The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England by Nicholas Perkins

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England by Nicholas Perkins Walter Wadiak nicholas perkins, The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture Vol. 39. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. Pp. xi, 270. isbn: 978-1526139917. $120. While medieval English romances have inspired readings in terms of 'the gift' since at least the early 90s, Perkins ambitiously reads the entire genre as structured around an ideal of generous exchange. In this remarkable study, the gift figures as nothing less than the founding gesture of romance and the impulse that drives these stories forward, in the process drawing readers themselves into the cycle of generosity and giving rise to responses in the form of new texts. Perkins concedes near the outset that such an approach might seem 'dreamily optimistic' (p. 31), yet the book feels bracing and even revelatory in its insistence that we attend to the ethical work of a genre that has often been dismissed as mere ideology. Chapter One reads a group of early romances (about a figure called Horn) as enacting the delay that makes the gift as opposed to the commodity. In romance, Perkins observes, it is often 'in the very delay or frustration of the return, in the gift's continuing journey, that narrative suspense and pleasure … is contained' (p. 44). The argument here is structuralist in its emphasis on the larger narrative picture, but Perkins adroitly zooms in to focus on, for instance, how the Romance of Horn plays on the idea of Horn as both a found object on the beach (le truvé el graver) as well as an inscribed or graven textual object, with a plausible pun on truver as poetic making (p. 33). Chapter Two extends the argument to the romances housed in the celebrated Auchinleck manuscript, though the links here are somewhat looser and more thematic, as Perkins admits. The last half of the chapter explores Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a story in which, as Perkins reminds us, 'the forme to the fynisment foldes ful selden', and in doing so he challenges what he sees as overly determined readings of the poem's many gifts and games. Perkins' writing here and elsewhere is frequently delightful, as when he describes Gawain, setting out for what he thinks will be his doom all trussed up in his sumptuous armor, as 'gift-wrapped for delivery' (p. 98). Those buoyant touches suit an argument that registers awareness of the darker possibilities lurking in romance but ultimately invites us to read the genre in recuperative terms. Chapters Four and Five, dealing with Chaucerian texts, feel a bit less fresh, but here, too, there is nuanced interpretation, as when Perkins remarks upon the limits [End Page 110] of our knowledge about the small keepsakes that Troilus and Criseyde exchange (as opposed to the public and ostentatious gifts—e.g., that heart-shaped brooch!—that tend to draw readers' attention). The notion of 'distributed agency,' first introduced in Chapter Four, helps Perkins to complicate the boundary between person and object in ways that bear upon gender-focused readings of, for instance, Chaucer's Knight's Tale, while Chapter Five outlines an intriguing notion of performative speech-acts as gifts, a return with interest on previous uses of this kind of 'citational' language. Since this is a book about how narrative returns with interest in subsequent retellings, both within and between texts, it makes sense that the final chapter, on Lydgate's Troy Book, is the richest in both close reading and theoretical heft. Hector's 'cyborg corpse' (p. 212), preserved by King Priam (via a weirdly intricate system of gold tubes) in a bid to raise the morale of the Trojans, becomes in Perkins' incisive reading an 'aureate body' (p. 228) that speaks both to the elaborate quality of Lydgate's own writing and to the blurred lines between people and things in Lydgate's narrative (this blurring being, as Perkins reminds us, a hallmark of the gift). That troubling of the boundaries between the human and the non-human is central to Perkins' effort to imagine what he calls a 'speculative anthropology,' one that might allow us to...