Abstract: Novelist and poet T.H. White is best known for The Once and Future King1—a much-loved modern adaptation of the Arthurian world; however, his interest in medieval hunting texts and practices has garnered rather less attention, either scholarly or popular. Most critical discussions center around White's use of Malory's Le Morte Darthur, and with good reason: it was his main source for the narrative. Yet White also drew on a few non-Arthurian sources. In addition to a twelfth-century Latin bestiary and medieval hawking manuals, White read two medieval English hunting texts: Edward of Norwich, Second Duke of York's Master of Game (a fourteenth-century Middle English translation of Gaston Phébus' popular French hunting ... Read More Keywords: Hunting; Sovereignty; Lancelot; Salda, Michael Norman, PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, several legal cases are settled through trial by combat, even though it was no longer common legal practice in Malory's time. Jacqueline Stuhmiller notes that the number of judicial combats in the Morte ranges from eleven to as high as twenty depending on the precise criteria applied.1 Many of these cases are essential to the plot of the Morte, particularly those late in the narrative, when Guenevere and Lancelot find themselves on trial. However, these cases are also imperfect, both in their ability to produce a just verdict and in their ability to resolve the conflicts at play. Robert Bartlett notes a distinction between judicial combat as 'a means of obtaining a decision,' ... Read More Keywords: Hunting; Sovereignty; Lancelot; Salda, Michael Norman, PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Normans—go! No longer take your armies of violent soldiery through our native kingdom. There is nothing left to fill your maw: you have eaten up everything that creative nature has till now produced out of her fertile bounty.Two decades after completing his enduringly popular and mostly fantastic Historia regum Britanniae, Geoffrey of Monmouth revisited his pre-Conquest Britain in order to enrich the biography of its most famous prophet: Merlin. In the Vita Merlini, or The Life of Merlin, Geoffrey more robustly imagines an historic British landscape, a forested countryside in which Merlin is joined by other gifted seers such as Taliesin and his sister, Ganieda. Although Geoffrey's Vita is a less overtly political ... Read More Keywords: Hunting; Sovereignty; Lancelot; Salda, Michael Norman, PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The thirteenth-century French Prose Lancelot appears to celebrate the adulterous love between its eponymous hero and Guenevere. Conversely the romance's successor in the Lancelot-Grail cycle, La Queste del Saint Graal, promotes piety virginity and humility. Scholars who see a transition to those austere values within the Prose Lancelot highlight episodes that mention the Holy Vessel or prophesize Galahad's future glory.1 Others dismiss these references to the Grail quest as interpolations with no meaningful connection to the rest of the romance.2 Adventures with no explicit link to the Queste but that allude to its ethereal priorities have for the most part escaped critical attention.3 However, for readers who ... Read More Keywords: Hunting; Sovereignty; Lancelot; Salda, Michael Norman, PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Michael Norman Salda, 57, died on October 16, 2015, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, after an almost decade-long battle with Multiple Sclerosis. Born and reared in Nebraska, Michael received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Chicago, where he wrote his dissertation on Chaucer. Salda had taught at The University of Southern Mississippi since 1991, serving in a number of capacities at the university, including Chair of the Department of English. When I subsequently met his colleagues at meetings of the Association of Departments of English, they were all unanimous in their praise for the skill, sensitivity, and just plain common sense that he displayed as department head in a time of great turbulence at the ... Read More Keywords: Hunting; Sovereignty; Lancelot; Salda, Michael Norman, PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Kathleen Biddick's new collection of essays (some previously published) summarizes its main concerns, for those who know their Foucault, in the title and subtitle. 'Untimely' in the subtitle refers to one of the central points to which the essays keep returning: whereas Foucault and some of those who have followed him in discussing modern biopower tend to emphasize the disjunction between pre-eighteenth-century and modern sovereignty, Biddick claims that they can do so only by erasing the medieval. Biddick rejects this disjunctive chronology and, by focusing on the medieval and early modern periods, finds greater historical continuity in ways of thinking about sovereign power.The main title, 'Make and Let Die,' ... Read More Keywords: Hunting; Sovereignty; Lancelot; Salda, Michael Norman, PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The editors of this essay collection have produced an invaluable contribution to Arthurian studies by capturing here seminal discussions centering on emotions in medieval Arthurian texts. The essays featured in this collection represent various approaches toward the subject matter and cover a broad range of languages (English, Dutch, German, Norwegian, French, and Latin), while focusing on embodiment and affect.The introduction to the book, co-authored by Brandsma, Larrington, and Saunders, expresses some of the underlying difficulties inherent in interpreting emotional expressions in medieval literary texts. Such challenges include questions 'of methodology, of medieval conceptions of and terminology for ... Read More Keywords: Hunting; Sovereignty; Lancelot; Salda, Michael Norman, PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: It isn't often a book on a medieval topic is timely, but that is certainly the case with this one. After white supremacists marched in Charlottesville recently, some of them carrying Viking symbols, there was a flurry of discussion among medievalists on social media about how to address extremists' appropriation of medieval symbols, from devoting more scholarship and class time to racial diversity in medieval Europe to publicizing new research that shows cultural assimilation by Vikings was not limited to crushing the cultures they assimilated. Andrew B.R. Elliott does not offer solutions to this problem (and most of the comfort you might take from his book is cold), but he does give us what we need to make a ... Read More Keywords: Hunting; Sovereignty; Lancelot; Salda, Michael Norman, PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Should one wish to introduce the poetry of John Lydgate to students, particularly to undergraduates, this is the text to use. The book is beautifully produced with a miniature on the cover from Arundel 119 (folio 1), the British Library copy of Lydgate's Siege of Thebes; it is in large format with plenty of marginal space for marking up by students (even in other languages like Chinese, which I see from time to time). The volume has a clearly written and accessible general introduction to John Lydgate. We learn, for example, that Lydgate in his day was 'a sought-after poet who wrote many poems on commission for some of the most important and powerful people in England' (p. 3). There are also separate introductions ... Read More Keywords: Hunting; Sovereignty; Lancelot; Salda, Michael Norman, PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: W.H. Auden, The Avengers (both the film and comics series versions), Alexander Stirling Calder, the Monty Python troupe, Captain America, Scrooge McDuck, Tolkien, Hedda Gabler and Nora Helmer, Joey Tribbiani and the rest of the cast from the TV show Friends, William Shakespeare, Richard Wagner and the Ring Cycle, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, The Vikings (the film and its short-lived TV spin-off), and Led Zeppelin—these are just a few of the topics discussed in this ground-breaking, well-written, always-intriguing study of the extensive, post-medieval legacy of the Icelandic eddas and sagas. The pervasiveness of that legacy is astounding, as Helgason moves beyond Andrew Wawn's thorough ... Read More Keywords: Hunting; Sovereignty; Lancelot; Salda, Michael Norman, PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: K.S. Whetter's central claim in The Manuscript and Meaning of Malory's Morte Darthur is that the Winchester manuscript's design—its rubrication of names and marginalia—correlates with theme. At the base of this project is P.J.C. Field's argument that the manuscript's marginalia derive from Malory. In the first part of this book, Whetter builds on his mentor's suggestion, making a strong case that the rubrication and marginalia are in fact Malory's. In the second part, Whetter fashions an expansive argument: that Winchester's mise-en-page points to Malory championing martial, over spiritual, chivalry; to his celebration of two heroes, not just Launcelot but also Arthur; and to his focus on human emotion and ... Read More Keywords: Hunting; Sovereignty; Lancelot; Salda, Michael Norman, PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Romance and History assembles a collection of essays on the relations between romance—both medieval and early modern—and history. The chapters are arranged according to subject matter and chronological order, with the 'Matter of Rome' followed by the 'Matter of Britain,' succeeded by the 'Matter of France and Italy,' and finally by sixteenth-century developments, thereby suggesting a vibrant cross-pollination between these different fields as European romance develops forms of sophisticated self-referentiality and becomes increasingly concerned with its own status vis-à-vis literary theory.In his thoughtful introduction, Jon Whitman takes his cue from Erich Auerbach's indictment of romance as lacking historical ... Read More Keywords: Hunting; Sovereignty; Lancelot; Salda, Michael Norman, PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
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