MEGAN G. LEITCH. Romancing Treason: The Literature of the Wars of the Roses.

Abstract

This book describes a key political discourse of the ‘long’ Wars of the Roses, from Henry VI’s assumption of independent rule in 1437 to the 1497 Yorkist rebellion against Henry VII. Leitch has two major conclusions. First, chivalric romances of this period are preoccupied with a socially broader, more diffuse concept of treason than that typically found in romance earlier or later. Secondly, treason becomes less containable not only in this sense of social expansiveness but also because writers cease to invoke providence as its looming or ultimate corrective. These conclusions are illustrated chiefly by discussions of Malory’s Arthuriad, the prose Siege of Thebes and Siege of Troy , English versions of the Melusine story, and some of Caxton’s chivalric translations. The appeal of this selection is its coherence and importance when considered in the light of medieval audiences and mentalities rather than our own critical tastes and traditions. Romancing Treason looks to build especially on the work of John Watts, Richard Firth Green, Paul Strohm, and Helen Cooper. Watts is one of the historians of this period most sensitive to discourse and the political importance of language, and Leitch aims to do for the term ‘treason’ what Watts has done for ‘commons’, reconfiguring our sense of a term’s late medieval inclusiveness and charting its politically sensitive evolution. Leitch’s argument here is that, while earlier romances and contemporary official discourse conceived treason as a hierarchical affair of subordinates acting insubordinately, the term achieved far wider and more diverse meaning from mid-century, with all manner of betrayals vertical and horizontal falling within its compass. Crudely speaking, this temporarily reverses a fourteenth-century development, which casts Leitch’s study as a coda to Green’s A Crisis of Truth . Meanwhile, the providence-excluding strain which Leitch discovers in her texts fits the ‘pre-Machiavellian moment’ that Strohm’s Politique uncovers in the late fifteenth century, when writers began to think of new possibilities for human control of social and political circumstance. Leitch’s texts, insofar as they dwell on treason and do so pessimistically, have less to say than some of Strohm’s material about what can be done to impose order within the gaps of a providential master narrative, but she is alert to the implication that neglecting or refusing to invoke God’s discipline places the onus for political correction and organization on humans. This is all part of a strand of Leitch’s book that confirms and elaborates Helen Cooper’s account of fifteenth-century ‘counter-romance’, according to which an age of happy endings gives way to a bleaker trend of kin-killings and political ruin. Rather than calling the unhappy texts romances, and in line with James Simpson’s approach, I prefer to think of this as a case of romance (a happy ending being counted essential) hybridized with tragedy; but Cooper’s and Leitch’s characterizations of a profound fifteenth-century shift in the prevailing chivalric literary outlook are deeply thought-provoking however we categorize the texts.