It is not so long since the festschrift seemed set to go the way of the vinyl LP. In difficult times for publishing they were indulgences, so the thinking went. Instead, with a few tweaks, they have proved to be (like vinyl), durable and persistent. The key is simple: tightly themed volumes by eminent scholars will still appeal.
The challenge for a volume dedicated to Siân Echard is that her output has been so varied that a single theme is impossible to come by. As the editors themselves remark, “[f]or over three decades [she] has made a multitude of important scholarly contributions to a diverse range of fields” from John Gower to Arthuriana to nineteenth-century medievalism and beyond (1). Reflecting this diversity, the editors have arranged this volume in three distinct parts, which nevertheless speak to one another.
The first of these sections—“Navigating Multilingualism: Medieval British Languages in Contact”—is perhaps the one that must deal with the most variation. Joshua Byron Smith writes about the DingestowBrut, the only one of the early Welsh translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain to exist in a modern critical edition. Smith examines the way in which the unnamed translator “sought to bring Geoffrey’s narrative into a closer relationship with Welsh historical tradition by portraying the Island of Britain as overrun by foreign, pagan invaders” (11). Still in Wales, Paul Russell writes about Gerald of Wales while also touching on Geoffrey’s Historia, tracing the “striking” fluidity of Latin texts in Britain.
John J. Thompson has devoted much of a career to Brut-history and it is fitting that he should have the next word in a study of how a specifically English approach to history (in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII) dealt with the British material deriving from the Brut tradition. Thompson’s long acquaintance with this sometimes knotty material shines through in his investigation of how the Brut tradition, despite attacks on it, continued to influence John Stow and later Tudors.
Finally, in this first section, Andrew Galloway revisits the topic of vernacularity, thinking further about The Vulgar Tongue (the 2003 volume edited by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson) and bringing to an examination of what he sees as key moments in medieval expressions of vernacularity—in Hali Meiđhad and The House of Fame—his characteristically depthful erudition.
Part II, “Gower’s Books and Books of Gower,” goes to the heart of Echard’s concerns. Here R. F. Yeager leads with “Gower’s Ovidian Aesthetic and its Discontents” and asks, “when, and perhaps why, did Gower start to think of Ovid in a serious manner as a guide to the craft?” (91). Correspondingly, Yeager explores Gower’s lack of interest in Virgil throughout his career, despite a “late shift away from Ovid” (98). Stephanie L. Batkie picks up from here, examining Gower’s Visio Anglie and doing a close reading which focuses in particular on Gower’s anaphora. This rhetorical figure “resists the teleology of cause and effect, the teleology of epic” she notes, in a way that dovetails with some of Yeager’s conclusions (132). William Green goes back to Book VII of Confessio Amantis and the particular problems it has posed to Gower critics. He usefully focuses on the perception of dullness in this section of the poem, suggesting that as scholars, “we often tend to set the mundane, the ordinary, the boring, aside...favouring instead the exceptional” (138).
Taking a somewhat different direction—and paying homage to Echard’s own work on the transmission and reception in print of medieval literature—David Watt rounds off the section with his essay “A Knight at the Roxburghe (Club): George Granville Sutherland-Leveson-Gower and the Textual Transmission of Balades and Other Poems by John Gower.”
The final section consists of a further four essays. In a trenchant critique of book history, Elaine Treharne goes back to MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv (the Beowulf manuscript—but should we call it that?). She makes an argument for reading a “complete physical codex...across its temporally distinct parts” (185) and proposes that “A more correct experience of Beowulf resides in an acknowledgement of the wholeness or voluminousness of the textual object” (192). Elizabeth Archibald next examines Trojan ghosts in Arthurian romances, noting that Geoffrey of Monmouth, surprisingly, makes just one explicit link between Arthur and Troy. She goes on to trace Troy in Arthurian romance. So prominent at the beginning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Troy is actually elusive in the genre. Archibald handily summarises what there is to be found, in continental and insular traditions. Still with Arthur, Helen Fulton notes that Latin Arthuriana is often overlooked and offers a study of the under-noticed Historiae Britannicae Defensio, published in 1573 but written earlier by Sir John Prise, a Welsh speaker who collected Arthurian material after the Dissolution that others did not use, recuperating a historical Arthur at precisely the time of scepticism over that possibility.
Martin B. Shichtman and Laurie A. Finke have a knack for discovering the lost byways of medievalism and they do so again here in an examination of William Byron Forbush’s boys’ fraternity, The Knights of King Arthur, a version of scouting for boys via Malory and Tennyson. The book is rounded out with a bibliography of Siân Echard’s works: it runs to fourteen pages.
Perhaps no one except the reviewer and the honorand reads a festchrift from start to finish in this manner. Doing so reveals a high level of editorial harmonising. It also suggests that there are perhaps two books here—one on Gower and another on Arthur (with a sub-theme of both being the transmission of these medieval works, especially in the nineteenth century). That this is the case of course is only an accurate reflection of a career which has been both diverse yet also fiercely focused. The key thing is that these essays fulfil their function of doing honour to the recipient while at the same time many will go on being cited in the future.