GERALDINE HENG's SEMINAL study The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018) is thought-provoking in many ways, even in minute details. In the Acknowledgements she thanks many people, including ‘David Johnson and Geert Claassens [who] shared their important translation-in-progress of the Middle Dutch Roman van Moriaen’. And indeed, Heng's excellent analysis of the story of the adventures of a black knight from Moriane in King Arthur's realm has benefited greatly from this well-made modern translation, where the only alternative in print would have been Jessie Weston's outdated and often not quite precise translation, published in 1901. The new translation-in-the-making would bring the number of Middle Dutch romances translated by the Johnson-Claassens team up to eight. The three volumes containing the already published translations, dating from 1992 to 2003, were re-issued in paperback in 2012. The translations areof great value for anyone studying Middle Dutch Arthurian romances, both in the Netherlands and abroad, since they combine a fine critical edition of the original Dutch text with an excellent rendition into modern English. The publication of their Moriaen translation, hopefully in the near future, will no doubt also stimulate the study of this very interesting romance in international and Dutch Arthurian research.

They have already done so much, and yet the team's intention at the time was, and hopefully still is, to bring to the international research community translations of more, perhaps even all ten, texts in the Lancelot Compilation, the flagship of Middle Dutch Arthuriana. This intention may be read between the lines of the elaborate introduction to the compilation accompanying the translation of five romances in 2003, where the acknowledgements suggest that there may be ‘further volumes in the Middle Dutch Romances series’. The Moriaen translation is perhaps one of these volumes-to-be, and there are a few more parts of the compilation that still remain un-translated. The manuscript (The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, hs 129 A 10), dating from around 1320, contains a verse translation of the final third of the prose Lancelot, followed by the Perchevael romance and Moriaen, then another translation from the French vulgate Cycle, the Queeste van den Grale, followed by five more romances and, as closure, the translation of La mort le roi Artu, Arturs doet.

IN 2002, THE members of the respectable Maatschappij der nederlandse letterkunde (Society of Dutch literature) were invited to participate in a survey of the most important Dutch authors and texts. Multatuli's novel Max Havelaar, published in 1860, turned out to be their favourite title, followed closely by the Middle Dutch verse text Van den vos Reynaerde (Of Reynaert the Fox). Their high ranking of this thirteenth-century beast epic is understandable. recently, for example, geert Claassens characterised Van den vos Reynaerde as ‘a perfectly composed text, with supple versification, irony, sarcasm and humour effortlessly upholding a story that runs along smoothly according to a perfect plot.’ Multilingualism is one of the textual features that contribute to the beast epic's humour, the author of Van den vos Reynaerde clearly used French and latin elements for comic purposes. This multilingualism was addressed by the author who translated the Middle Dutch beast epic into Latin. His adaptation of the French and Latin passages demonstrates his moralising intentions in writing Reynardus Vulpes.

At the beginning of Van den vos Reynaerde, King Nobel, the lion, holds court. Various animals charge Reynaert with crimes in absentia. Even though Grimbeert the badger defends his nephew Reynaert eloquently, the king decides to summon the fox. His first two messengers, Bruun the bear and Tybeert the cat, fail to bring Reynaert along. Exploiting their weaknesses, the fox tricks them. The third messenger, Grimbeert, persuades Reynaert to accompany him to the court. On their way, the fox confesses his countless crimes to the badger. The court tries Reynaert and sentences him to death. However, due to his public confession, in which he presents an invented story about a hidden treasure and a conspiracy against the king's life, the greedy Nobel pardons him and imprisons Reynaert's opponents. Pretending to go on pilgrimage, the fox is allowed to leave the court in the company of Cuwaert the hare, whom he kills when he arrives at his home. Confronted with this murder, the king realizes that the fox has deceived him. Peace is seemingly restored after Nobel's reconciliation with Reynaert's enemies.

AT THE END of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur (completed 1469–70; published 1485) [hereafter Morte], after the wrack and ruin of Lancelot and Mordred's respective civil wars and the internecine strife in the wake of the Grail Quest, Guinevere, hearing that Arthur has died, seeks refuge in an abbatial convent at ‘Amysbyry’, or Amesbury. She takes vows there to become a Benedictine nun, wearing ‘whyght clothys and blak’ (2.929), and is eventually elected abbess and ruler, ‘as reson wolde’ (2.930). After an uncertain amount of time, she encounters her former lover Lancelot and turns him away, enjoining him to adopt a religious vocation in light of his sin, and while their parting is sorrowful, provoking ‘lamentacyon as they had be stungyn wyth sperys’ (2.934), the queen dies repentant. Malory's rendering of Guinevere's final years is poignant, leaving little doubt as to the authenticity of the queen's devotion, and his version of events is the one that has become perhaps most canonical in the centuries since its composition. The Morte, however, is an exceedingly late medieval account, and its treatment of Guinevere, at odds with a huge majority of the preceding pan-European Arthurian tradition, is derived in large part from Malory's principal English source for the latter part of his text, the anonymous fourteenth-century stanzaic Morte Arthur [hereafter sMA]. Guinevere's moral rehabilitation at Amesbury, in fact, is a detail seemingly original to the sMA, and although scholars have offered fruitful examinations of the textual convent in reference to the Benedictine monastery and later dependent Fontevrault priory located in the historical town of Amesbury, the site's particular associations and resonance within the Arthurian literary tradition have gone unacknowledged in any substantial detail. Amesbury is an important site of transformation in the Brut tradition that descended from the earliest dedicated chronicle account, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) [hereafter Historia] (c. 1136–38), and the fact that the poet of the sMA, and later Malory, utilizes Amesbury as the location of Guinevere's redemption strongly suggests an intertextual link from within the established Brut tradition that introduces a thematic valence of mourning turned to celebration for the queen in these later texts.

GOSCELIN OF ST Bertin's Liber confortatorius (Book of Encouragement) [hereafter the Liber] is the first known work of spiritual guidance for an anchoress to have been composed in England. It is also a deeply personal letter designed to assuage the heartbreak occasioned by Goscelin's loss of his former student Eve, who had left Wilton Abbey (where Goscelin was probably serving as chaplain) c. 1080 to embrace a more reclusive life as an anchoress in Angers. Distraught over Eve's unannounced departure, Goscelin envisions the Liber as a substitute for his physical presence, a textual surrogate that might effectively reconnect two bodies whose former closeness was severed by geographic distance. Although the fact of their separation is bitter to Goscelin, he seeks comfort in the idea that ‘Loquetur etiam edificatius tenax pagina quam fluxa lingua’ [the tenacious page will speak more edifyingly than the fluid tongue] and that ‘alligare et refouere nos poterit intercurrens epistola’ [a letter shuttling back and forth can reconnect us and keep us warm].

The connection with Eve that Goscelin hopes to engender by his self-described peregrina epistola (26) ‘pilgrim letter’ (19) is merely one aspect of the Liber's sustained fascination with chaste human intimacies. Composed in the early 1080s during the first flourishing of Gregorian reforms, Goscelin's letter is filled with images that explore corporeal configurations and the spiritual and intellectual closeness they enable or refuse: conjoined female twins fused from the navel down; a hermit with his limbs stuck in a tree for fifteen years; a ‘double man’ sporting two torsos, four hands and feet, but only one soul; a dead girl whose womb swells with her foster father's unborn child; and the Liber itself, a letter to a lost beloved sealed with both lips and tears. That the Liber displays a strong interest in bodily union and spiritual intermingling is, in many ways, unsurprising. The text took shape during the early years of clerical reform, a religious movement notorious among scholars of women and gender for its increased scrutiny of human bodies and their interactions. Although scholars have amply recognized the Liber's investment in interpersonal relations, they have yet to investigate the extent to which interconnected, immobile, or restricted bodies – figures with physical configurations often categorized under the modern rubric of ‘disability’ – inform Goscelin's efforts to theorize the possibilities and dangers of human intimacy.

ONE OF DAVID F. Johnson's many contributions to the study of Middle Dutch Arthuriana is an argument about the diverse reasons why Walewein should be considered as operating in a class of his own in the Roman van Walewein. Johnson's reading is characteristically astute, but his thesis about Walewein's individuality presents an opportunity to examine once again the manipulation of genre and convention evident in another Arthurian masterpiece focusing upon Arthur's nephew: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight [hereafter SGGK]. In this most carefully crafted of medieval English romances, genre and convention are also closely tied to issues of heroism. Indeed, the Gawain-poet's manipulation of generic features includes a persistent emphasis on the isolation of his hero; this isolation is unusual given the generic telos of reconciliation so commonplace in the romance kind. Part of what happens, in consequence, is that Gawain is and is not a traditional romance hero; accordingly, SGGK is a generic hybrid. The question of how best to define romance has produced considerable scholarly debate, but love, whether of a heterosexual or homosexual partner, or of family, or of one's chivalric fellows, is a recurring and, indeed, defining feature of the genre; Gawain thus undertakes adventure for the love of Arthur. Unusually, though, Gawain is careful to avoid the kind of amorous or loving dalliance that is another staple form of adventure in the romance genre. Gawain is in fact continuously isolated throughout the poem, and this isolation suggests that he is also, in part, an unusual epic-heroic hero, one interested not only in the winning of that all-important heroic trait of public fame but also in abiding by a powerful code of honour. As so often in the heroic ethos, it is this code of honour and heroism – including, in this case, keeping Lady Bertilak's secret – that gets the hero Gawain into trouble. These issues of the hero's isolation, generic trouble, and honour are important for reassessing Gawain's supposed failure.

Erwin Cook makes a convincing case for the ancient Greek hero being both active and passive, a figure who is willing and capable of taking physical action and rendering appropriate harm to opponents, but who is equally likely to suffer harm him- or her-self.

IN A DISCUSSION of the meaning of ‘individuality’, Terry Eagleton cites two examples: ‘Homer's Odysseus seems to feel roughly this way, whereas Shakespeare's Hamlet most definitely does not’. Eagleton does something here that readers frequently do: he treats fictional characters like real, living, thinking people. It is a natural reflex to fill out the always-incomplete information in a story to make from it a plausible whole. The branch of literary criticism most commonly known as ‘cognitive literary studies’ takes this tendency as a point of departure for textual analysis. From this perspective, we may potentially resolve a conundrum found at the very heart of the Lanseloet van Denemerken, a fourteenth-century Middle Dutch play. Lanseloet van Denemerken [hereafter Lanseloet] is one of the so-called abele spelen ‘artful plays’ contained in the famous Hulthem manuscript (Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 15.589–15.623), where the play is recorded (on fols. 223rb–230ra) along with 210 other, mostly Middle Dutch, texts. The author is unknown (although he is likely to have come from the southern Netherlands), and its date is just as difficult to determine. The codicology of the manuscript itself does provide a terminus ante quem: the watermarks in its paper point to a production date between 1405 and 1410, and it was written by one scribe. The play itself likely dates to the late fourteenth century.

The play is not very long (no more than 952 lines) but still brings quite a few players on stage. Lanseloet (crown prince of Denemerken), his mother, Sanderijn (the woman he loves), an anonymous knight (whom Sanderijn eventually weds), Reinout (Lanseloet's servant) and the anonymous knight's forester. The play is well-structured, and the actions of the characters are usually clearly motivated. But Lanseloet, of all people, does something that initially seems counterintuitive (and that turns out to be very counterproductive in his attempts to win over Sanderijn): he agrees to a ruse his mother devises. Precisely at this point, the text does not give unequivocal information about the choices Lanseloet makes. This lack of information is not a problem only if the audience fills in the gaps in the text based on the context, giving them more or less free rein as long as they do not make assumptions that are clearly contradicted by the text.

THE VISIBILITY OF the intentions and identities of the leading artists, sculptors, scribes, and illuminators of early medieval England seems to become more apparent as the centuries progress, but such acts of representation always require thoughtful work on the audiences’ part. One of those acts of representation concerns the teams of producers, whose work may be deliberately rendered invisible within the object. In early medieval English art, for example, clear signs of the hands of the artists – their personal style, how this thing was carved, painted, and made – are often concealed, yet indications of the maker may be discoverable if one searches carefully for them. These are not meant to stand out, or even to be identifiable, except in a minority of cases, where a lead artist or scribe has significant prestige. In this study we seek to uncover the evidence for the ways in which the producers of textual and artistic objects in the early medieval period made manifest their individual efforts, to determine what presence the maker does have within their own work, and the different ways in which individual craftspeople are identified within objects, especially when the artefact was produced by a team.

Artworks, including illuminated manuscripts, were made for God, or at least manufactured in the sight of God, and expressions of personal artistry might usually have been considered evidence of pride or vanity. Very few artists’ identities are known prior to the twelfth century, and where self-reference appears to be made through the possible depiction of an artist by that artist, their name is concealed and thus lost to history. On the other hand, a portrait of the scribe (and possibly artist) Eadwig Basan survives on folio 133r of the Eadwig Psalter (London, British Library, Arundel 155, c. 1012–23), but scholars cannot be sure that it is actually by his hand. In the twelfth century, by contrast, it is possible to identify some professional artists, including the well-known ‘Master Hugo’, whose work is seen in the famous highly-illuminated manuscript, Cambridge Corpus Christi College, 2 – the Bury Bible, made at Bury St Edmunds.

Chapter 2 investigates how identity in Senecan tragedy is achieved via sympathetic identification with others, whether individuals or groups. The chapters focuses on Roman practices of exemplarity, which encouraged the formation of individual selves via the appropriation of others’ - often normative - characteristics. This habit of coyping and becoming a copy of other people connects the human individual to the fictional character, which is by nature inherently replicable. The two plays discussed in this chapter are Troades, where Astyanax is constantly characterised as a ‘second Hector’, and Hercules, where the protagonist pursues self-aemulatio in place of family attachments.

Chapter 1 examines behavioural coherence as a marker of both fictional and actual identity. Concentrating on the recognition scenes in Medea and Thyestes, this chapter contends that Senecan recognition is less about revelation than about validation of an identity achieved through consistent, habitual conduct. It discusses key concepts of decorum and Stoic persona-theory as ways of evaluating Atreus‘ and Medea’s self-construction. It also demonstrates how such behavioural repetition has gone largely unnoticed, as scholars have focused instead on the textual repetition highlighted by dominant methods of intertexual analysis.

The Introduction sets forth the book’s main parameters and situates its study within the current landscape of Senecan scholarship. In addition, it provides a detailed overview of major theoretical approaches to literary character from the late nineteenth century to the present, arguing against the limitations inherent in both the formalist/structuralist method of character criticism, and the humanist/psychological method, and proposing instead a blended theory of character that recognises both structural and person-like qualities. The final section of the Introduction narrows focus to theatrical contexts and considers how stage performance affects the presentation and reception of fictional character.

Chapter 4 discusses autonomy (or its lack) as a key element in characters’ fictional ontology. It divides the topic into three themes - freedom, revenge, and suicide - each of which plays a vital role in Seneca’s dual concept of personal and fictional independence. The first section addresses Stoic isolationism as an assertion of individual sovereignty and demonstrates that this trait is shared by Seneca’s sapiens and tragic characters alike. The second section examines revenge as, simultaneously, an amplification and limitation of characters’ autonomy. Finally, the chapter considers Senecan suicide as an expression of free agency in the midst of misfortune, charting its importance across both the prose and the dramatic works.