Medieval Oral Literature is an excellent introduction to an important aspect of medieval studies, the study of oral-derived literature of the Middle Ages. Many of the essays are influenced by the oral-formulaic approach to the topic, and this is no surprise as the oral-formulaic theory was applied right from its beginnings to medieval literature. Albert Lord refers extensively, for instance, to the medieval Greek epic “Digenes Akritas” in his 1960 book The Singer of Tales. Reichl writes in his preface that “[t]oday, fifty years after the publication of Lord’s seminal work, the scholarly debate on medieval oral literature has reached a stage in which the extremes of earlier views have been discarded and a synthesis that does justice to the many-facetted interplay of orality and literacy in the Middle Ages is possible.” “The present book,” he continues, “attempts such a synthesis” (xvii).
Reichl opens the volume with a long essay, “Plotting the Map of Medieval Oral Literature,” (3-67) that introduces the reader to the various core concepts, such as textualization of oral texts, for the study of medieval oral literature. This introductory essay is followed by two parts. Part I: Concepts and Approaches, (71-249) is the shorter of the two, and is a survey of the ideas and methods used in the study of medieval oral literature. This part has six essays; these essays include John Miles Foley and Peter Ramey on “Oral Theory and Medieval Literature,” Joseph Harris and Karl Reichl on “Performance and Performers,” and Thomas A. DuBois on “Oral Poetics: The Linguistics and Stylistics of Orality.” The essays in this part of the book take a broader comparative approach to their topics than those that follow, and also seek to further orient the reader to the controversies and successes in the study of medieval literature as an oral literature.
Part II: Traditions and Genres (253-724) surveys the various medieval oral literatures and genres of oral literature. The nineteen essays in this part include those by Joseph Falaky Nagy, “Oral Tradition and Performance in Medieval Ireland,” Jan-Dirk Müller, “Medieval German Literature: Literacy, Orality, and Semi-Orality,” Roger Wright, “Hispanic Epic and Ballad,” Thomas Pettitt, “The Late Medieval Ballad,” and Thomas Herzog, “Orality and the Tradition of Arabic Epic Storytelling.”
The quality of the essays is generally very high, and the coverage is wider than in many books on medieval literature. The authors describe medieval oral literature in Old Icelandic, Old English, Middle English, Middle High German, Medieval Spanish, early modern Romanian, Old Italian, Old French, Old and Middle Irish, Middle Welsh, Old Russian, medieval Hebrew, medieval Arabic, and Classical Persian.
While the breadth of coverage is impressive, some interesting and relevant literatures are not covered. Some absences that especially stood out to me, because I have done research in these areas, are: Middle Dutch literature; Middle Low German literature; Medieval Slavic literatures, such as those in Old Church Slavonic, Old Russian, and Old Polish (the only chapter on a Slavic topic in the book is on “The Lay of Igor’s Campaign”; no other attention is given to the very rich resources for the study of medieval oral literature in Old Russian and the other medieval Slavic languages); and Medieval Armenian.
I would also have liked to have seen the volume look even further beyond the usual literatures and include some South Asian and Oriental literature, such as Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, and Mongolian literature, all of which offer the comparativist a fascinating body of medieval oral literature for comparison. Marc Bloch long ago pointed out to historians that there were interesting comparisons to be made between developments in medieval European and medieval Japanese history, for example, and that is equally true for folklore and literary studies.
The bibliographies to the essays, which are especially important in a book like this, are in general excellent, and will be fine starting points for further study of the literatures and topics covered. Readers will find the usual variation in the quality of the essays one finds in such collaborative projects, though they are, on the whole, very good. While, as noted above, there are some gaps in the coverage, it would be unfair to leave readers with a negative impression of this book. Medieval Oral Literature is an excellent handbook that can be highly recommended to those looking for an introduction to the study of medieval oral literature. It will serve as a basic reference work and introduction to medieval oral literature for some time to come.
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[Review length: 751 words • Review posted on October 8, 2014]