The Arthurian World ed. by Victoria Coldham-Fussell, Miriam Edlich-Muth, and Renée Ward (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Arthurian World ed. by Victoria Coldham-Fussell, Miriam Edlich-Muth, and Renée Ward Dan Nastali victoria coldham-fussell, miriam edlich-muth, and renée ward, eds., The Arthurian World. Routledge Worlds. London and New York: Routledge, 2022. Pp. xxi, 579. isbn: 978–0–36–17270–1. $200. With a title like The Arthurian World and a contents-list of thirty-four articles by an international assembly of editors and contributors, including several prominent names, this collection would seem to offer the latest critical thought in Arthurian studies. A closer look at the individual subjects, however, reveals that it is not exactly a representative sampling of current scholarship. As the editors indicate in a lengthy and informative introduction, the actual scope looks 'beyond the canonical British and French Arthurian traditions of the medieval period to include works that extend the margins of the Arthurian mainstream based on their medium, their language, or the period in which they were written' (p. 1). The articles that follow certainly do that. The book consists of four thematic parts, the first of which, 'The World of Arthur in the British Isles,' begins conventionally enough with two concise essays on the early historical records and ancient Welsh sources by P.J.C. Field and Helen Fulton respectively, both articles having a bearing on the historicity of Arthur. Then unconventionally, perhaps, but in keeping with the promise of the introduction, the studies which follow venture into such less-explored areas of British Arthuriana as the Nine Worthies tradition; the death of Elizabeth I and The Misfortunes of Arthur; romance elements in The Tempest; and leaping forward chronologically, Renée Ward's piece on the sanitized Arthurian stories of the Victorian writer Eleanor Louisa Hervey. The section concludes by expanding the thematic margin of the British Isles to include a well-researched piece by Virginia Blanton on Guinevere in the plays of Richard Hovey, an American poet of the 1890s. The second section, 'The European World of Arthur,' takes as topics additional lesser-known works: the Byelorussian Tristan; The Old Knight, the only medieval Greek Arthurian work; the Melekh Artus, a thriteenth-century Hebrew romance; Viduvilt, a sixteenth-century Yiddish romance; and three fifteenth-century German public entertainments. The scholarly mainstream is not entirely ignored in this section. Nicola Morato provides a guide through the transformations of the Guiron le Courtois cycle over time and by country, and to conclude this part, a study by Martha Claire Baldon explores the relationship of the physical sense of sight to spiritual perceptions of the Holy Grail in the Lancelot-Grail and Perlesvaus. The third section, 'The Material World of Arthur,' begins with Alison Stones's overview of illustrated manuscripts from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, and while manuscripts are 'material' enough, there follows an array of topics which [End Page 104] stretches the meaning of the term: Sir Palamedes and his checkered coat of arms; Arthurian murals in Italy and Germany; British Arthurian art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the Percy folio; the printing history of Malory; and Guinevere's connection to Amesbury—her grave, presumably, the material connection. As in other instances, one senses the editors had some difficulty finding the right home for some of the pieces. 'The Transversal World of Arthur' is the title of the final section and it is something of a catch-all for a group of essays which, according to the editors, '… demonstrate the continued reinvention of the myth as it spreads across time and space …' (p. 17). That concept of 'transversal' seems somewhat inadequate, perhaps, when applied to the whole of American Arthuriana, the topic of the opening article by Alan Lupack which sketches some of the major figures, landmark works, and cultural movements involving the legend in America. Except for the articles on popular cultural topics, the essays by Lupack and Blanton are the only pieces that treat American works. 'Transversal' seems more applicable to the much narrower topics which follow: medievalism in the books of the Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren; The Army of Darkness film; the legend in modern fantasy literature; a survey of Arthurian films not tied to traditional sources; Arthur's world...