Landscape in Middle English Romance: The Medieval Imagination and the Natural World by Andrew M. Richmond (review)

Abstract

When explored, the image suggests simultaneously different modes of looking at and representing birds. Movement through time (the modern and medieval) is both captured on a two-dimensional plane and freed by the godwits escaping the frame. In contrast to the stylized front cover, an austere black and white photograph by Brian Lawrence precedes each chapter, presenting a single species of bird important to the chapter’s focus. The list of illustrations (p. vi) replicates the captions that attend each photograph, which include the names of birds in modern English and Latin and selected lines of Old or Middle English poetry. Visually, the photographs are not just realism-infused reminders of the animals that inspired medieval authors. Their presence—although framed by human technology and aesthetic choices—affirms the otherness of birds, their strangeness, the inability to capture them (their thereness, their theirness) in a web of words, concepts, or images. If you wish to request a PDF of one of the book’s chapters, you might consider adding a page number to the start of the request so that a scan of the illustration will be included. (For example, request pp. 24–63 for chapter one, instead of pp. 25–63). The book closes with a glossary of Old and Middle English bird names (pp. 225–36), bibliography (pp. 237–54), and index (pp. 255–59). Heather Maring Arizona State University