This volume pays tribute to Fiona Tolhurst (1968-2021), well known as an authority on Latin and Middle English Arthurian literature and on the representation of women in medieval texts, and remembered by very many (including the present reviewer) for her energetic conversation, loud laughter, and loyal friendship.
Per their introduction, the editors have aimed “to recreate the depth and breadth, the range and excellence—the impact, both quondam et futurus—of Tolhurst’s work” (2), an impossible task. In the attempt, however, they and their contributors have done justice to the importance, and character, of Tolhurst’s work. The editors’ introduction provides a summary of Tolhurst’s career and the impact of her scholarship—in which she was unflaggingly productive up until the time of her death—and charts the texts and themes addressed in the book’s individual chapters, which this review will take in turn.
Edward Donald Kennedy’s “Scota” explores the multifarious origin myths circulating in early histories of Ireland, Scotland, and Britain. Though anonymous in her first textual appearance (Exodus 2: 2-10) the Egyptian princess who found Moses in the bulrushes enters legendary history as “Scota,” likely “invented to explain the etymology of the name of the people who settled in Ireland and Scotland” (9). From the eighth to the fourteenth century, Scota was invoked “to show that the Gaelic Celts had an ancient and distinguished ancestry” and, in Scotland, “to argue for the antiquity of the country and its right to be independent of England” (9). Kennedy shows—in an impressively ordered set of associations—how Scota weaves her way through the early chronicles, as both a legendary genetrix and an etymon.
The reader of Daniel Helbert’s “Bad Girls and the Britons: Ronwein, The Feminist Villain of De gestis Britonum” will soon come to appreciate (if they do not already) one of Tolhurst’s most important critical interventions: the identification of a feminist thread in the writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Starting with the ninth-century Historia Brittonum (possibly by Nennius) as source against which Geoffrey’s own inventions are legible, Helbert shows how Geoffrey takes an interest in Ronwein, the Saxon princess established (though unnamed) in his source as Hengist’s daughter, Vortigern’s wife, and an all-around bad influence. In Geoffrey’s retelling, she is still these things, but here she has a name, and here acts on own volition: it was her idea to ply Vortigern with drink, teach him his first English words, and bring him under her spell. In these and other ways, Geoffrey “turns her into a highly capable, intelligent, and very dangerous adversary to the Britons” (33), and shows himself “able to feminize villainy without vilifying femininity” (37). As Helbert acknowledges, it was Tolhurst who made it possible to speak of Geoffrey as working in a feminist vein, even if that vein was abandoned by subsequent writers.
Lorraine Kochanske Stock’s “Primitivism, Colonialism and the Rhetoric of Topography: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Giants of Albion and Britain’s Giant Figures,” observes the ways in which Albion—pre-Brutus Britain—might be read, giants and all, as continuous with Ovidian and Boethian ideas of a primitive Golden Age. Here, Geoffrey’s giants derive from literary antecedents and the actual chalk-figure giants which marked the topography of Britain, one of which (Stock suggests) Geoffrey may have known first-hand. “Alternately extoling the ‘state of nature’ characterizing Albion’s ‘former age’ and endorsing its exploitation by the Trojan colonizers to create the Britain that his British audience experiences in the present age, Geoffrey places primitivism and colonialism in dynamic tension” (66). That tension may have lasted about a millisecond, but it is still worth having on record.
Alan Lupack’s “Reception of the Legendary History of Britain” traces Galfridian tales in early-modern (and some modern) poetry, drama, and fiction. Readers may be surprised by the extent of Geoffrey’s influence on Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. Lear and Cymbeline we know, and we may have heard of Gorboduc, but there was also The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine (1595, once attributed to Shakespeare), Thomas Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent (1615-20), the anonymous Nobody and Somebody (1606, concerning Geoffrey’s Archgallo and Elidurus), and Nahum Tate’s Brutus of Alba (1678). In general, there has been “little recognition of the scope of Geoffrey’s influence on non-Arthurian literary history” (87), a situation already improved by this chapter.
Raluca L. Radulescu’s “What we leave behind: Legacy in Malory’s Characterisation” considers “the transformation of both Lancelot and Guinevere into literary figures that emerge as more politically active, and also more politically astute in the Morte than in Malory’s sources, both French and English” (89). Radulescu’s expertise in fifteenth-century English social and political life is reflected in the legal and political contexts she provides for Lancelot and Guinevere’s behavior—and especially Guenevere’s decisive, strategic action—in the final sections of the Morte Darthur. Malory’s Guenevere is “a worthy continuator of a legacy of the strong queens of Galfridian tradition that Fiona Tolhurst defended in her scholarship, and a queen whose courage could be admired and feared by fifteenth-century standards” (110).
Fiona Tolhurst’s latest critical statements, in productive collaboration with K. S. Whetter, were nothing if not bold, and boldly presented. In a 2019 publication, for example, they sought not only to refocus critical reception of the Alliterative Morte Arthure—which, since William Matthews’s Tragedy of Arthur (1960) has been widely open to “anti-war” readings—but to correct it, urging that “the scholarly community collectively retract what is today the standard interpretation of this well-known literary work.” [1] With “‘Both / And’: Engaging the Alliterative Morte Arthure,” Dorsey Armstrong summarizes such positions (both rhetorical and critical), supplying valuable nuance, and suggesting a more inclusive, accretive way of addressing the critical habits with which Tolhurst and Whetter are concerned. Armstrong’s detailed readings of the alliterative Morte form their own contribution to our understanding of the poem.
With “Some Problems with the Critical Reception of Malory’s ‘Boke of Sir Trystram’: Quondam nec Futurus,” K. S. Whetter mounts a characteristically vigorous assault on the near-institutionalized disdain (and inattention) with which commentatorsregard the central third of Malory’s Morte Darthur. (I haven’t counted up the times I’ve heard “Trystram” breezily dismissed in Arthurian conference panels, but it’s a lot.) Few know the breadth and depth, and the manuscript, of Malory’s book as well as Whetter, and he brings all his scholarship to the fight. If elsewhere one could urge a little moderation on Whetter’s attack (echoing Merlin’s “Hast thou nat done inow?”), in this cause one can only say: “do thy warste.”
A highlight here is Kevin T. Grimm’s, “Malory in the Time of Pandemic,” whose title describes “a period of social destabilization and uncertainty,” and “conditions which extend well beyond those associated only with the spread of Covid-19 and thus metaphorically captures the current sense of socio-political stress, bordering on crisis, that characterizes our present moment” (160). Touching on specific aspects of Arthurian fellowship—and its maintenance in times of frightening instability—and on the “aura of imprisonment” (160, and passim) which, in both concrete and psychological terms, pervades the Morte, Grimm illuminates areas of shared experience between Malory’s characters and his readers in the present generation. As a counterpoint to the strict historicism which often guides medieval studies, this chapter’s (tacit) engagement with reception theory demonstrates this kind of reading at its most productive, as, in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s words, “a process of transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated” [2], even (one might add) as the texts and readings in this volume are mediated by the work, and by the loss, of a fellow scholar.
Reception is also at the heart of “How to Handle a Woman: Aaron Sorkin’s Camelot” by Susan Aronstein and Kathleen Coyne Kelly, which analyzes the characterization of Guinivere and Morgan le Fay in Sorkin’s 2023 revival of Lerner and Loewe’s 1960 musical. Aronstein and Kelly, whose vivid descriptions of key scenes give us a good view of the stage, are game theater critics, appreciative of the literary, theatrical, and cinematic history that led to this production. Their open-minded approach gives us reason to hope, especially since, as we learn, Morgan, whose role was cut from the 1960 production, is back in. Despite the revival’s promising infidelity to its source, however, we learn (spoiler alert) that “[t]he constraints on Guenevere and Morgan, figured differently in Sorkin’s Camelot, are still constraints that can’t seem to be transcended—only paraphrased” (204).
With her “Epilogue: Painting Lions,” Amy S. Kaufman bridges Fiona Tolhurst’s life and work, scholarship and praxis. “Tolhurst understood the liberating effects of unearthing positive representations of medieval women, and she was deeply cognizant of the ways that reading performed by scholars...can change both the traditional understanding of history and the course of history, affecting academic and popular interpretations of the past as well as real women’s lives” (206). Kaufman here pays tribute to Tolhurst as an esteemed scholar and beloved teacher, and in the process gives us her portrait, painting the lioness as she was: incisive, energetic, unapologetic.
This tribute volume shares the eclecticism of its kind: if only a certain few will read it cover to cover, any reader who shares Fiona Tolhurst’s interests will find something new and valuable to take away. The absence of an appendix listing Tolhurst’s publications is to be regretted. The only real objection, though, is that we are reading this book now instead of many years hence.
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Notes:
1. Fiona Tolhurst and K. S. Whetter, “Memories of War: Retracting the Interpretive Tradition of the Alliterative Morte Arthure,” Arthuriana 29, no.1 (2019): 4-14; 7.
2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, revised edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (Bloomsbury, 2013), 302.