Malory's Le Morte Darthur : Anatomy of a Legend; Understanding Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; The Legend of Arthur in Literature and Popular Culture (review)

Abstract

96ARTHURIANA Katherine's shrine) would have been able to take 'imitative journeys' to that place by visiting those shrines in medieval England built to duplicate the saint's resting place (p. 51). Jane Carrwright attends to the various 'lacks' in the Welsh version of the saint's life {Buchedd Catrín) that distinguish it from other versions in England or the continent (the Welsh version is not concerned with Catrin's nobility or her education) in order to indicate the appeal the legend might have had for a broader audience. Jenkins reads a late medieval prose life of Katherine and places it within the context of'laywomen's reading, devotional practices, and manuscript production' through an examination of Harley MS 4012 which includes an introductory Prohemium indicating 'the legend's intended use as a private devotional and meditative text' (p. 154). Two essays are primarily concerned with how the legend was consumed and altered by clerical audiences. Sherry L. Reames reads breviary lessons on St. Katherine and detects 'a certain degree ofclerical ambivalence' about Katherine's rhetorical skills, her sexuality, and her mystical marriage with Christ (p. 208). Alison Frazier's essay on the Italian humanist Antonio degli Agli's unsuccessful efforts to integrate hagiography and historiography in his De vitis etgestissanctorum similarly notes that clerical audiences often found whatJenkins calls 'the polysemous nature' of Katherine's cult more troublesome than inspiring (p. 116). I would make special note of the essays by Anke Bernau, Karen A. Winstead, and Emily C. Francomano because ofthe care with which they present and analyze what Winstead calls 'the varied imaginings ofgender that marked the later Middle Ages' (p. 199). Bernau shows that a culture in which 'virginity [was] shown to govern and exemplify both proper bodily governance and speech' would have had particular interest in Katherine's ability to confound her tormenters with her verbal eloquence (p. 114). Francomano's study ofa medieval Iberian manuscript that includes DeSanta Catalina with other saint's lives and romance tales firmly places Katherine's legend within a larger cultural 'debate about women's nature' (p. 133). Finally, Winstead's study of visual representations in which Katherine is shown to have short hair— what Winstead calls 'an androgynous. . .aspect ofKatherine' (p. 188)—suggests that the saint could, in a single representative moment, appeal to both women and men. For those interested in the specifics of Katherine's cult, the broad range of the collection will prove enlightening and substantial. For those more generally interested in the representation of female saints, essays such as those by Lewis, Bernau, and Winstead are clearly in dialogue with current studies ofdevotional practices in the Middle Ages. KATE KOPPELMAN University of Montevallo Malory's Lc Morte Darthur: Anatomy ofa Legend; Understanding Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; The Legend ofArthur in Literature and Popular Culture. Video Series: TracingtheArthurian Tradition. Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 2002. $129.95 per video; $349.95 for the set of three videos. In the quest to appeal to an increasingly visually-oriented student body, academics teaching Arthurian literature often supplement their class presentations with documentary videos about the Arthurian legend. Most of the videos currently REVIEWS97 available, aimed at satisfying the educated general public's seemingly inexhaustible fascination with things Arthurian, were originally broadcast by PBS Television, The History Channel, Biography, or theA&E Network. These programs have been assembled from a montage of filmed still images, brief generalizations made by 'talking heads'—not always the best scholarlyauthorities on thesubject—and footage ofplaces associatedwithArthur.To satisfy theTV audience's 'star interest,' voiceovers by familiar actors like Leonard Nimoy or Richard Harris handle the narration, while the visuals all too often feature travelogue-like camera shots lingering over telegenic scenes of Tintagel castle ruin or Glastonbury Tor at sunset. Although inevitably these previous documentaries mention in passing medieval Arthurian texts or examples ofnineteenth- or twentieth-centurymedievalism, the literary texts and their authors receive rather short shrift. This new series ofrelated videos aims at 'Tracing the Arthurian Tradition' not so much by raising the overused question ofthe 'historical' versus 'legendary' Arthur as much as by chronicling the development ofmedieval-through-modern Arthurian literature and the endurance of the legend in...