Tara Williams's Middle English Marvels—complementing the Magic in History series published by the Pennsylvania State University Press—focuses on a number of romances in Middle English composed in the fourteenth century: Sir Orfeo, Lybeaus Desconus, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the “Wife of Bath's Tale” and “Squire's Tale” in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. These romances, Williams argues, all use “magical” marvels of one kind or another to interrogate moral concerns of various kinds. In Sir Orfeo, Orfeo—a medieval rewriting of the Orpheus of classical mythology—comes across a “gallery” of men and women who have died suddenly when he enters the underworld of which Pluto, now a “fairy,” is the king. This is a marvel, Williams argues, that reveals to Orfeo the moral code to which Pluto and his fellow “fairies” adhere, and that raises questions in turn about chivalric ethics (#). In Lybeaus Desconus, Williams suggests, the marvel of a serpent with a woman's face with which the hero of the romance is confronted invites one to assess the relationship between what appears to be and what is in fact the case. It is through the multiple marvels to which Gawain is exposed in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—a text that “represents the zenith of the visual marvel in the fourteenth century” (96)—that Gawain is tested morally in multiple ways. “Wife of Bath's Tale” and “Squire's Tale” substitute verbal for visual marvels, Williams argues, and through them raise such moral considerations as the true meaning of gentillesse on which the “hag” lectures her rapist husband in the “Wife of Bath's Tale.” Williams argues that the use of marvels to ask moral questions is a distinctive feature of fourteenth-century English romances, one that contributes to the validity of reading them as a group and that asserts their interest against later English romances, perhaps a more fashionable subject for scholarly analysis in recent years.

Williams's book extends the considerable amount of work on a number of interlocking concepts that has been produced over the last few decades: on “marvels” and the “marvelous”; “wonder” (what one does when one is faced with a marvel, or something marvelous); “magic and the supernatural,” treated as parallel notions; the “otherworld,” or “otherworlds.” Williams makes careful reference to the work done by other scholars on these respective ideas, and mostly accepts their findings. She regularly departs from the immediate subject matter and argument of her book to register other scholarly cruces in the texts with which she deals.

Williams offers some interesting readings. For example, Lybeaus Desconus—one of a group of romances about a “fair unknown” who either does not know who he is or chooses to keep his identity secret from other people—exposes its hero, Williams points out, to a kind of dragon that cannot be fought in the way that knights usually fight dragons, since it is not just a dragon, but a dragon that, with its woman's face, is also human, a hybrid creature. This marvel perhaps probes issues relating to chivalric conduct as much as do other, better-known romances in Middle English, notably Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Williams's study raises several questions that might be added to the ones with which she concludes her book. In the first place, if there is a repeated confluence of the concerns with which the book deals in romances in English of the fourteenth century, is it just coincidence that they do all share these concerns? If not, is there some contextualizing material that might be invoked to rationalize why so many different authors, writing in different parts of England in the fourteenth century, deployed the same strategies in the romances that they composed, as Williams suggests they did? Williams claims that the romances that she discusses are not like medieval romances in other languages, or romances in English written at different moments of the Middle Ages. Is there some reason why these particular romances came to be so distinctive?

The time is probably ripe to think about the limits and limitations of some of the terms that Williams marshals, following other scholars of romances written in Middle English. Is it right to infer that any “marvels” that those romances attribute to fairies are the result of “magic” that the fairies have worked? Might fairies be thought to produce marvels because they are perceived ontologically to possess powers that human beings do not have? As Williams registers, magic is a practice of human beings, and so not of beings that are regarded as superhuman. Did people in the Middle Ages recognize the concept of “otherworlds” that modern scholarship has distinguished? Did people in the Middle Ages identify phenomena that contradict—or appear to contradict—the laws of nature as “supernatural”? Scholars such as Robert Bartlett and Richard Firth Green (to whom Williams refers) have done exciting work on some of these issues. They offer scholars of medieval romances—in Middle English and other languages—new frameworks for understanding these enigmatic literary texts.