All fiction is to some extent parasitic. A story without links to a perceived actual world would simply make no sense, and without borrowings from other stories existing within a shared imaginative network, it would have little purchase with its intended audience. But the insular fictions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were more sponging than most. This is at least in part why romances of the Anglo-Norman period, and their translations and adaptations in the following Middle English period, now appear generically messy. In contrast to a comparatively stable romance scene on the Continent, and to other, more secure genres such as the saint’s life and the fabliau, it seems romance in England became something of a favored vehicle for writers interested in pursuing the limits of what was possible in a particular form.

The resulting eclecticism, and with it the potential to be surprised—even shocked—at any turn, is perhaps what makes these romances most interesting. Indeed, one of the strengths of The Exploitations of Medieval Romance is in the way the contributors consistently adopt incorporative rather than disambiguating critical strategies, in the way they refuse to cover up or define-away the untidiness of romance but, rather, use this untidiness as an opportunity for thinking about how these texts were deeply entrenched in networks of complex literary exchange. This focus on romance’s cross-genre literary contexts seems to be one of the directions romance studies, at least in Britain, has been taking in recent years, aided in no small part by the D. S. Brewer series in which this present collection is published and by the biennial Romance in Medieval Britain conference where many of these papers were first delivered.

Exploitations brings much to the table in this regard, but one of its major contributions is to argue that romance’s exploitative tendencies are not always just literary play for its own sake. As Laura Ashe proposes in her introduction, romance doesn’t necessarily—as Derek Pearsall has suggested—replace logic with rhetoric; instead, the rhetoric of romance makes its own logic, of the sort that depends on romance’s self-conscious fictionality and imaginative freedoms to produce its ideological influence. What Ashe goes on to describe as the potential for romance to be co-opted as a vehicle for ideological expression emerges as a major thread in this volume. In her own article, Ashe argues that the Gawain-Poet uses the beheading game in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to expose the incompatibility of chivalry and Christianity, or, more fully, she argues that the poem is a critique of its own genre in that it lays bare the contradictions of Christianity’s ideology of interiority and sacrifice and chivalry’s ideology of fame and life. There is much to admire here, but is the poem really a critique of romance itself? The two major ideologies of medieval England may not have been perfectly compatible, but for me this romance shows how that tension can be thematically and narratologically productive—an exercising of the possibilities of the genre—in the hands of a skilled romancer.

In “Saracens and Other Saxons,” Ivana Djordjević is also interested in the ideological influence of romance. Here she looks at shifting place names in successive manuscripts of Gui de Warewic and its Middle English adaptations. What she finds, interestingly, is that the geographical specificity of the early manuscripts descends into vague or implausible toponyms in the later texts. The change in these places, which have “less an impact on the geography of the narrative than on the representation of history in it” (41), exposes not just scribal error but, rather, how later readers could not understand the historical and ideological implications of the original author. Diane Vincent’s excellent article on the fifteenth-century Turpines Story shows how romances can accrue cultural significance over time, but Djordjević’s essay is a useful reminder that they can lose them as well.

Judith Weiss’s contribution also focuses on Gui de Warewic. Here she is interested in how the author exploits the conventions of pilgrimage and saints’ lives and argues that “narrative plausibility takes a back seat to superficially enhancing his hero’s moral standing” (56). While the poet borrows from hagiographic texts to make Gui more saintly, he does so at the expense of narrative cohesion. Neil Cartlidge also deals with a parallel genre: the fabliau. He reads Le chevalier qui fist les cons parler alongside Lanval to show how generic exploitation cuts both ways; in this case the same story matter used for both narratives allows for an analysis of how each is a carefully rendered generic performance, the one acquiring resonances from the other. Anna Caughey also considers generic interplay, arguing that the Buik of King Alexander the Conqueror falls into four sections according to “major generic influences”: epic, courtly romance, the Wonders of the East, and tragedy.

Finally, at the heart of this collection are extremely useful essays by Melissa Furrow and Rosalind Field. Furrow is interested in showing how early insular romance not only exploited the conventions of Chanson de geste but wholly absorbed them as well, to the extent that the Chanson de geste became romance in England. Rosalind Field is also interested in transitions, though this time from Anglo-Norman to English. In an incredibly rich survey she argues that, when it comes to translation practices, a vocabulary of cooperation rather than competition ought to be adopted, since Middle English romances existed side by side with those in Anglo-Norman in the Middle English period. The volume also contains a characteristically insightful essay by Corinne Saunders on the exploitations of magic (itself an exploitative art) and a piece by Arlyn Diamond on the uses of gardens. What all this amounts to is an extremely useful collection—a significant contribution to the D. S. Brewer series and to the study of medieval romance writ large.