Parergon

Although ‘Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle Ages’ is the title of an international project that has produced at least two conferences to date, and one in which the editors of the volume now being considered play leading roles, there is no overt attempt in this book to establish any association with project activity. The book contains thirteen single-author chapters and an introductory essay by the editors. Despite the common connotations of the word ‘insular’ in medieval studies, the focus here in on the high and late Middle Ages, not the centuries before 1000, and Iceland receives prominence beside Britain and Ireland. Though England receives some attention, particularly in chapters on Welsh translations of English Tudor period prophecy literature, and on Anglo-Latin abuse poetry during the Hundred Years’ War, as well as in Rory McTurk’s essay examining alliterative patterns in Piers Plowman and skaldic poetry, the emphasis of the volume is on the literatures of Wales, Ireland, and Iceland. Scotland does not feature here.

Nine of the thirteen chapters after the introduction are largely devoted to considering the practice of translators (or as some authors prefer to say, ‘redactors’) in rendering into the vernacular Latin texts from antiquity or the Middle Ages (and to a considerably lesser extent texts from other medieval vernaculars). The source texts are varied—from the Aeneid and Statius’s Thebaid (both rendered into Irish) to De excidio Troiae historia attributed to Dares Phrygius (c. fifth century ce) and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (both rendered into Icelandic). The emphasis of the chapters is on what the translators or redactors have achieved, considered in the light of the milieu in which they worked and their likely audiences: source study has a long history, but the focus here is not on tracking down sources for its own sake as an intellectual exercise, or on demonstrating how a translator failed to appreciate the subtleties of the source text. The studies here lead in most cases to an enhanced appreciation of what was achieved in the reworking of the source.

Other essays consider gentry libraries in late medieval Wales and discuss the possibility that the portrayal of the paradisiacal Glæsisvellir, ‘Shining Fields’, in Icelandic sources may have been directly influenced by something similar in Irish [End Page 189] mythology. It will be apparent that the broad theme of ‘crossing borders’ has been interpreted so as to allow contributors considerable latitude. In discussing the Anglo-Latin abuse poetry Joanna Bellis admits that the poems ‘did not so much cross a border [...] as erect one’ (p. 109), and in seeing parallels between what he describes as contrapuntal alliteration in William Langland’s great poem and the work of the earlier Norse poets McTurk understandably makes no suggestion that the skalds exerted a literary influence in fourteenth century England.

The chapters in this volume are very lucidly written (though Sif Ríkhardsdóttir’s more theoretical discussion of emotive literary identities, emotive script, and emotive coding in the earlier part of her essay is understandably a bit more challenging). In general, they do not focus on the major historical subjects or the best-known literary masterpieces of medieval insular cultures (but Sif Ríkhardsdóttir has some brief but interesting comments on Njáls saga and Egils saga Skallagrímssonar). Leading scholars are represented in the volume, and most of the chapters have extensive and useful individual biographies, typically extending over at least three pages. There is an index of manuscripts and a general index, but, somewhat disappointingly, no biographical information about the contributors or systematic indication of institutional affiliation.

The study of medieval translation practices is a field increasingly attracting attention, and those concerned with that subject should find this volume a rich resource. Other students of medieval literature, particularly those whose interest is...