Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood: Alterity and Context in the English Outlaw Tradition

by Stephen Knight

The Robin Hood tradition is a rich assembly of exciting stories, more than five hundred years old and still thriving. From medieval ballads of yeoman resistance and gentrified Renaissance stories of Lord Robin versus bad King John, the tradition survived lustily into modern film, through which Robin Hood, played by major stars like Fairbanks, Flynn, and Costner, has become a truly international hero of natural law. This richly varied tradition enables scholars to study how different periods have understood the concept of Robin's noble resistance to wrongful authority. These new essays uncover innovative topics like Robin's relation with the cult of archery in the late Middle Ages, the purpose of the recently discovered 1670s' Forresters manuscript of outlaw ballads, and what Thomas Love Peacock thought when in 1815 he met in Windsor Forest a man called Little John. Other essays explore the social meanings and contexts of the texts, from the stark early ballads and their contacts with both Catholicism and Protestantism, through to modern excitements like the Kevin Costner film of 1991 and the links between Robin and Batman. Just as the five-hundred-year tradition of the Robin Hood story is alive today, so this collection shows how vital and varied is modern analysis of the myth of the best known and most loved of all the outlaws.

234 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

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Stephen Knight - Thrillers

Reviews

[Geoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Without doubt Helen Phillips essay "Reformist Polemics, Reading Publics, and Unpopular Robin Hood" is the best thing about this collection. Entertaining and enlightening Phillips outlines how RH was used as stick by competing Christianities: for example the Catholic Thomas More comparing Martin Luther and his wife to "frere tuk & mad Maryone" in an anti-Protestant tract.

Other essays of note were Rob Gossedge "Thomas Love Peacock, Robin Hood, and the Enclosure of Windsor Forest" and Valerie B. Johnson "Agamben's homo sacer, the 'State of Exception', and the Modern Robin Hood". Usually reliable contributors Stephen Knight and Alexander L. Kaufman delivered sub-standard essays. Indeed Kaufman's "Nietzsche's Herd and the Individual: The Construction of Alterity in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode" was close to incomprehensible.

This collection may be the first step in the professionalization of Robin Hood studies but it is just as much a mixed bag as those produced by the RH conferences.