Taylor, Cheryl (2022) New Medieval Literatures 21 ed. by Wendy Scase et al. (review). Parergon, 39 (2). pp. 168-170.

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Abstract

[Extract] The seven essays in this collection maintain the high standard of scholarship that typifies the series (see the review of New Medieval Literatures 18 in Parergon, 38.1 (2021), 179–80). Three deal with medieval romances; two with specific manuscripts and approaches to manuscript study; one with Richard Rolle; and the last with 'the role of visual culture in constructing both the medieval idea of antiquity and the modern idea of the Middle Ages' (p. 190). All the contributions support their arguments with judicious analyses of texts, manuscripts, and preexisting scholarship, though some of the outcomes are inevitably more substantial and convincing than others.

In the first of the romance studies, Geneviève Young applies Michel Foucault's theories to the interaction between truth, power, and individual conduct in Chrétien de Troyes's Conte du Graal. She shows how Chrétien 'establishes a new version of knighthood' (p. 5) through Perceval, whose ancestry is troubled by the suggestion of incest, and whose path is subject to many false starts and reversals. Based an analysis of the conventional truth claims that pervade Middle English popular romance, Lucy Brookes's contribution reveals 'truthiness' (a term with considerable humorous appeal) to be 'an essential aspect of a romance's literary framework' (p. 165). Thirdly, Casey Ireland's erudite essay contextualizes the deer hunt in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the details of which appear to modern readers as both gruesome and excessive, in an account of pre-Conquest and [End Page 168] later hunting methods. While the poet's object, to raise suspense about Gawain's fate by emphasizing Bertilak's aristocratic ruthlessness and prowess as a hunter, is obvious, his purpose in so graphically narrating the butchering of the deer, except as supplementary entertainment for a courtly audience, remains obscure.

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