Imagining Iberia in English and Castilian Medieval Romance.
- Author/Editor
- Houlik-Ritchey, Emily.
- Title
- Imagining Iberia in English and Castilian Medieval Romance.
- Published
- Houlik-Ritchey, Emily. Imagining Iberia in English and Castilian Medieval Romance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023.
- Review
- Drawing particularly on, but not confining herself to, "Neighbor Theory" as advanced by Kenneth Reinhard and George Edmondson, and grounded by the ontology of Emmanuel Levinas, Houlik-Ritchey sets out to sketch the "imaginations of Iberia within romance" (23). She arranges her book into three "clusters," one devoted to versions of Fierabras, one to Floire and Blancheflor, and the third, to "De-Networking Iberia and England in the Constance story" (167-208). Gower's version of the last figures as the centerpiece of the third cluster, which should be read keeping in mind Houlik-Ritchey's goal, to bring together "disparate texts to foreground attention to the contrapuntal or uneven dimensions of their relationality, analyzing the dissonance that emerges within their affinities" (29-30). The "Tale of Constance" interests her not only because it was translated into Portuguese and Castilian, but also because it "is the most illuminating in terms of Iberia's comparability with Northumbrian England" (169). Following Edmondson, she sees the two places as "neighbor[ing] one another" (174): that is, they reflect each other even in their differences, which are extreme--but also in their similarities. Gower's Northumbria begins as "a place of fellowship" (176) while Iberia (where Constance is almost raped) exemplifies "qualities of solitary, self-serving interest, taken at the expense of others" (177). Yet Houlik-Ritchey finds resemblances one to the other: there is a near-rape in Northumberland, there is murder, and once again Constance is set adrift by her mother-in-law, in the boat that took her from Syria, and this time to Spain. Ultimately Houlik-Ritchey offers "a rigorous interrogation of the religious and geopolitical logic that ushers in both English-Roman alliance [i.e., through Moris] and Christian hegemony throughout the Mediterranean and North Atlantic" (178), which she sees as the fulcrum of Gower's endeavor. For her the changes brought to Gower's text in the Portuguese and Castilian translations, which "reimagine" (195) both Northumbria and Iberia, bears this out. She rightly makes much of the marriages of John of Gaunt's daughters to the kings of Portugal and Castile (180-87, with attention to the "Man of Law's Tale') as defining the world of the fifteenth-century translators as different "geopolitically" from Gower's. Theirs reflects Iberian cultural centrality, recognizing Islamic communalities and the Portuguese and Castilian courts as power centers, Houlik-Ritchey argues via a keen analysis of both translations. This in her view diminishes the Anglo-Roman, Christian "Weltanschauung" Gower's version projects. "In spite, then, of the tale's [i.e., Gower's] resounding resolution of alliance and empire, Iberia elucidates what routes and alliances do not result, precisely because others were being forged instead" (208). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2023
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Backgrounds and General Criticism