In uhis timely and refreshing study, Caroline Jewers argues for a reintegration of medieval romance into the history of the novel, offering in the process an alteroative to ideologically motivated histories of the novel which both disparage and exclude medieval romance as a legitimate precursor to the modern novel. Solidly grounded in a tradition of recognized romance scholarship, in particular in the critical approaches to irony and parody developed by such figures as Margaret Rose, Cesare Segre, Peter Haidu, Norris J. Lacy, June Hall Martin, and Dennis Green, Jewers' monograph is founded on two theoretical tenets. Addressing at length Bakhtin's neglect of the romance genre, Jewers argues cogently that not only did Bakhtin omit from consideration numerous mediwval romance texts which show the dialogic structure and concerns which he attributes to the modern novel, but that medieval literature itself is inherently heteroglossic. Her reading of medieval texts takes fundamental issue, as a result, with critics such as Ian Watt, Hubert McDermott and Robert Kellogg, for whom the novel begins, in an irrevocable break with past, with Cervantes. Their error, for her, is not only that they have read the prologue to Don Quixote too literally, but that they have privileged realism as the primary measure of novelistic success. Other criteria can and must be invoked, which place the romance, with its themes and formal experimentation, at the center of the novel's history.
Don Quixote is unquestionably a parody of chivalric romance, but for all that, it remains a chivalric romance. Its parodic elements constitute, moreover, its strongest ties to the romance tradition. Through Jewers' extension of the term parody to cover what Peter Haidu terms irony, she is able to show that parody was inherent in medieval romance from its inception. Rather than being a destructive force which arises from outside of the narrative tradition, parody originates within the text and the tradition, and constitutes the fundamental means by which the romance genre renews itself. These arguments are laid out in the first two chapters of the work, entitled "Rekindling the romance: Toward and Away from the Prehistory of the Novel", and "Northern Exposure, Chivalry snd Parody in the Old French Tradition", respectively, in which she also exposes the issues and establishes her theoretical framework. While Jewers' careful and insightful review of the critical literature on parody is not necessary to convince medievalists of her position, her rejection of Watt's modernist conceits becomes convincing to the literary community at large because it is rooted in careful reading. Her greatest strength, and in this lies the most significant contribution of her monograph, comes from her analysis of several key texts which constitute "missing links" between Chretien de Troyes and Cervantes, and which are too little known, even by continental medievalists.
It is in her second chapter that Jewers establishes her textual field. Her decision to begin in France, and to trace the evolution of the romance southward, through Occitania and into Castile, is significant, for it allows her to circumvent Anglo- centric histories of the novel which typically are sidetracked by the eclecticism and textual thorniness of late Middle English texts. While even these are currently being reassessed, and the place of Middle English romance in the canon being understood in a more sympathetic light, the book's southern trajectory has the merit, mentioned above, of linking us directly with Don Quixote, both textually and thematically. Jewers begins then with Chretien de Troyes as the terminus a quo of her journey, and by reviewing first his romances, and then discussing in detail Aucassin et Nicolette and touching on the Roman de Silence, she argues for a Genettian kind of hypertextuality in the romance, created by the genre's propensity to lampoon itself while establishing its own formal bases. In her words, "The yardstick of normative chivalric and courtly behavior sets up a model that encourages deviation from those same norms, such that there is a strong sense of generic parody inherent in clashing characters, registers, and episodes."
This dialogic model of deviation from a norm while simultaneously upholding it is what enables the romance to renew itself, such that its themes of love and heroic pursuits do manage, Jewers argues correctly, to avoid mindless repetition. Rather than pursue the many rich and varied examples, within the French tradition, of this textual renewal, Jewers chooses at this juncture, in chapters three and four, to turn to two full-length Occitan romances, Jaufre and Flamenca. Jaufre, discussed in chapter 3: "Going South: Courtliness and Comedy in the Occitan Tradition", has the distinct merit of being the only extant Arthurian romance in Occitan, as well as a text whose Spanish version is cited by Cervantes in part I of Don Quixote. Jaufre, more than any of its French predecessors, is a vehicle for comedy in which the code of chivalry as exemplified in twelfth-century knightly narrative is transposed into a more realistic plane where antisocial behavior and vulgarity supersede idealism. The adventures which open and close the romance are anti- adventures, as they are contrived through magic to relieve the humdrum of a court patently unable to entertain itself, and they are furthermore not a credit to Arthur or his knights. The ineffectual court and the lackluster combats which undermine and devalue the chivalric code are seen by Jewers as an expression of the political and cultural relations of Occitania with its northern neighbor. The characters and plots of Arthurian romance are plainly thoroughly familiar to the author of Jaufre, yet the strange landscape in which they are set serves to decontextualize this familiar poetry and undermine it as an effective narrative model. The earthy directness of some Troubadour lyrics and of other varieties of short fiction concurrently practiced in Occitania, in particular the lai and the novas, constitute the most important intertextual influences on these southern adaptations of the matiere de Bretagne, and Jewers considers that the effect of this refraction through the "playful ambiguity and energy derived from the troubadours" was to reencode the romance with a new sense of dynamism and a restored sense of adventure.
Chapter 4, "The Uses of Literacy: Parodic Fusion in the Roman de Flamenca", argues that the latter text renews the genre by its mixing of the courtly live triangle with an elegant parody of fin'amor and of romance conventions. As the romance lacks both a beginning and an end, the author's voice and purpose are difficult to identify, and there is perhaps more disagreement with this work than with the others Jewers treats concerning the romance's narrative and aesthetic functions. Jewers nonetheless demonstrates here, as elsewhere, her mastery of the existing critical positions, to then offer an assessment of the work which steers its own course. She argues, in contrast with Muscatine and Menard, who situate Flamenca solidly within courtly tradition and view it as pushing courtly convention and love poetry to the limit, that Flamenca constitutes a "quiet revolt against ethos of northern French romance". A veritable encyclopedia of medieval romance which is at the same time deeply indebted to the fabliau-like novas and to the language and culture of fin'amor, Flamenca places courtly norms and deviant parody in "collusive alliance" rather than in opposition. As Flamenca shifts the locus of action away from the court and down the social ladder, much in the way Don Quixote does later, it both celebrates and satirizes the entire tradition in a highly self-conscious, hyper-literary form. Drawing the line between convention on the one hand, and parody, satire and burlesque on the other requires the most delicate of critical scalpels, and Jewers' incisive reading attributes irrefutably to the romance the kind of Bakhtinian heteroglossia which establish it as a precursor to the novel.
The final link in the chain stretching from Chretien to Cervantes is the late fifteenth-century Catalan romance Tirant lo Blanc, analyzed in chapter 5: "Romance into Novel. Tirant lo Blanc". Like Flamenca, Tirant "absorbs, parodies, and transforms the courtly romance, linking the ideal world of chivalry with the more realistic naturalistic setting of the modern novel". Its importance was recognized by Cervantes, moreover, and the work is recommended by one character in Don Quixote to another, though perhaps with less than complete candor. The geography of Tirant is epic in proportion, while its heroes and heroines, as well as their ideals, become reduced to an iconographic plane, or are expressed in courtly pageantry. The otherworldly elements of traditional romance are replaced by the mundane, and all of the sublimation of courtly love is stripped away to portray it as a frankly erotic and artificial game. At the same time, Jewers argues, the work cannot be dismissed as an unmitigated parody of chivalry, because the society in which the romance was written still ascribed considerable historical importance to chivalry as a social order and, as she put it, "as the ultimate guarantee of good government". Here again, France serves as a model of courtly virtue yet is portrayed comically, and the gap between literary ideal and social norm is the locus for much of the irreverence which marks the romance. Tirant lo Blanc's distance from Chretien, and now confirmed position as precursor to Don Quixote, prompts Jewers to propose this romance, rather than Don Quixote, as the "half-way house" between medieval romance and modern fiction. Her argument is convincing, and has the merit of presenting in detail a little- known work whose contribution to the history of the novel is inversely proportional to its fame.
In the concluding chapter, Jewers addresses the Quixote itself, arguing that its popularity derives not only from its offering of an ideal world which is being visibly and rapidly eclipsed, but because it is a romance, albeit a distorted romance, and one which purports to be the demise of the genre. That such claims are exaggerated is illustrated by Jewers' return to her definition of parody as a positive force which creates for Cervantes, exactly as it did for Chretien, the collusion between convention and comedy which she addresses in chapter 4. Her assessment of parody in medieval romance is original to the extent that she highlights its role as an inbuilt form of literary criticism which serves to renew the narrative energy of the genre rather than tear it down. This reassessment of the role of parody in the medieval text allows her to construct the textual chain of development leading up to Don Quixote, and to displace the don himself as the pivotal figure in the shift from medieval to modern narrative paradigms. Her readings of Jaufre, Flamenca and Tirant, are entirely convincing; her solid grounding in classic and very recent criticism, and her careful, witty analyses of the texts themselves have allowed her to overturn accepted critical positions and spark renewed interest in late medieval narrative. This work deserves to be placed on the required reading list for graduate studies in Comparative Literature, national literatures, English, and Medieval Studies.