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 SAUNDERSteaches 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.
| Preface | ||
| Introduction | ||
| 1 | The Origins of the Romance Forest | 1 |
| The Historical Forest | 1 | |
| The Biblical Wilderness | 10 | |
| The Philosophical Tradition: Silva and Hyle | 19 | |
| 2 | Classical Antecedents and Romance Retellings | 25 |
| The Classical Tradition | 25 | |
| The Roman d'Antiquite | 34 | |
| 3 | The Forest of Courtly Romance: The Twelfth Century | 44 |
| The Breton Lay | 46 | |
| The Romances of Chretien de Troyes | 58 | |
| The Tristan Romances | 81 | |
| 4 | Convention and Innovation: The Thirteenth Century | 95 |
| Contes | 95 | |
| The Prose Romances of Lancelot and Tristan | 103 | |
| 5 | The Landscape of Vision: Merlin and the Grail Quest | 114 |
| The Vita Merlini and the Hagiographic Tradition | 115 | |
| The Queste del Saint Graal | 122 | |
| 6 | Multiple Readings: The Middle English Romances | 132 |
| Sir Orfeo | 133 | |
| Sir Launfal | 142 | |
| Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | 148 | |
| Chaucer | 155 | |
| 7 | The Forests of Logres: Malory's Morte Darthur | 163 |
| 8 | Rewriting the Forest: Spenser and Shakespeare | 186 |
| Spenser's The Faerie Queene | 187 | |
| Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It | 196 | |
| Epilogue | 204 | |
| Bibliography | 207 | |
| Index | 229 |
Overview
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 ...