<i>Medieval Romance: The Aesthetics of Possibility</i>. James F. Knapp and Peggy A. Knapp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Pp. ix+251.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewMedieval Romance: The Aesthetics of Possibility. James F. Knapp and Peggy A. Knapp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Pp. ix+251.Kimberly K. BellKimberly K. BellSam Houston State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJames and Peggy Knapp’s latest joint scholarly endeavor (and first coauthored book), Medieval Romance: The Aesthetics of Possibility, is a significant and original contribution to the study of medieval romance, for it brings forth and examines the philosophical underpinnings of a number of well-known and extensively studied romances. Pushing against common assumptions that the genre is fundamentally escapist, the Knapps argue that the challenges romance protagonists confront in their individual aventures underscore the intellectual seriousness of the genre, so that in its “extravagance,” romance is actually “metaphysical[ly] probing” (6). Drawing from the tenets of G. W. Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, the authors maintain that romance is “deeply philosophical” (5) in that “it asks us to imagine other worlds, to gather perception out of an infinity of tiny detail, [and] to enter into fictions that evade conceptual closure by containing some mysterious surplus” (3), an excess, they contend, that is “made possible by a surplus within” the texts themselves (31). While the stance that romance affords its audiences more than popular entertainment is not new, reading the genre through the lens of philosophy allows the Knapps to open up the serious and aesthetic dimensions that romance offers. They are invested in asking why it has appealed to audiences over centuries and why it “deserves to be called beautiful” (3).The substantial introduction succinctly details the German philosophers’ concepts of time, perception, possibility, and beauty that drive the study, which are then applied to several romances in six chapters that follow. In chapter 1, the Knapps maintain that the surplus de sens Marie de France (famously) anticipates for future readers in the prologue to her Lais can be found in the possible worlds she offers, and they target the questions of trans-world identities within the “real” worlds of literary fiction vis-à-vis the individual aventures (24) of the protagonists of Yonec, Lanval, and Eliduc. Chapter 2 also examines the quest as shaping of selfhood in Sir Orfeo but from the perspective of the persistence of identity—Heurodis’s as well as Orfeo’s—across the Celtic mythical underworld and Orfeo’s kingdom of Winchester. The characters’ processes of greater self-awareness show “a gradual divergence” in the romance “between the inwardness of self-identity and accidents of personal and social appearance” (61).Chapters 3 and 4 argue for the genre’s intrinsic philosophical scope as seen in Chaucer’s tragic romance Troilus and Criseyde and Jean d’Arras’s Middle French prose historio-romance, Melusine, or The Noble History of Lusignan. These texts, generically “complex and tangled” (99), centralize the transcendent beauty of Criseyde and Melusine. The two worlds found in Troilus—the realm of Troy, where the tragic love affair unfolds, and the eighth sphere into which Troilus ascends—open the romance to both allegory and comedy. The Knapps view the sphere as an “epistemologically possible world” that is in “dialectical play” (74) with the otherworldly and allegorical beauty of Criseyde and the poem itself. Jean d’Arras, they argue, also shapes a tale “ripe for allegoresis” (100). In Melusine, the fairy otherworld is set in sharp relief against the historically verisimilar accounts of the exploits of Melusine’s sons. Half fairy, half mortal, Melusine retains her essential identity in the human world with her marriage to Raymondin and serves as the means by which the worlds of fairy and mortal overlap and coexist.The next chapter turns to the tales of the Wife, Clerk, Franklin, and Canon’s Yeoman from the Canterbury Tales that all address the conventional theme of promise keeping and give way to the “transformative impulse” (119) of romance to reveal collectively “Chaucer’s sympathetic understanding of why we seek recourse to alternative worlds [as a way to] grapple with the reality of [our] lives” (120). The Knapps choose to explore these tales with an additional purpose of proving that Chaucer, rather than being dismissive of romance, was profoundly engaged with it. The book ends with a chapter on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a text teeming with a surplus of detail that resists closure in its “obvious purposiveness” (153). Gawain’s quest, the authors contend, raises philosophical questions about time, reality, and possibility, wherein the lines between the aristocratic world of Arthur’s court and Celtic fairy world of Morgan le Faye are blurred but are ultimately found to be incompossible.The book is clearly intended for scholars of romance but also, with the detailed close readings and translations of quoted passages, advanced students. Nonetheless, it is dense, and while the introduction provides the necessary philosophical framework for the study, one wishes a conclusion would have also been included to tie up the various threads of discussion woven throughout the chapters and to offer a more sustained reading of future incarnations of several of the romances (currently treated unevenly and in only some of the chapters). Such minor complaints aside (and they are minor, given the meticulousness of the study), Medieval Romance: The Aesthetics of Possibility clearly and eloquently accomplishes what it sets out to do, and this new interdisciplinary approach provides a solid foundation for the future study of romance. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 117, Number 1August 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/704042HistoryPublished online May 07, 2019 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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