Reviewing a volume of collected essays always presents a challenge, as it is difficult to avoid simply critiquing the individual chapters one by one. For a character as long in evolution and varied in guise as Robin Hood, this challenge becomes particularly formidable, as interpretations and arguments are bound to differ greatly depending upon context and perspective.

Like many edited collections, Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern is the product of a conference, in this case the Fifth Biennial Meeting of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies, held at the University of Delaware in 2005. The book's editors, Lois Potter and Joshua Calhoun, follow the recent trend in Robin Hood scholarship by focusing less on the perennial but almost certainly unsolvable question of his true historical origin and more on his diverse appearances in British and American culture from the Middle Ages to the present. The contributors represent the usual mix of academic faculty and graduate students, including some of the most notable names in an admittedly highly specialized field. The book is divided into two halves, medieval and postmedieval, but the thematic emphasis remains consistent throughout: Robin Hood is, as the editors assert in the introduction, “a character who resists capture. … To imagine a Robin Hood is to select from a forest of possibilities” (11).

Images of Robin Hood thus stakes out a place in postmodernist historical and literary territory, with most contributors only minimally interested in the legend's links to empirical reality or to a real-life antecedent yet to be discovered in the medieval archives. In the opening chapter, Stephen Knight, academe's most renowned Robin Hood scholar, argues that the “real” Robin Hood was not even an outlaw but, rather, that his legend developed from the French pastourelle tradition via the English May games. Only later did the punning link between his name and the word “rob” lead to his connection with banditry. Given the decades-long duration of his focus on a subject with only limited textual and archival references, Knight deserves full marks for once again supplying an interpretation that is both original and convincing. Other essays in this section also attempt to strip medieval legends of latter-day accretions: Stephen D. Winick, for example, claims that the supernatural elements of the French Reynardine tradition are modern interpolations, thus making it possible to link it to the early tales of Robin Hood.

Some contributors to the medieval half of Images of Robin Hood, however, are more aggressive, and therefore less successful, in their attempts to employ poststructuralist theory in their analysis of the legend. Stuart Kane's examination of the early fourteenth-century poem The Outlaw's Song of Trailbaston overflows with Derridian and Foucauldian phrases such as “metanarrative gesture” and “metaphorical correspondences between the social and individual body” (45, 47), which serve to obscure rather than enlighten his argument. Similarly, Kimberly A. Thompson's claim that the Robin Hood of the late medieval ballads “functions, through his variability and instability, as a site of resistance to restrictive identity positions” (103) risks the imposition of modern conceptions of identity in sociopolitical context upon the Middle Ages. At the end of the section, Michael Wheare's description of how the attempts of the Edinburgh civic authorities to suppress the Robin Hood games in 1561 led to violent riots provides less theoretical sophistication but greater clarity in illuminating the relationship between Robin Hood and the subversion of medieval structures of power.

The second half of the book has to work less hard to say something new, due to the greater variety of source materials at its disposal. Henry Griffy's chapter on the illustrations created by Virginia Lee Burton for the children's book Song of Robin Hood (1947) reveals relatively little about the legend but much about art's struggle to maintain its authenticity in an age of technology. Two essays, by Patricia Yongue and Judy B. McInnis, trace the significance of Robin Hood references in Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. Sherron Lux attempts once again, this time through illustrations in children's books, to determine whether Maid Marian is yet another literary woman constrained by dominant males or whether she is a true protofeminist heroine, active and assertive in her own right. We also get, from Yoshiko Uéno and Jianguo Chen, a look at Japanese and Chinese parallels to Robin Hood, as well as two chapters on the American composer Reginald de Koven, whose operetta Robin Hood achieved considerable popular success in 1890. Perhaps the most valuable contribution of this section, however, is the recognition of the American illustrator Howard Pyle as a leading shaper of the twentieth-century legend, thanks to the two chapters by Jill May and Alan T. Gaylord. The former succeeds in demonstrating how Pyle's Sherwood Forest, which continues to dominate our imaginings of Robin Hood's milieu today, was based less upon the English landscape than it was upon his native Brandywine Valley in northern Delaware. Gaylord, meanwhile, shows how, in keeping with his own religious beliefs, Pyle reinvented Robin Hood as an exemplar of “Quaker fortitude and gentleness” (158). Our modern-day Robin Hood, often cited as a symbol of Englishness, thus turns out to have a number of American attributes.

Taken in sum, the essays in Images of Robin Hood confirm the introduction's claim that Robin Hood is at heart a shape-shifter who cannot be traced to a single antecedent or identity. The medieval outlaw has thus become the perfect icon for a postmodern age.