Landscape in Middle English Romance

Landscape in Middle English Romance offers a new approach through which “to interpret the textual landscapes and ecological details that permeate late medieval English romances” in the period ca. 1300–ca. 1500 (p. 1), and represents a significant step forward for writing about literature and the environment in its aims to balance relationships between “literary worlds and “real-world” landscapes” (p. 2). Andrew Richmond presents a convincing demonstration of how the “ecological contexts” of Britain in this period affected the development of even the most “highly generic and motif-dependent” romances (p. 2). A steady introduction (“Digging into Romance”) introduces Richmond's approach to defining landscape, literary-historical backgrounds, and the environmental-historical contexts of the period, as well as providing an overview of the remaining chapters. Filling a clear gap in the scholarship, Landscape focuses on romances thought to have been more widely read than ecocritical favorites such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, though this poem has a well-justified cameo in the book's closing chapter. The aims of Landscape, which Richmond achieves successfully, are both to raise the profile of these works, and to evaluate a body of works demonstrably better known by a wider readership, for their potential as sources of ecocritical and environmental enquiry.Chapter one, “A (Disappearing?) World of Opportunity,” delves into the mines and quarries of Sir Isumbras and William of Palerne, trawls the oceans of Havelok the Dane, and gleans the barren fields of Sir Degrevant and Sir Gamelyn, considering their authors’ treatment of landscapes and environments as a source of economic resources. Here, the categorization and management of landscape in romances reflects, however consciously, the economic and social entanglements between humans and the landscapes they inhabit and commodify. The latter part of the chapter considers “landscape degradation, climate change, and population decline” in the wake of the fourteenth century pandemic (p. 25), revealing “real-world concerns about the changing nature of post-plague England” (p. 39). Richmond identifies an important lesson in Sir Degrevant, whose nobles realize the “economic and practical value of their local environments from those who work beneath them” (p. 48) and have more intimate knowledge of the topography and management of their immediate environment. This is in keeping with approaches elsewhere in medieval literatures, chronicles, and so on, to models of good lordship (or stewardship) in which effective management of the landscape, its natural resources, and its human inhabitants is closely connected. It would be valuable, in these wider contexts, to consider how the processing of this post-plague disruption might compare with the impacts of other periods of prolonged environmental turbulence.Chapter two, “Chasing the Surf”, presents clashes between environment and social hierarchy in romances, examining seashores as ludic spaces for “play,” both light-hearted and hazardous, and as places where stranded property and people are subject to contest and legislation. Moving through Sir Eglamour of Artois, Sir Tristem, Sir Amadace, Emaré, and The Franklin's Tale, Richmond shows how beaches can be places for fun and for reinvention, but also for games with potentially dangerous consequences. The littorally sea-side space, immediately adjacent to the open ocean, serves a range of possible roles offering the “allure of momentary anonymity” and a (temporary) “escape from consequences” (p. 68), though its “fast-eroding sands and ever-evolving topography” are equally an “apt geographical metaphor for the misleading permanence” of play (p. 69). The second part of this chapter reveals romances’ preoccupation with the consequences of shipwreck and seashores as contentious and shifting ground for questions of possession (p. 70), particularly in relation to ownership of the land on which mariners and merchants find themselves wrecked. Discussion of Sir Amadace, Emaré, and Chaucer and Gower's Constance romances shows us how disaster for some, at the hands of impossibly powerful natural forces, yields great opportunities for others. Finally, the chapter plumbs The Awntyrs off Arthure and Sir Isumbras for “waterscapes . . . that ask their late medieval audiences to question the malleability of human identity,” considering their place in “Creation as embodied by the natural world” (p. 98).“Across the Sea,” the third chapter, moves away from the shores of Britain to what Richmond describes as “hyperbolically ‘exotic’ locales,” focusing on two texts which share a common home in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 622: Titus and Vespasian and Kyng Alisaunder (p. 99). As is, interestingly, commonplace in Old English depictions of distant lands, he argues that these places are interpreted and translated through recognizably British landscapes. These are complex relationships, and the former a particularly “messy text” (p. 114), which attempts to celebrate human mastery of the landscape at the same time as recognizing the impossibility of overcoming divine power over natural forces. Richmond argues that Titus and Vespasian is especially valuable because of the difficulty it ultimately encounters in failing to resolve these perspectives, while Kyng Alisaunder makes a virtue of the inability of human efforts to overcome environmental forces. Recognition of one author's frustration and another's resignation in this context makes the two a particularly fruitful pairing, and this chapter a useful case study in the diversity of approaches to environment in medieval writing more generally.Chapter four, “‘In His Contrie at Hame,’” returns to the shores of Britain to consider how the ballad-romances of Sir Colling the Knycht, Eger and Grime, and Thomas of Erceldoune reimagine the “Scottish and Border landscapes of hilly moors, rocky shores, and violent feuds,” and in doing so present “compelling iterations of the northern British landscape as a realm of fantastic topography” (p. 134). Richmond's aim here is to build on an established set of approaches to these landscapes in scholarship, as he makes clear. These texts reflect an “interplay of landscape conventions, with green bowers, hilly wilderness, and deep rivers charting the boundaries of elfin otherworlds and contested territories” (p. 166). His contention beyond this is rather more complex, and benefits from rereading at the chapter's close. The simultaneously familiar and strange characteristics of these Border landscapes articulates a medieval and Early Modern understanding of the relationship between nature and culture. Passages focusing on the economic importance of landscapes in English writings are less common than they are in their “later, northern brethren” (p. 166). These ballad-romances transform the Anglo-Scottish Border regions into “another type of boundary,” and in doing so emphasize “how the political categorizations of space . . . influence and are perhaps influenced by conceptions of the boundary between the realms of human and Nature's more alien identities” (p. 166).The “Conclusion: The Singing ‘Bonkes’ of Britain” is really a short chapter, bookended with a brief summary tying its observations back into the thrust of those which precede it. Here, Richmond connects the book's themes with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, less popular as far as manuscripts go (in its single surviving copy), but well trodden in Middle English ecocriticism. Lest Richmond be accused of cakeism, this is paired with the more demonstrably popular ballad-romance The Greene Knight (ca. 1500), finding “narrative colonization of the non-human world” to be a “core goal of romance” in both, with the latter focusing heavily on the “political violence inherent in such domination” (p. 168). Again, Richmond mounts a convincing argument for the influence of real-world environments and climatic contexts for understanding both of these works, and makes a solid case for their post-medieval endurance casting beyond the perdition of scholarly periodization. My criticism here is of the better-favored kind; I felt this chapter could have been longer, and the conclusion have drawn together some of the many important threads that connect its constituent parts, as well as announcing the book's achievements.As a study focused on environmental representations, this book has much in common with works such as Peggy McCracken's In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France (2017), which similarly tackles questions concerning how humans understand and have understood themselves and their own sociopolitical relationships, for example through their environments and relationships with their nonhuman cohabitants, animal, vegetable, and mineral. Richmond's is a focused and controled piece of writing that raises as many questions as it answers. His approach in addressing a breadth of material likely better known to wider audiences is important for developing a broader appreciation of what a greater number of readers may have been reading. Avoiding a common lapse or sidestep of ecocritical writing, the book is historically well grounded, with a good sense of geography, space, and place in the landscapes of late medieval Britain. Where there may be room for future consideration of material culture, Richmond's readings are not at odds with this material. As a whole, Landscape in Middle English Romance presents an eminently emulable model for future work in studies of ecocritical and environmental writing, and is unmissable reading for students and scholars writing and researching in this area

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Audience measurement · Knight · Literature · Natural landscape · Poetry · Romance · Scholarship · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History