The earliest sources of the Arthurian legend come from a Welsh context. Arthur is presented as an inspiring warrior to his people, even in their defeat. In rivalry with Christian saints, he concedes. The French analogues use Celtic mythology, but are themselves an influence on the Welsh language texts. (CW)

Reviewed by: William Langland: Piers Plowman, The A Version by Michael Calabrese Arvind Thomas michael calabrese, trans. William Langland: Piers Plowman, The A Version. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2020. Pp. xlvii, 160. isbn: 978-0-8132-3343-7. $34.95. Michael Calabrese's new translation of, and introduction to, the A-version of Piers Plowman reimagines medieval England's great vernacular poem for our own time. As a translator, Calabrese animates the poem in its much-neglected A-version in ways that will undoubtedly hold the attention of contemporary readers and scholars, and especially those with little or no background in medieval studies. As someone who values reading texts in their original languages and tends to view translators as traditores, I was not only pleasantly surprised but also deeply moved by Calabrese's translation. Far from betraying Langland's poem, Calabrese delivers it in all its complexity and poetic beauty in an idiom that in many ways stylistically approximates and, in places, even enacts that of the original Middle English. To be sure, Calabrese's translation may call to mind several notable translations of the poem. The translations of Covella, Donaldson, and Schmidt are all, as Calabrese generously notes, works that he has studied, taught, or otherwise enjoyed; however, his translation stands apart from previous ones in at least two significant respects: 1) it is crafted to enable student readers to enjoy and understand Langland's poem and 2) it foregrounds a version of the poem that has thus far been largely neglected by students and scholars of Piers Plowman. So, what makes Calabrese's translation of Piers Plowman appeal more directly or even viscerally to modern students and scholars than any other translation of the poem? First, Calabrese takes care to render into modern English the rich variety of Langland's rhetorical registers in Middle English ranging from the demotic to the formal. Second, as Calabrese explains in his stimulating introduction to the poem and to the principles of his translation, he regards the A version of the poem as informed by conflict. Consider, for instance, the lines describing Waster's anger and pugnacity. Line 139 of Passus 7 reads thus: 'Then Waster got himself all angry, aching for a fight.' At first sight, we may not see much by way of poetic form apart from the alliteration. But when we listen to the line or hear it read out with a New York accent, the words 'all angry' come vibrantly, almost viciously alive, and sound like what one might hear on a subway platform. Likewise, the very next line 'Then some loud braggart burst forth as well' would call to mind or, more precisely, echo the opening line of the song 'Be True to Your School' by the Beach Boys. What we hear in such lines is Langland transposed or translated into North American cultural and linguistic settings ranging from New York to Southern California. Or, consider a few lines about Glutton's confession in Passus 5 (alliteratively entitled 'I'm sorry, so sorry'). Glutton finds himself in a bar amidst company that Calabrese translates in a way that renders them as much medieval as modern: Little Davie the ditchdigger and a dozen others—a fiddle player, a rat-catcher, a street-cleaner from Cheapside;a rope seller, a personal assistant, and Rosie who sells dishes,Godfrey from Garlic-heath, Griffin the Welsh guy, [End Page 150] and a big table of salesmen, doing some early morning drinkin'. (Passus 5.165–69) The diction and alliteration apart, the tone of voice, especially in the last half-line 'doing some early morning drinkin'' resonates with that of a New Jersey rhetoric in a bar, especially when one reads it aloud without enunciating the 'g' in 'drinkin'.' Such examples may suggest that Calabrese merely renders Langland into a demotic key. Far from it. Calabrese's translation exemplifies the wide range of linguistic registers that we find in Langland. For instance, in Passus 6, the register in which the tower of truth is introduced and described is stately and dignified: All the dwellings within, halls and chambers, are tiled notwith lead but with love and lowness...

Reviewed by: From Camelot to Spamalot, Musical Retellings of Arthurian Legend on Stage and Screen by Megan Woller Kirsten Yri megan woller, From Camelot to Spamalot, Musical Retellings of Arthurian Legend on Stage and Screen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 227. ISBN: 978-0-19-751103-9. $125. For a book on adaptations of Arthurian legend in musical theater and film musicals, one need look no further than Megan Woller's From Camelot to Spamalot. This enjoyable read takes up six 'musicalizations' of Arthurian legend that have landed on the stage or screen in the twentieth century. Among the famous retellings of the legend, Woller focuses on those written by Mark Twain, T.H. White, and Monty Python. For Mark Twain, Woller includes the musical A Connecticut Yankee by Rodgers and Hart and the 1949 Bing Crosby film, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; for T.H. White, Woller analyzes Lerner and Loewe's musical Camelot and Disney's The Sword in the Stone; and in the last pairing, Woller addresses Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the musical Monty Python's Spamalot. The stated goal of the book is to explore the myriad ways in which songs, musical characterizations, and musical theater productions as a whole shape interpretations of Arthurian legend and narrative. Each chapter is organized around a particular adaptation, first outlining changes to the characters and narrative before moving into a discussion of music. The book will introduce readers to ways that adaptations always negotiate between their 'needs' or 'functions' as twentieth- and twenty-first-century products at the same time that they engage with previous versions. As theories of adaptation aver, changes to character and plot inscribe their own values, telling us more about the current product than about the 'object' on which they are based. Thus we can see, as Woller does, Bing Crosby's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court as a vehicle for Crosby's stardom, an extension of his role in romantic comedies and desire to foreground the 'crooning' for which he was famous (Chapter Two). The book promises to explore the layering of intertextual meanings through subsequent adaptations, and in terms of plot, character and storyline the book succeeds. The discussion of the musical numbers and musical characterization is also commendable. Woller is able to single out the most salient musical details which she explains with straightforward language unencumbered by jargon, offering an evaluation of the cultural work they do. Thus, she shows (for instance) how particular musical topics—martial rhythms, homophonic choral style, and trumpet fanfare—contribute to an image of the 'absurdity of the monarchy and court life' in King Arthur's court (p. 21). I wondered though, if the musical discussion might benefit from attention to composition outside the world of musical theater, and indeed, if a case for intertextuality could be made that some of these, especially early, musical [End Page 117] theater productions adopt musical tropes from medievalist works (Edward Elgar and Benjamin Britten's engagement with the King Arthur legend come to mind, to say nothing of the Wagnerian operas known to have played a role in epic film scores). This would also serve to bridge the gap that frequently exists between 'high' and 'low' culture, one that these particular adaptations attempt to close. Where Woller puts different versions of the Arthurian adaptations into intertextual dialogue, the book is the strongest. Weaving together the shifts in narrative and character in each adaptation with an evaluation of the changes, Chapter Three, 'Interpretation and Characterization in Camelot,' begins with a rich analysis of Camelot that is well-grounded in the music and musical traditions, including operetta and the musical theater, and ends by offering an account of the political idealism of Lerner and Loewe's version that gave birth to the nickname for the Kennedy administration. For example, her discussion of the 1960 stage production focuses on musical characterizations of Arthur, Guenevere, and Lancelot, articulating ways in which Arthur is characterized as insecure, honest, and worthy of Guenevere's love. As Woller shows with support from her musical analysis, Guenevere's character is rounded out with more agency in...

Many see Aggravain as only a minor villain in the Morte Darthur. He actually ascends comet-like from 'extra' to protagonist as the book nears its close. His ascent impressed Wynkyn de Worde into choosing a woodcut focused on Aggravain and his scheming for his 1529 edition of the Morte Darthur. [DTH]

Reviewed by: French Romance, Medieval Sweden and the Europeanisation of Culture by Sophia Lodén Joseph M. Sullivan sophia lodén, French Romance, Medieval Sweden and the Europeanisation of Culture. Studies in Old Norse Literature. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2021. Pp. 216. isbn: 978–1–84384–582–9. $99. In this groundbreaking study of the reception of French literature in Sweden, Sofia Lodén convincingly shows how extensively Sweden and Europe's north were integrated into the larger medieval European intellectual and courtly currents radiating out of France from the beginning of the twelfth century. As Lodén demonstrates, the skillful translation into Swedish of narratives originating in French contributed in fundamental ways to the civilizing process and the Europeanization of Sweden from the beginning of the Late Middle Ages through the beginning of the sixteenth century. As her central case studies, the author analyzes four Swedish translations of courtly narratives alongside their ultimately French-language sources. To each of these case studies she devotes a chapter, in which she applies a separate, carefully chosen theoretical framework. Thus, she discusses the French Valentin et Orson and its fifteenth-century Swedish adaptation in terms of their authors' constructions of beastliness and the place of the animal alongside the human. And in a brilliant discussion of Paris et Vienne and its fragmentary Swedish adaptation from the sixteenth century, she employs ideas of gender to illuminate how these texts construct masculinities. Her remaining two case studies are devoted to narratives from the most important set of secular texts in the Old Swedish courtly canon, that is, from the so-called Eufemiavisor (or Tales of Eufemia), a group of three narratives from the early fourteenth century that were commissioned by the German-born Norwegian queen Eufemia, probably as political gifts for the Swedish court. For the Eufemiavisor's version of the Old French Floire et Blancheflor and its French sources, Lodén takes a close look at the very different roles that childhood plays in those texts. And with the best known of the Eufemiavisor, and the most influential of all secular courtly narratives in Old Swedish, namely, Herr Ivan—the masterful Old Swedish translation of Chrétien's Yvain—Lodén again turns to ideas of gender, this time however showing how varied the portrayal of female characters is in the French original and in its Swedish rewriting. Lodén's decision to employ different theoretical lenses for each of her case studies is admirable. Specifically, it allows her both to make use of some of the most significant current analytical frameworks in medieval studies and to choose that particular framework which works best to illuminate the particular narrative that the individual chapter treats. In so doing, Lodén deftly avoids a mistake common to many otherwise solid monographs, which use only one dominant theoretical framework throughout, even when that framework does not lend itself equally well to all the artifacts a monograph discusses. As if the author recognized that most readers would be interested in only one or two particular chapters, and not necessarily in reading her entire study, Lodén has chosen wisely to make each of her case studies stand on its own. In fact, all four case studies can be read independently and, indeed, out of order with no loss of comprehensibility. I would recommend, however, that those readers who wish [End Page 99] to read only one or two chapters also read the book's introduction and conclusion, both of which are excellent and which together concisely summarize the study's most important overall findings. Several other factors also make Lodén's study important and, as a work of comparative literature scholarship, exemplary. Thus, her focus is not limited to the consideration of Swedish translations and their French sources. Instead, Lodén extensively consults versions of these originally French narratives in other medieval languages as well, including, for instance, in medieval Spanish, Italian, German, Icelandic, and English. While holding so many strands simultaneously in the discussion of a particular narrative is perhaps the most challenging task of the comparativist scholar, Lodén manages such analysis almost effortlessly. (Only in the case of Floire et Blancheflor does...

Reviewed by: From Iceland to the Americas: Vinland and Historical Imagination ed. by Tim William Machan and Jón Karl Helgason David F. Johnson tim william machan and jón karl helgason, eds., From Iceland to the Americas: Vinland and Historical Imagination. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture Vol. 33. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Pp. 296. isbn: 978–1–5261–2875–1. $120. The contributions in From Iceland to the Americas do not read like occasional papers, the occasion here being a conference on the subject held at the University of Notre Dame in September of 2018. As the Preface tells us, it was the volume (its chapters presented in their penultimate versions) that gave rise to the conference, and not the other way around. This fact might raise readers’ expectations for the quality of what they are about to read, and they would not be disappointed: the individual contributions to this volume are without exception thoughtfully composed essays, reflective of deep consideration of their topic. The book as a whole coheres around a single fact: Leif Eiriksson’s visit to Vinland in the year 1000. Each chapter explores some aspect of this event and its reception in novels, poetry, history, politics, arts and crafts, comics, and films in the North American cultural context. The research and learning on display in each chapter is impressive, and each contributes in its own way to this thought-provoking exploration of the reception of a single idea. The volume is divided into four sections: an Introduction, followed by papers grouped under the headings ‘Imagination and Ideology,’ ‘Landscapes and Cultural Memory,’ and ‘Recasting the Past.’ Each sub-section contains four essays. Tim Machan’s Introduction, ‘Vinland on the Brain: Remembering the Norse,’ is a fascinating and lucidly written brief history of what Machan calls ‘Vinland fever.’ The [End Page 175] 19th-century adventurer Richard Burton had noted that Britain had ‘Iceland on the Brain,’ an obsession with all things Icelandic, and Machan charts how this affliction subsequently spread to Canada, the United States, and South America. Fueled by very thin historical evidence, this ‘condition’ revealed itself in a wide range of cultural artefacts, and it is this ‘Vinland fever’ that the book is about. This introductory essay is worth the price of admission on its own for the way in which it sets the tone and topic for the volume as a whole. In Chapter One of Part One, ‘Journey to the Centre of the Mind,’ Seth Lerer explores the central role of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth as a significant influence on the Anglo-American perception of Iceland in the literary imagination. His chapter explores the sublime and the influence of the literature of the day on professional academics who either were or fashioned themselves to be adventurers. Chapter Two is Kevin J. Harty’s ‘The “Viking Tower” in Newport, Rhode Island: Fact, Fiction, and Film,’ a gem of an essay that presents us with the history of this ‘Viking’ artefact, supposedly built by Leif Eiriksson himself. Harty’s argument begins with the 1928 silent film The Viking, in which the tower features, moves then to The Thrall of Leif the Lucky, the 1902 novel upon which the film was based, and explains how these works, the tower included, reflect the construction of an alternative American national origin narrative. This, too, is a theme that resonates in several of the other essays in the volume, and the Viking tower of Rhode Island receives attention in some of the studies that follow. Next, Michael Scribner’s ‘Critiquing Columbus with the Vinland Sagas’ examines anti-Columbus discovery narratives in popular works of history that use the ‘anti-discovery’ aspect of the Vinland sagas as a flawed pro-indigenous argument. The final chapter in this section is Verena Höfig’s ‘Vinland and White Supremacism,’ which addresses the question of why Old Norse culture is so popular with white supremacist groups in the U.S. The piece is a pretty disturbing exposé of heathen groups in the U.S. and their adoption of white supremacist views and practices. Höfig has immersed herself in this world so we don’t...

This essay offers a new approach to reading description in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I argue that description is choreographed in the poem through the circular movement of the carole dance.

In the ‘Book of Sir Tristram’ section of Le Morte Darthur, it is the Saracen Sir Palomides and not Tristram who reaches salvation through love, foreshadowing Lancelot’s relationship with Guenevere at the end of the Morte Darthur.

Reviewed by: King Arthur: The Making of the Legend by Nicholas J. Higham Christopher Michael Berard nicholas j. higham, King Arthur: The Making of the Legend. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018. Pp. xi, 380. isbn: 978–0–300–21092–7. $32.50. N.J. Higham has long given pride of place to the Historia Brittonum (829–30) as the Ur-text that established Arthur as a pseudo-historical figure. Now, in King Arthur: The Making of the Legend, Higham is pushing this thesis further, arguing that [End Page 141] pseudo-Nennius, the author of the Historia Brittonum, invented Arthur. Higham seeks to persuade us that we have no credible evidence (1) of a brief but glorious ‘Arthurian’ era of post-Roman British resistance to the Anglo-Saxon invasion, (2) of an enduring legend arising from a Roman commander stationed in Britannia by the name of Artorius, and (3) of a folkloric tradition involving Arthur that predates the Historia Brittonum. Higham adopts a two-pronged strategy to convince his readers that pseudo-Nennius created Arthur. One line of argumentation is intratextual and the other is extratextual. The former involves an exploration of pseudo-Nennius’ method of composition. Higham looks for evidence of original invention and ‘alternative facts’—a wanton disregard for the tenor and specifics of his known source material. Of particular interest are the ‘British protector-figures’ analogous to Arthur that appear in the Historia Brittonum, namely Bellinus, Dolabella, Cunedda, and Vortimer. He traces the names of the first three back to antecedent sources but notes that these figures underwent ‘systematic fictionalization’ in the Historia (p. 213). Indeed, pseudo-Nennius seems to have been mining earlier texts for usable names. Higham admits that he is uncertain how or why pseudo-Nennius arrived at the name Arthur but speculates that he might have ‘borrowed’ the name from a late sixth-century Scottish prince from the North Irish Sea area, one that was perhaps the inspiration for the Arthur of the early Welsh poem Y Gododdín (pp. 168–72, 214). By means of his intratextual analysis, Higham does not eliminate the possibility of an antecedent Arthurian tradition, but he does demonstrate that there need not have been one in order for pseudo-Nennius to give us Arthur. The extratextual approach to demonstrating that Arthur is pseudo-Nennius’ brainchild consists of a comprehensive refutation of all known arguments for the existence of the Arthur figure prior to the Historia Brittonum. Indeed, the first five chapters (175 pages) of the book are dedicated to this laborious task. In his earlier scholarly works, Higham allowed for the possibility that a ‘folkloric Arthur’ informed pseudo-Nennius’ historicization of Arthur. He has since changed his stance on this matter, most likely because he is now confident that the tract known as the Mirabilia Britanniae (The Wonders of Britain), which mentions two Arthurian marvels, was not part of the archetype of the Historia Brittonum. Higham holds that it was a later composition (c. 950) that became attached to British Library Harleian MS 3859 (c. 1100), the ‘best and most complete of the early versions’ of the Historia Brittonum (pp. 179, 226). Given that the Historia Brittonum is at the core of his argument, a more thorough discussion of its complicated textual history is a desideratum. As stated above, Higham doubts that there was an ‘Arthurian’ moment of post-Roman British success. The Saxons, he believes, took control of many lowland territories in Britain soon after the battle of Mount Badon (p. 163). His revisionist version of British history is not, in this reader’s opinion, persuasive. Gildas laments how in the four decades that followed the victories of Ambrosius Aurelius the Britons grew forgetful of the virtues of their elders, less vigilant about external threats, and prone to infighting. Gildas’ complaint seems to suggest that the Britons had achieved [End Page 142] a victory on a scale large enough to permit a false sense of security to take hold among his contemporaries. Higham in King Arthur: The Making of Legend succumbs to a characteristically Arthurian ambition: he tries to establish mastery over too much terrain and is overtaken by a quixotic quest—resolving the...

Reviewed by: Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-Century Worcestershire ed. by Susanna Fein Daron Burrows susanna fein, ed., Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-Century Worcestershire. Manuscript Culture in the British Isles Vol. 9. York: York Medieval Press, 2019. Pp. xix, 310. isbn: 9781903153901. £60. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86 is a commonplace book generally thought, on the basis of manuscript-internal evidence, to have been copied by Richard de Grimhill II in Worcestershire in the years 1281–83. As a voluminous trilingual anthology preserving a heterogeneous mix of prose and verse texts, its importance to our understanding of the Anglo-Norman, English, and Latin literary culture of medieval Britain has long been recognized, and the impetus provided by the EETS printing of a black-and-white facsimile of the manuscript (ed. Tschann and Parkes, 1996) and, more recently, by the full-color publication on Digital Bodleian has inspired this worthy collection of essays seeking to build upon the earlier work on the manuscript by Stengel, Miller, Meier-Ewert, Corrie, and others. [End Page 124] Delbert Russell argues that the copy of Wace's Miracles de seint Nicholas, with its combination of the terrestrial and the celestial, forms a bridge between the unequivocally pious and the sometimes shockingly secular material transmitted in the manuscript; he also offers a stimulating orthographical analysis which contributes significantly to the study of the copyist's scripta. Maureen Boulton relates the opening six items of the manuscript, a variety of pastoralia, to the enthusiastic promotion by English bishops, such as Cantilupe of Worcester, of the canons of Lateran IV, convincingly identifying minor modifications which ensure that the doctrinal material is entirely consonant with the cura animarum in the late thirteenth century, and demonstrating that these concerns are reflected in various of the explicitly religious Anglo-Norman texts which appear later in the manuscript. Sheri Smith discusses the organization and significance of the thirty-one prayers in the manuscript, appearing in six clusters organized in various ways by language and theme; an important conclusion drawn is that Anglo-Norman features as the principal language of prayer, with English a later addition. Marjorie Harrington explains the practical emphasis of the first section of the manuscript, as it moves from pastoralia for the soul to medical recipes for the body, and thence to texts including charms, experimenta, and prognosticatory material. Jennifer Jahner concentrates specifically on the experimenta—a combination of practical tips, chemical experiments, and party tricks—as a possible metaphor for the project of the manuscript itself, an exercise of trial and error as the scribe attempts to craft a new form of book. David Raybin argues that the French version of Petrus Alfonsi's Disciplina clericalis, as the longest text in the manuscript, occupies a pivotal position in introducing a series of literary texts; separate appendices provide a concordance of the French and Latin narratives, and editions with translations of the tales seen as analogues to The Fox and The Wolf and Dame Sirith. Marilyn Corrie exposes the wealth of misogynistic material present in the manuscript, hypothesizing that the Digby compiler's choices in this regard may have reflected his own predilections. Neil Cartlidge focuses on the numerous texts across the manuscript featuring an antagonistic relationship between men and women, concluding that 'the shared insistence on the inevitability of gendered antagonism is in the service of a determined playfulness, with gendered experiences and gendered perspectives being mined, in effect, as a source of sociability' (p. 161). Susanna Fein summarizes the Middle English content of the manuscript, drawing attention to the patterns of organization and providing an inventory of texts cross-referenced with other manuscript copies, as well as editions with translations of The Fox and The Wolf and Dame Sirith. Jenni Nuttall considers the use of paratextual features to highlight verse structures, with particular attention to the scribe's distinctive use of tie-lines. J.D. Sargan offers a detailed analysis of the numerous forms of colored initial 'A' found in the manuscript, comparing the scribe's experimentation with attested types to a jazz musician improvizing on the basis of learned structures. John Hines and Melissa Julian-Jones...