Muth asserts the importance of placing too much focus on source identification as it obscures the text itself. Instead, she points to the value of reading prologues, noting divisions within the works, and marking the methods of compilation; each of these access points provides a place to begin recognizing the difference between source influence and adaptor innovation (31).Chapters Two, Three, and Four showcase Edlich-Muth's close reading of how the texts employ some of the adaptation strategies she has identified. …