The Arthur of the Iberians: The Arthurian Legends in the Portuguese and Spanish Worlds ed. by David Hook

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Arthur of the Iberians: The Arthurian Legends in the Portuguese and Spanish Worldsed. by David Hook David A. Wacks David Hook, ed., The Arthur of the Iberians: The Arthurian Legends in the Portuguese and Spanish Worlds. Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015. Pp. 576. isbn: 978–1–78316–241–3. $155. [End Page 178] The Arthur of the Iberiansis the long-awaited eighth volume in the Arthurian Literature in the Middle Agesseries published by Wales University Press and edited by Ad Putter. Those of us Iberianists, who have been making do with the seminal but badly outdated study of Henry Thomas (1920) and the more recent (in medievalists’ terms) study of William Entwistle (1975), must now do a happy dance, for David Hook has come to make all our Iberian-Arthurian dreams come true. No longer must we bear the scorn of our colleagues in Welsh, English, German, French, Scandinavian, Latin, and Italian, who, on the quads and in the pubs, tauntingly bandied about the series’ volumes dedicated to theirfields—yes, you all remember; finally we have a respectable collection of well-curated panoramic essays on Arthuriana to call our own. And massive and well-curated it is: the book consists of no fewer than twelve essays, several of them substantial, divided mostly by region (Iberia, Portugal, Galicia, Aragon, Castile, extra-Peninsular), by textual group (Post-Vulgate, Lancelot en prose, Tristan, Amadís de Gaula), or by discipline (codicology/paleography, literary history). Hook does an admirable job of marshaling these scholars, and while there is some duplication of material, as is inevitable when toggling between categories such as ‘Spanish’ (Alvar), ‘Iberian’ (Gracia, Cuestatorre, Zarandona), ‘Peninsular’ (Lucía Megías), ‘Portuguese’ (Gutiérrez Gracia,), ‘Galician’ (Lorenzo Gradín), ‘Aragonese’ (Soriano Robles) ‘Hispanic’ (Contreras), and ‘Hispanic and Portuguese’ (Hook), this detracts little or not at all from the volume’s appeal, which is considerable. Now for a brief overview of the contributions: Paloma Gracia, ‘Arthurian Material in Iberia’ (pp. 11–32) provides an overview of documented Arthurian themes and texts in poetic and literary production in Latin and Iberian Romance languages from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. José Manuel Lucía Megías, in ‘The Surviving Peninsular Arthurian Witnesses: A Description and an Analysis’ (pp. 33–57), analyzes the very scanty manuscript tradition of Arthurian material in Iberia, placing it in the context of the codicological and literary economics of the times. He points out that the great success of Arthurian titles in early print editions may have contributed to the scarcity of the manuscript tradition. Santiago Gutiérrez García’s ‘Arthurian Literature in Portugal’ (pp. 58–117) is a very sophisticated and rigorous analysis of the propagation and diffusion of the Arthurian tradition in Portugal. Guitérrez García pays special attention to how nationalisms and other political considerations have shaped textual production, diffusion, and the modern interpretation of the medieval evidence. In ‘The Matière de Bretagnein Galicia from the XIIth to the XVth Century’ (pp. 118–61), Pilar Lorenzo Gradín analyzes the Arthurian references in the Galician-Portuguese troubadour corpus, the Alfonsine Cantigas de escarnho e maldizer, historiographical texts, and the fragments of the Livro de Tristan. Lourdes Soriano Robles, in ‘The Matière de Bretagnein Aragón’ (pp. 162–86), gives an overview of the Arthurian manuscript tradition in the Crown of Aragon but also writes a cultural history of Arthuriana that extends to the plastic arts (frescoes, tapestries) and folklore (Arthurian-themed stories, Arthurian themes used as propaganda for saints’ festivals). She details how books containing Arthurian-themed [End Page 179]texts spread from the courtly milieu to the bourgeoisie beginning in the late fourteenth century, and how Aragonese authors wrote their own literary and historiographical texts featuring Arthurian themes beginning in the mid-fifteenth century. Carlos Alvar, in ‘The Matter of Britain in Spanish Society and Literature from Cluny to Cervantes’ (pp. 187–270), contributes a comprehensive and insightful study of Arthurian themes and texts in medieval Castilian literature and culture. He includes explorations of the specific reception and development of Arthurian themes in Castilian literature, especially in...