Reconstructing Camelot: French Romantic Medievalism and the Arthurian Tradition by Michael Glencross (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS109 and epilogue do advance '"the concept of a standard and authentic text," an issue of concern to Renaissance humanists interested in preserving the "English Homer"' (p. 74). Chaucer receives most of the attention (five essays) in the Festschrift, but the essays break no new ground. Gregory K. Jember's 'Confessions of an English Storyteller: Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales, ' begins with a consideration ofthe Middle English verb confessen in both its 'ecclesiastical/penitential' and its 'laic/common' meanings and examines acts of confession in the Miller, the Canon's Yeoman, the Pardoner, and Chaucer's Retraction. Jember's intetesting conclusion, that 'Confession becomes. . .a positive celebration ofthe modern, humanistic self can hardly be proven in a twelve-page essay. Because Jember does not define the terms 'modern' and 'humanistic,' I was left wondering whether he was locating Chaucer's confessional tendency in the early modern/Humanist movement of the sixteenth-century or in our own times. In contrast to Jember's over-reaching, Yoshiyuki Nakao in his 'SocialLinguistic Tension as Evidenced by Moot/Moste in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde,' reaches too limited a conclusion: that the poet 'perhaps pushed the ME moot/moste toward its functions in ModE' (p. 31). Masahjko Kanno's 'Chaucer's Conception of Originality' surveys medieval ideas of invention and auctoritas but at a rather introductory level. As I read this collection, I had the distinct and recurring feeling that these authors were working without access to the latest books and journals in the field. (On the other hand, very few North American scholars check into Japanese journals such as Poetica before we publish.) Nonetheless, several of the essays struck me as removed from current scholarly debate. For example, Akiyuki Jimura's essay is an interim report on a comprehensive textual comparison of Blake's and Robinson's editions of the Canterbury Tales, which are based respectively on the Hengwrt and Ellesmere Manuscripts. Since Benson's Riverside Chaucer replaced Robinson's edition in 1987, it was not clear to me why Benson 'will be dealt with in a future study' (p. 35) and why in fact we still need to consider Robinson. The essays in Essays on English Literature and Language are pleasant, but none of them show the incisiveness of the Noguchi's own work. Several seem pedestrian in comparison. Still I am grateful that these Japanese scholars attend so closely to the literal and linguistic level ofthe text. In a profession given to abstraction and theory, the colleagues and friends ofShun'ichi Noguchi are to be commended for reading English texts carefully and thus keeping the rest of us grounded. KAREN CHEREWATUK St. Olaf College Michael GLENCROSS, Reconstructing Camelot: French Romantic Medievalism and the Arthurian Tradition. Arthurian Studies 36. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995. Pp. x, 192. issn: 0261-9814. $53. As the authot regretfully admits, 'the place occupied by the Arthurian corpus in French Romanticism may seem surprisingly and disappointingly marginal.' Despite that perception, Michael Glencross offers the contempotary reader of French and HOARTHURIANA English a careful analysis ofthe resonance ofArthurian material to the French reading public during the half-century between 1812 (the first edition of Crcuzé de Lesser's Les chevaliers de la table rondé) and i860 (the appearance of Edgar Quinet's Merlin l'enchanteur). His argument is essentially that the discovery, criticism, and diffusion to the general reading public ofArthurian material was integral to the development ofFrench medievalism during the Romantic period (roughly 1800—1860), even though Arthurian literature was distinctly less important to the French scholarly and public imagination than the Carolingian epic cycle or troubadour lyricism. This careful, indeed painstaking study consists ofsix chapters, somewhat diverse in style and of uneven interest to the Anglophone Arthurian specialist. Chapter 1, 'The Ideological Background' (pp. 1—26), is well described by the chapter sub-title, 'Chivalry, Feudalism and Romance in the Literary Critical and Historical Discourse of the Restoration.' Glencross sets up a neat quadrilateral of the liberal historians Guizot and Sismonde de Sismondi (Swiss, but influential in French public thought because of his huge Histoire des Français—31 volumes between 1821 and 1844—as well as for his less widely read De L· littératuredu...