International Arthurian Research Articles

The Japanese Branch of The International Arthurian Society. Part One. General Issues and English

Abstract Presentation of the Japanese Branch of the International Arthurian Society, including a discussion of the contribution of its members to international Arthurian scholarship, especially on Malory studies, in English Arthuriana.

XXVIIth International Arthurian Congress, Aix-en-Provence, France, 11–18 July 2024

XXVIIth International Arthurian Congress, Aix-en-Provence, France, 11–18 July 2024

XXVIIth International Arthurian Congress, Aix-en-Provence, France, 11–18 July 2024

Article XXVIIth International Arthurian Congress, Aix-en-Provence, France, 11–18 July 2024 was published on September 1, 2022 in the journal Journal of the International Arthurian Society (volume 10, issue 1).

In Memoriam: Dr. Roger Simpson (1938–2022)

In Memoriam: Dr. Roger Simpson (1938–2022) Alan Lupack, Director Emeritus, Barbara Tepa Lupack, and Kevin J. Harty, Professor of English Click for larger view View full resolution It is with great sadness that we report the recent death of Dr. Roger Simpson, a member of the British Branch of the International Arthurian Society, but a great supporter and friend of the North American Branch and a frequent contributor to Arthuriana as an author and as a submissions and book reviewer. Roger had a truly amazing academic career. After earning a BA in English Language and Literature in 1960 from Wadham College, Oxford, he completed a Diploma in Education at Oxford two years later. From 1962–1963, he was Assistant English Master at Verdin Grammar School in England. From 1963–1965, he was Senior English Master at Old Kampala Senior Secondary School in Uganda. From 1965–1966, he returned to England and served as Assistant English Master at Aylesbury Girls High School. From 1966–1968, he was Senior English Master at Momenshahi Cadet College in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). From 1969–1982, he was Senior Lecturer and Head of English at Gulf Polytechnic in Bahrain. He returned to England in 1982 to take up a position at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where he taught and remained until 2003. In 1988, he completed [End Page 75] his doctorate at the University of East Anglia with a thesis on The Arthurian Revival and Tennyson, 1800–1849. In 1998, he was a visiting scholar at the National Museum of Ethnography in Osaka, Japan. Roger authored two important Arthurian monographs: Camelot Regained: The Arthurian Revival and Tennyson, 1800–1849 (1990) and Radio Camelot: Arthurian Legends on the BBC, 1922–2005 (2008). His other publications include dozens of essays and reviews on multiple aspects of Arthuriana. Roger was a scholar’s scholar who took immense joy in the painstaking work of unearthing forgotten Arthurian works and authors. He was able to present his research in a comprehensive and compelling way and to infect others with his enthusiasm for his discoveries. As his two books and many essays attest, Roger was interested in, and made contributions to, the study of Arthuriana in both ‘high’ and popular culture. Whether responding to questions at a conference from an established colleague or from beginning graduate students, Roger was always the model of earnestness, grace, and courtesy. He was the gentlest of gentlemen. To those who knew him, Roger was a convivial colleague, a charming host, and the most generous of scholars. Like Chaucer’s Clerk, gladly did he learn and gladly teach. Survivors include his wife, Paddy, and their son, Dr. St. John Simpson, Assistant Keeper for Iran, Central Asia, and Arabia at the British Museum. [End Page 76] Alan Lupack, Director Emeritus The Robbins Library, University Of Rochester Barbara Tepa Lupack Rochester, New York Kevin J. Harty, Professor of English La Salle University Copyright © 2022 Arthuriana

Necrology for Professor Fiona Tolhurst (1968–2021)

Necrology for Professor Fiona Tolhurst (1968–2021) K.S. Whetter Click for larger view View full resolution Fiona Tolhurst, bottom right; Evelyn Meyer, back to the camera; Molly Martin and Richard Sévère, top right; Barney Haney, top left; Joseph M. Sullivan, middle left; K.S. Whetter, bottom left: at the IAS conference at Würzburg University, 2017. Photo courtesy of David F. Johnson. Dr. Fiona Tolhurst died unexpectedly on 21 December 2021; she was 53. The death of a good friend or respected teacher or fine scholar is always hard, and Fiona was all of these things—and was these things to an extraordinarily wide range of people. But Fiona's death has hit many of us especially hard for coming when it did: in the midst of an ongoing global pandemic that complicates or negates conference travel, many Arthurians have been looking forward with more than usual enthusiasm to the days when we can all see one another again at a Branch meeting or Kalamazoo conference or the International Arthurian Congress. Suddenly, there is a conspicuous [End Page 3] absence in our Arthurian fellowship, an absence that echoes and enforces the poignant lament for lost fellowship spoken by Malory's King Arthur: 'nevyr shall I se you agayne holé togydirs!' Fiona Tolhurst pursued her undergraduate English literature degree at Rice University, graduating Magna cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa (1990); it was also at Rice that Fiona met her life-long love and husband, Christoph Neuendorf. From Rice, Fiona proceeded to a Mellon Fellowship and Princeton for her graduate training (earning her M.A. in 1994 and Ph.D. in 1995), eventually pursuing a Ph.D. thesis under the direction of the noted medievalist and Chaucerian John Fleming on what Fleming initially jokingly referred to as 'the trash literature of the Middle Ages': Arthurian literature. (Fleming's remark encapsulates what was, for much of the twentieth century, the dominant scholarly attitude towards romance and Arthurian literature, but Fleming was very supportive of Fiona and they worked well together.) After her Ph.D., Dr. Tolhurst worked one year at Texas A&M before taking up a tenure-track position at Alfred University, becoming one of the youngest female faculty members to achieve Full Professor. Fed up with American politics, Fiona and Christoph leapt at the chance to move to Switzerland for several years, where he worked in finance and she taught and continued her scholarship. When Christoph and Fiona returned to North America, Fiona secured a permanent position at Florida Gulf Coast University, where she was recently promoted (for the second time in her career) to Full Professor. At the time of her death, Fiona was Chair of the Department of Language and Literature at Florida Gulf Coast University. As a scholar, Fiona had many interests and published widely. She was a recognized authority on Geoffrey of Monmouth, particularly feminist approaches to Geoffrey, a topic on which she wrote numerous articles and book chapters as well as two monographs (see especially the commissioned chapter on 'Geoffrey and Gender: The Works of Geoffrey of Monmouth as Medieval "Feminism,"' in A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth, edited by Georgia Henley and Joshua Byron Smith [Brill, 2020], pp. 341–68; Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Translation of Female Kingship [Palgrave Macmillan, 2013]; and Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Feminist Origins of the Arthurian Legend [Palgrave Macmillan, 2012]). She also edited an important special collection of Arthuriana (8.4 [1998]) devoted to theoretical approaches to Geoffrey, a collection that she put together remarkably early in her career. She then co-edited a book of essays in memory of Maureen Fries (On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries, edited by Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst [Scriptorium Press, 2001]), and also published articles emphasizing the extent of C.S. Lewis' Arthurian interests (including 'Beyond the Wardrobe: C.S. Lewis as Closet Arthurian,' Arthuriana 22. 4 [2012]: 140–66). Throughout her career she also consistently worked on medieval women, particularly [End Page 4] Eleanor of Aquitaine (including 'Catty Queen Consort, Lioness in Winter and Loyal Queen Mother: Images of Eleanor of Aquitaine in Film', in Medieval Women on Film: Essays on Gender, Cinema...

Miroirs arthuriens entre images et mirages: Actes du XXIVe Congrès de la Société Internationale Arthurienne ed. by C. Girbea et al

Reviewed by: Miroirs arthuriens entre images et mirages: Actes du XXIVe Congrès de la Société Internationale Arthurienne ed. by C. Girbea et al Amy E. Brown c. girbea, m. voicu, i. panzaru, c. anton, and a. popescu, eds., Miroirs arthuriens entre images et mirages: Actes du XXIVe Congrès de la Société Internationale Arthurienne. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. Pp. 434. isbn: 978–2–503–57991–7. €85. This collection represents several important, and sadly infrequent, developments in the field of Arthurian studies and of medieval studies more broadly. It comprises the conference proceedings from the 2015 Congress of the International Arthurian Society in Bucharest: a conference that is rarely held outside of Western Europe and North America. In addition, it is truly bilingual in English and French, with French contributions slightly outnumbering English ones, rather than the more common obverse, and a significant number of contributors in both languages are from institutions in neither Anglophone nor Francophone locations. The volume, which runs to over four hundred pages, covers a breadth of Arthurian fields including literature, historical analysis, archaeology, folklore studies, and art history, albeit with a substantial majority of literary contributions. Within the literary studies presented, a majority focus on French literature, with English, German, and Spanish medieval Arthuriana also represented, rounded out by essays examining a Polish film (Lukasz Neubauer), Romanian folklore (Mihaela Voicu), and Italian poetry (Corina Anton). The volume’s key strengths, then, are its catholicity on many axes. Regrettably, that same breadth and inclusiveness have produced a volume that lacks cohesion. The opening section, ‘Iconographie des manuscrits arthuriens,’ is the most well-knit, and it includes several notable contributions: Alison Stones’ resumé of recent Arthurian art exhibitions and recently discovered art objects strikes me as particularly useful, both to art historians interested in digging into Arthuriana and to Arthurian scholars seeking to brush up on art historical developments. Alicia Servier’s analysis of images of Élizabel in manuscripts of Lancelot du Lac will be of particular interest to literary scholars of that text, as she shows that the images associated with the Corbenic episode represent a distinct interpretation of events. Unfortunately, the other sections are far less coherent, and there seems to be no uniting theme throughout—even the title, ‘Miroirs Arthuriens,’ is not explored. This would be reasonable for a smaller conference and smaller proceedings, but in the case of an event so large as the Congress of the IAS, and as substantial a volume as this, the book missed an opportunity to define a special thematic thread and produce a volume that invited greater conversation among contributions. [End Page 170] A key thread throughout the volume is the number of contributions that take a survey approach. A good example is Mihaela Voicu’s article, in which she posits resonances of themes between Romanian folk traditions, especially carols, and Arthurian literature. Voicu is straightforward about her aims, namely to make available to scholars outside Romania some aspects of these folk traditions and note axes on which they may be of interest to scholars of Arthuriana more broadly; in this she succeeds. Amongst the many contributions which take a thematic or symbolic approach to French Arthuriana, Anne Berthélot’s survey of approaches to the Grail in both French and English sources stands out for clarity and insight; unfortunately, some others primarily synthesize pre-existing scholarship on symbolism and Arthurian motifs. Finally, and this aspect could have been most easily remedied, the collection sets no basic standards for citation and style. To have slightly different styles for French and English would make sense, but in fact no consistency has been applied: some contributions use footnotes, some endnotes, and some in-text. Some have bibliographies, but some do not. Most disappointingly, one contribution contains no bibliography, citing only by surname and citing only direct quotations (one of which I have been unable to trace); it engages no scholarship later than the mid-twentieth century at all, nor does it offer quotation and analysis of primary sources. Here, what appears to be an editorial policy of maximum inclusion has done a disservice to contributors. Amy E. Brown University of Bern Copyright © 2021 Arthuriana

Call for Papers: Special Issue of the Journal of the International Arthurian Society on Arthurian Medievalism

Call for Papers: Special Issue of the <i>Journal of the International Arthurian Society</i> on Arthurian Medievalism

XXVIth International Arthurian Congress, Catania, Italy, 25–31 July 2021

XXVI^th International Arthurian Congress, Catania, Italy, 25–31 July 2021

XXVIth International Arthurian Congress, Catania, Italy, 19–25 July 2020

XXVI^th International Arthurian Congress, Catania, Italy, 19–25 July 2020

‘But rather I wolde sey: here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff’: Malorian and Scholarly Retraction

‘But rather I wolde sey: here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff’: Malorian and Scholarly Retraction Karen Cherewatuk (bio) and Meg Roland (bio) Late in life or late in their work, medieval writers could resort to retraction to soften the more brazen or less certain aspects of their work. Within the capacious ‘grete boke’ of Le Morte Darthur, Thomas Malory suggests but then retracts certain ideas, such as the nature of love or loyalty. He also contests his sources, contradicts earlier plot lines, and presents characters who take unexpected actions or change sides. This special volume explores and even celebrates the retraction: within Malory’s text, in Arthurian scholarship over the last century, and in our own work as scholars. The best-known examples of authorial retraction come, of course, from Boccaccio and Chaucer, both of whom retracted the ‘worldly vanities’ of their respective works purportedly upon their death beds. Many of the scholars contributing to this volume have had long careers in Arthurian literature; the idea of retraction as reconsideration opened up the possibility of approaching our work with a bit of humility, fortunately not of the death-bed variety, but to harvest, as Chaucer wrote, ‘newe corne’ from ‘olde feldes’ and to create ‘out of olde bokes . . . newe science.’1 ‘“But rather I wolde sey”’ began as a roundtable of Malory scholars at the International Arthurian Congress, held in Wurzburg in 2017, and continued at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in 2018 (see photos, below). As conveners, we invited Arthurian scholars to take a second look at work they published, at critical modes that had framed scholarly debate, or at aspects of Le Morte Darthur itself that suggest retrospection or reconsideration, perhaps even an outright retraction. While a few scholars declined our invitation, quite a number of our colleagues were intrigued by the opportunity to rethink their thinking. Their open-mindedness and desire to keep learning is an impressive attribute of their approach to scholarship. Frankly honest and spirited discussions followed both panels and have led to this current collection of essays. [End Page 3] In Under Another Sky, classicist and journalist Charlotte Higgins elegantly writes about the substrata and interweaving of imperial Roman culture with Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and subsequent British culture. She quotes the early twentieth-century Romano-British scholar R.G. Collingsworth, who suggested that his writing on art was ‘the best example I can give to posterity of how to solve a much-debated problem in history, not by discovering fresh evidence, but by reconsidering questions of principle.’2 In this collection, scholars who have devoted much of their career to Malory studies adopt Collingsworth’s example by reconsidering questions of principle and engaging in a lively reconsideration of Arthurian work with fresh perspectives and seasoned scholarly practice. Michael Twomey notes in his essay in this volume that, ‘in a broader sense, one could say that all scholarship and criticism begin in retraction, in that every new contribution implicitly retracts what came before it, without ever removing it from the scholarly or critical record’ (11). Not surprisingly, many of the scholars in this collection turn to the concluding passages of Malory as the characters that have held our hopes ‘pass oute of thys worlde’ (827.16). In a way, Twomey’s contribution undergirds this entire collection. He explains the Augustinian notion of retraction as reconsidering or reexamining a work in contrast to the post-Chaucerian notion of withdrawing it. He further identifies retraction as the process by which Arthurian authors expanded the corpus: through ‘palinode,’ which involves a single author countering his/her own earlier view, as Chrétien does in Yvain; through ‘recreation,’ which is when an author creates a new narrative about existing characters, as did the Gawain-poet; through ‘adaptation’ which is an alteration of an existing narrative, as demonstrated by any of the post-Chrétien Grail continuations; or through ‘supplementation’ which is an addition to an existing narrative, as when Malory brings pillars and robbers onto the field after Arthur’s final battle. According to Twomey, the logic of those innovative forms of retractions lead to a ‘both/and’ view of literary composition which allows renewal...

Preface

Preface Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack Kevin J. Harty has a long and distinguished record of highly respected publications in a number of areas. His books on business writing have long been standard texts in the field; his Strategies for Business and Technical Writing, first published in 1980, is still (many editions later) widely used today. But his expertise is multi-faceted, and it is in literary and film studies that he has made his most significant contributions. His essays on Chaucer and on adaptations of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales after the Middle Ages are of great scholarly interest and importance, as are his essays on the Chester Mystery Cycle. Kevin's 1993 Casebook on that cycle remains a seminal text for those interested in medieval drama. Given his extensive knowledge of the history of drama, it is not surprising that he was the obvious choice to be the literary advisor to Films for the Humanities, a well-known and widely distributed resource, when they created their series on The History of World Drama. But it is his work in another field—Arthurian Studies—that is unparalleled. In 1991, when Kevin edited a collection of essays on films based on the Arthurian legends, he was a true pioneer. It was almost unheard of to consider these films as a group with interconnections and with significant cultural insights to offer, but he recognized what scores of medieval scholars and film historians had failed to see. He coined the phrase 'cinema Arthuriana' for these films and—in his many lectures, articles, and books on the subject—essentially created a new field of scholarly inquiry. All the while, he has been incredibly generous to those who have followed in his footsteps, sharing with them his expertise and resources. A simple recitation of Kevin's publications, however, does not do justice to their impact, especially on an entire generation of academics, scholars, and students. It is difficult to overemphasize just how influential his scholarly vision has been on the development of Arthurian scholarship. Over the past two decades, through his writing, editing, and lecturing, Kevin has continued his pioneering research and expanded the field of Arthurian cinema even further. He never ceases to amaze his colleagues with his ongoing discoveries of little-known or neglected Arthurian films. A testament to his standing among Arthurian scholars is his election to a three-year term as president of the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society, and his position as Associate Editor and board member of Arthuriana, the leading journal in Arthurian studies. [End Page 3] Kevin has also broadened his interests to include all films with medieval themes. His landmark study The Reel Middle Ages, one of those classic and groundbreaking books that provide the research on which others build, is a comprehensive survey of virtually all films in all languages that deal with the Middle Ages, on such topics as the Crusades, the Black Death, the Vikings, Joan of Arc, Alfred the Great, Charlemagne, Beowulf, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and others. His scholarship brought many of these often overlooked films to the attention of those working in medieval studies and medievalism. Obviously the result of years of diligent and meticulous research in film archives in various countries, The Reel Middle Ages is precisely the kind of creative, far-sighted, interdisciplinary scholarship that inspires generalists, students, and other scholars. Kevin has never rested on his laurels: he continues to build on his vast knowledge of cinema based on medieval themes. Vikings in Film, a book that he recently edited, grew out of his research for The Reel Middle Ages and has in turn opened up new areas for scholarly discourse. He is also currently at work on a volume about Robin Hood and Joan of Arc in film that will certainly have the same long-term impact. Kevin has been—and obviously will continue to be—not just a productive and prolific scholar, but one of the most respected experts in the field. On a more personal note: we have contributed essays to some of his collections, just as he has to ours, and we have seen firsthand what high standards he has...

Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden. Tristan and Isolde: Medieval Illustrations of the Verse Romances. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2016. 462 pp., 538 Ill.

Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden’s prodigious volume on illustrations of the Tristan materials fills a gap in research on the Tristan illustrations by providing a single, authoritative resource for them. As the author explains, its purpose is quite simply “to list all the extant manuscripts, artefacts, and objets d’art, and to describe all the scenes depicted on them” (3). Building upon previous studies of illustrations by literary critics and art historians over the past century, including works by Hella Frühmorgen-Voss, Norbert H. Ott, and Robert Sherman and Laura Hibbard Loomis, as well as the exhibition of Arthurian art and literature in Leuven at the XVth Congress of the International Arthurian Society in 1987, Van D’Elden collected over 500 images from the broad span of Tristan sources, identifying them according to the manuscripts or objects which they adorn, as well as categorizing them by the specific scenes in the Tristan materials they depict. Van D’Elden’s efforts to organize and catalogue over 500 items, reproduced clearly and cleanly in fine detail, will serve as a valuable contribution for decades to come to our cross-disciplinary understanding of Tristan, one of the most important tales of the European Middle Ages.

Xxvith International Arthurian Congress, Catania, July 2020

xxvi^th International Arthurian Congress, Catania, July 2020

Gwerzio� for all! A look at the field

North American journal of Celtic studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (November 2018) Copyright © 2018 by The Ohio State University REVIEW ESSAY Gwerzioù for all! A look at the field MATTHIEU BOYD Constantine, Mary-Ann, & Éva Guillorel. 2017. Miracles & murders. An introductory anthology of Breton ballads. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978–0–19–726619–9. 250 pp. $80.00 (hardback). The occasion of this essay is the publication of Miracles & murders. An introductory anthology of Breton ballads by Mary-Ann Constantine & Éva Guillorel (2017). Every Celtic language has its particular treasures; among the treasures of Breton are the hundreds of ballads called gwerzioù (sg. gwerz, from Lat. versus). One can further distinguish the gwerz of oral tradition from the more literary broadsheet gwerz, although there was some degree of cross-pollination. Miracles & murders is concerned with the former. As explained in the preface (xv–xvi), the book is an opportune collaboration between Constantine, who identifies as a literary scholar, and Guillorel, who identifies as a historian; their combined expertise exceeds these two areas and embraces almost every aspect of the gwerzioù. Miracles & murders has the text and translation of 35 songs, and an audio CD with performances of 22 of them. This is much more than what was previously available in English: nine songs in the appendix of Constantine’s Breton ballads (1996: 209–250), and a few in Jacqueline Gibson & Gwyn Griffiths’ anthology of Breton literature in translation (2006). For many years, Constantine’s fine book Breton ballads (1996) was just about the only secondary literature in English on the subject; to this has been added a book and some Matthieu Boyd [mwboyd@​ fdu​ .edu] is Associate Professor of literature at Fairleigh Dickinson University; an associate of the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University; a contributing editor to the Broadview anthology of British literature; and a past member of the executive or advisory boards of the Celtic Studies Association of North America, the International Arthurian Society (North American Branch), the International Marie de France Society, and the MLA Discussion Group on Celtic Languages and Literatures. 180 North American journal of Celtic studies articles by Natalie Franz (2011), a little of my own work, and now Miracles & murders. I will not be able to do justice in this space to Guillorel’s monumental study La complainte et la plainte (2010), so I will not try. Suffice it to say that it is a milestone in the study of Breton oral literature, with important theoretical implications; if you work in this area, you need to read it. Its main contribution is to assess the value of the gwerzioù as historical evidence by comparing the songs to pre-Revolutionary court records and other archival sources. Overall, the songs are impressively accurate: only when the singers considered that there had been a miscarriage of justice do they vary significantly from the documentary record established centuries earlier. Miracles & murders is almost the perfect book within the scope it sets itself, being an ‘introductory anthology’. If you read only one book about gwerzioù (and if you are in any branch of Celtic studies whatsoever, you should), this is it. The introduction is in three main parts: ‘Song collecting in Brittany. From the early 19th century to the present day’, ‘The nature of the gwerz tradition’, and ‘Ways of “reading ” gwerziou’. ‘Song collecting in Brittany’ covers Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué’s romantic and somewhat embellished Barzaz-Breiz (1839), the more scientifically-minded Gwerziou Breiz-Izel of François-Marie Luzel (1868–74), and various collectors since. No single collection has stature equivalent to Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish popular ballads (1882–1898) for the Anglo-Scottish tradition, though Luzel is probably the best approximation of such. There is a catalogue of Breton-language folksongs by Patrick Malrieu that covers nearly 2000 items, not all of them gwerzioù; this was an unpublished dissertation (Malrieu 1998), familiar and accessible to specialists, but not to the general public. However , it has been further developed on-line: the sites https://​ to​ .kan​ .bzh/​and https://​ fv​ .kan​ .bzh/​cover orally-transmitted and broadsheet songs, respectively. ‘The nature of the gwerz tradition’ is comparable to the...

Review Essay: &lt;em&gt;Gwerzioù&lt;/em&gt; for all! A look at the field

North American journal of Celtic studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (November 2018) Copyright © 2018 by The Ohio State University REVIEW ESSAY Gwerzioù for all! A look at the field MATTHIEU BOYD Constantine, Mary-Ann, & Éva Guillorel. 2017. Miracles & murders. An introductory anthology of Breton ballads. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978–0–19–726619–9. 250 pp. $80.00 (hardback). The occasion of this essay is the publication of Miracles & murders. An introductory anthology of Breton ballads by Mary-Ann Constantine & Éva Guillorel (2017). Every Celtic language has its particular treasures; among the treasures of Breton are the hundreds of ballads called gwerzioù (sg. gwerz, from Lat. versus). One can further distinguish the gwerz of oral tradition from the more literary broadsheet gwerz, although there was some degree of cross-pollination. Miracles & murders is concerned with the former. As explained in the preface (xv–xvi), the book is an opportune collaboration between Constantine, who identifies as a literary scholar, and Guillorel, who identifies as a historian; their combined expertise exceeds these two areas and embraces almost every aspect of the gwerzioù. Miracles & murders has the text and translation of 35 songs, and an audio CD with performances of 22 of them. This is much more than what was previously available in English: nine songs in the appendix of Constantine’s Breton ballads (1996: 209–250), and a few in Jacqueline Gibson & Gwyn Griffiths’ anthology of Breton literature in translation (2006). For many years, Constantine’s fine book Breton ballads (1996) was just about the only secondary literature in English on the subject; to this has been added a book and some Matthieu Boyd [mwboyd@​ fdu​ .edu] is Associate Professor of literature at Fairleigh Dickinson University; an associate of the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University; a contributing editor to the Broadview anthology of British literature; and a past member of the executive or advisory boards of the Celtic Studies Association of North America, the International Arthurian Society (North American Branch), the International Marie de France Society, and the MLA Discussion Group on Celtic Languages and Literatures. 180 North American journal of Celtic studies articles by Natalie Franz (2011), a little of my own work, and now Miracles & murders. I will not be able to do justice in this space to Guillorel’s monumental study La complainte et la plainte (2010), so I will not try. Suffice it to say that it is a milestone in the study of Breton oral literature, with important theoretical implications; if you work in this area, you need to read it. Its main contribution is to assess the value of the gwerzioù as historical evidence by comparing the songs to pre-Revolutionary court records and other archival sources. Overall, the songs are impressively accurate: only when the singers considered that there had been a miscarriage of justice do they vary significantly from the documentary record established centuries earlier. Miracles & murders is almost the perfect book within the scope it sets itself, being an ‘introductory anthology’. If you read only one book about gwerzioù (and if you are in any branch of Celtic studies whatsoever, you should), this is it. The introduction is in three main parts: ‘Song collecting in Brittany. From the early 19th century to the present day’, ‘The nature of the gwerz tradition’, and ‘Ways of “reading ” gwerziou’. ‘Song collecting in Brittany’ covers Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué’s romantic and somewhat embellished Barzaz-Breiz (1839), the more scientifically-minded Gwerziou Breiz-Izel of François-Marie Luzel (1868–74), and various collectors since. No single collection has stature equivalent to Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish popular ballads (1882–1898) for the Anglo-Scottish tradition, though Luzel is probably the best approximation of such. There is a catalogue of Breton-language folksongs by Patrick Malrieu that covers nearly 2000 items, not all of them gwerzioù; this was an unpublished dissertation (Malrieu 1998), familiar and accessible to specialists, but not to the general public. However , it has been further developed on-line: the sites https://​ to​ .kan​ .bzh/​and https://​ fv​ .kan​ .bzh/​cover orally-transmitted and broadsheet songs, respectively. ‘The nature of the gwerz tradition’ is comparable to the...

Xxvith International Arthurian Congress, Catania, July 2020

xxvi^th International Arthurian Congress, Catania, July 2020

Xxv th International Arthurian Congress, Würzburg, Germany 24–29 July 2017

<b>xxv</b> ^th International Arthurian Congress, Würzburg, Germany 24–29 July 2017

Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate ed. by Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith (review)

HOLLY A. CROCKER AND D. VANCE SMITH, eds., Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp. 534. isbn: 978-0-415-66789-6 (cloth), 978-0-415-66790-6 (pbk). $125 (cloth), $55.95 (pbk).Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate is a powerful collection for long-standing professionals and graduate students alike. Unlike most essay collections consisting entirely of new scholarly work, Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate (MLCD) provides a rich contextual slice of medieval studies over the past twenty five years. While most essays were first published after the millennium, a few notable essays from the 1990's are also included (David Lawton's iconic essay, for example, 'Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,' first published in 1987), signaling the way in which these earlier essays have continued to exert significant influence in the field of medieval literary studies well into the 21st century. There are essays here from David Wallace, Bruce Holsinger, Patricia Clare Ingram, Christine Chism, the hardworking duo of Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman, well-known to Arthurian scholars, and many other fine scholars of medieval literature. Re-published essays from esteemed colleagues are worth reading for the first or fourth time. The resulting collection is akin to aggregating the best plenary lectures of Kalamazoo, Leeds, The New Chaucer Society, The International Arthurian Society, and the MLA all into one volume. For graduate students, the volume is essential reading as a means of entering the conversations that have shaped and are currently shaping the field of late-medieval studies, and each chapter offers suggestions for further reading that includes other important essays published in the last 25 years. The majority of the volume, however, consists of newly-commissioned work across a provocative range of constructs, grouped together to spark critical dialogue.Editors Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith, both contributors to the volume, attribute their inspiration for their methodological approach to medieval debate poetry. As the editors assert, 'Scholastic method . . . is a mode of critique, a testing of the possibility of what is being asserted, and an analysis of how it is thought about' (4). In this spirit, MLCD does not have one theoretical perspective but provides, instead, a spirited (rather than 'bloodless' [5]) celebration of polyphonic voices and debate. The volume is thus organized 'around a series of counter-posed topics' with the goal of enacting 'the capacious dynamism that is present from the outset of the medieval disputation' (3).Essays are grouped so as to enhance dialectical exchange within conceptual categories such as 'Form and History,' 'Belief and Thought,' 'Gender and Sexuality,' 'Memory and Matter,' 'Nation and Language,' 'Time and Place,' 'Science and Embodiment,' 'Period and Politics,' and 'Desire and Performance.' Within these groupings are essays on chronicles, ballads, romance, Chaucer, religious texts, conduct books, the Pearl Poet, the Ancrene Wisse, Hoccleve, fabliau, Mandeville's Travels, Malory, Christian-Jewish relations, and more. …

Arthurian Literature XXX ed. by Elizabeth Archibald and David F. Johnson (review)

elizabeth archibald and david f. johnson, eds., Arthurian Literature XXX. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013. Pp. xi, 169. isbn: 978-1-84384-362-7. $90.This latest volume in Boydell and Brewer's Arthurian Literature series offers expanded versions of eight papers delivered at the 23rd Triennial Congress of the International Arthurian Society. Together, these papers cover a wide-range of texts-from early Welsh romances through nineteenth-century editions of Geoffrey of Monmouth- and testify to Arthurian scholarship's flourishing interdisciplinarity as the field continues to build on traditional methodologies, such as philology and manuscript studies, while integrating postcolonial theory, cultural studies and ecocriticism.The collection begins with two essays that ask us to reconsider earlier readings of narratives in light of historical and cultural context. Helen Fulton's argument that Celtic magic is a 'fundamentally English colonialist identity whose strategy is to construct the alterity of Wales and Ireland as subaltern cultures' (3) clears the way for her examination of 'magic naturalism,' characterized by the 'agentless occurrence of wonders' (1) in medieval Welsh narratives. Her analysis of Culhwch and Olwen and Breuddwyd Rhonabwy centers on Arthur's relationship to this supernatural landscape in light of the political concerns of a people battling acquisitive Norman neighbors. While Cuhlwch and Olwen glorifies a Welsh past, a 'world with a legitimate king, who ...proves his supernatural credentials through his success in battles and challenges of the most challenging kind' (15), Breuddwyd Rhonabwy presents a parody of Arthur's sacral kingship in which the king 'has lost control' of both the supernatural world and 'the past as a narrative of Welsh greatness' (22). In the next essay, Michael Twomey revisits the perceived binary between civilization and the forest in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, asserting that the forest and park surrounding Hautdesert depict 'a settled, managed environment-part of civilization rather than apart from it' (38). Thus, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight does not valorize a wild nature in opposition to Arthur's court but rather offers a nostalgia for a vanishing institution and a 'culturally determined and ultimately anthropocentric point of view toward the forest as a resource to be managed, controlled, and exploited by the few' (52).The next two essays examine what Richard Barber calls 'the greatest of the unread Arthurian romances,' Perceforest (55). …

Arthur of the North: Histories, Emotions, and Imaginations: Introduction

Arthur of the North: Histories, Emotions, and ImaginationsIntroduction Bjørn Bandlien, Stefka Georgieva Eriksen, and Sif Rikhardsdottir The articles in this special issue are based on papers presented at the First International Conference of the Nordic Branch of the International Arthurian Society, which took place at the University of Oslo in May 2013. The aim of the conference was to mark the establishment and thus inaugurate the newly formed branch. Its primary goals were (1) to map the state of the field of Arthurian studies in the North, and thus lay the groundwork for future activities and collaboration among the members of the network, and (2) to introduce the Nordic branch to the International Arthurian Society as a whole by inviting to the conference prominent scholars representing other linguistic and cultural communities of the society, such as Latin, French, German, English, Dutch, and Welsh. The objective of the conference was therefore to promote international collaboration and comparative research, and to foreground the nature and potential of the studies of the transmission of Arthurian literature in medieval Scandinavia. The main goals of this special issue are closely related to the main objectives of the conference, that is, to present current innovative scholarly work on the Nordic Arthurian material and thereby emphasize the relevance of this material for Arthurian studies in general. The conference, as well as this publication, may certainly be seen as a part of a recent trend that promotes the value of cross-cultural research of Arthurian material and that seeks to highlight the significance of [End Page 1] Nordic Arthurian literary material for gaining a better understanding of the development of indigenous literary traditions.1 The papers presented at the conference covered a wide variety of topics, including literary transmission, cultural adaptations and social contexts, feelings and cognition, senses and the psyche, and identity and the self. The conference concluded with a roundtable discussion with invited scholars representing the various literary traditions. The roundtable discussions addressed the relevance of cross-cultural research for Arthurian studies. To paraphrase some of the scholars’ ideas: Frank Brandsma emphasized the nature of texts as agents of cultural transmission, and the dynamics and continuity of this transmission process across the artificial borders created by modern languages and cultural and historical contexts. Keith Busby focused on the role of manuscripts when studying the transmission process, and touched upon some of the problematic issues related to varying editorial practices. Cora Dietl argued that by focusing on the process of translatio, our research contributes to an increased sense of European political, cultural, and didactic history. Siân Echard emphasized the dual nature of all individual literary traditions, including Latin: that is, their centrality in certain contexts and simultaneous invisibility and peripherality with regard to others. It is therefore crucial to combine detailed knowledge of the specific with comparative and collaborative endeavors in order to reach a better understanding of how the various traditions feed into each other. While the conference papers reflected a wide array of topics, revealing a vibrant research community in Nordic Arthurian studies, the present issue focuses on three thematic strands that seemed to stand out as overarching themes. The editors furthermore consider these themes to represent fertile, new, and innovative approaches to Nordic Arthurian literature, which moreover have significant theoretical or critical relevance beyond the borders of Nordic studies. Unfortunately, many very promising papers and topics therefore had to be excluded to maintain thematic coherence of the special issue. The thematic strands are conveyed in the title of this special issue, and of this introduction, and focus on the making and transmission of histories, emotions, and imaginations. The concept of history here conveys the yet unexplored [End Page 2] territory of the reception history of medieval Nordic Arthurian literature, the representation of history in the extant stories, and finally the history of the manuscript variants and textual representation. Emotion and imagination are interlinked in their foci on the internal senses and cognition, while the approaches adopted here by the authors are very varied and range from linguistic analysis of emotive representation to landscape studies from a cognitive (or emotive) perspective. In the first article, Marianne Kalinke, in her plenary address, directs...