The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden

by Corinne J. Saunders

Corinne J. Saunders's exploration of the topos of the forest, a familiar and ubiquitous motif in the literature of the middle ages, is a broad study embracing a range of medieval and Elizabethan exts from the twelft to the sixteenth centuries: the roman d'antiquite, Breton lay and courtly romance, the hagiographical tradition of the Vita Merlini and the Queste del Saint Graal, Spenser and Shakespeare. Saunders identifies the forest as a primary romance landscape, as a place of adventure, love, and spiritual vision... offers a pleasurable overview of the narrative function of the forest as a literary landscape. Based on a close comparative (and theoretically non-partisan) reading of a broad range of literary texts drawn from the Europeqan canon, Saunders's study explores the continuity and transformation of an important motif in the corpus of medieval literature. MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEWDr CORINNE SAUNDERS/teaches in the Department of English at the University of Durham. (BLURBEXTRACTED FROM TLS REVIEW) ...An immense tract, not only of medieval literature but of human experience (is) engagingly introduced and presented here...Corinne Saunders considers first forests in reality (a reality which keeps breaking through in romance...). She looks also at the classical and biblical models including Virgil, Statius and Nebuchadnezzar...only then does she turn to the non-real and non-Classical, i.e. the medieval and romantic. Here she follows a clear chronological plan from twelfth to fifteenth centuries (also covering) the allegorized landscape of Spenser and the lovers' woods of Arden or Athens in Shakespeare. Her text-by-text layout does justice to the variety of possibilities taken up by different authors; the forest as a place where men run mad and turn into animals, a place of voluntary suffering, a focus of significance in the Grail-quests, a lovers' bower; above all and centrally, the place where the knight is tested and defined, even (as with Perceval) created.

Genres: Nonfiction, Medieval

249 pages, Hardcover

First published June 17, 1993

About the author

Corinne Saunders is Professor in the Department of English Studies. She specialises in medieval literature and the history of ideas, and has particular interests in romance writing. She is also interested in gender studies and the history of medicine. She has recently published a monograph, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval Romance (2010), for which she was awarded AHRC-funded additional leave and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. She is the author of The Forest of Medieval Romance (1993), Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (2001), and over thirty essays and articles on a wide range of literary and cultural topics. She has edited a Blackwell Critical Guide to Chaucer (2001); A Blackwell Companion to Romance: from Classical to Contemporary (2004); Cultural Encounters in Medieval Romance (2005); A Concise Companion to Chaucer (2006); and (with Françoise le Saux and Neil Thomas) Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses (2004); (with Jane Macnaughton), Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture (2005); (with David Fuller) Pearl: a Modernised Version by Victor Watts (2005); (with Ulrika Maude and Jane Macnaughton), The Body and the Arts (2009). Her edited collection, A Blackwell Companion to Medieval Poetry, was published in March 2010. She is the English editor of the international journal of medieval studies, Medium Ævum; and editor in overall charge of Medieval Studies (1100-1500) for the major online resource, The Literary Encyclopedia. She is the Director of Durham University's Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and Associate Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities, funded by the Wellcome Trust. She has also co-organised two Public Lecture Series in the University, ‘Madness and Creativity: The Mind, Medicine and Literature’, and ‘Flesh and Blood: The Body and the Arts’. She teaches across the range of Old and Middle English language and literature, as well as History of the English Language, Old French, and some Renaissance topics, at both BA and MA level. She currently supervises a number of PhD students working on later medieval literary topics, and welcomes enquiries from postgraduate applicants in these areas.

Reviews

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comprehensive but not all that theory savvy. Close readings of texts, nicely researched.