After an introduction by the editor, this volume contains eleven articles examining English outlaws, most notably Robin Hood, as well as Welsh and Scottish outlaws. Articles by Thomas Hahn and Stephen Knight as well as by David Blamires, examine gender and outlawry. Other articles examine the development of outlaw myths across time, including all of the way up to the twentieth century (e.g., Jeffrey Richards’s “Robin Hood, King Arthur and Cold War Chivalry”; 167–95).

Editor Helen Phillips explains that the term “bandit territories” is an English idiom denoting a geographical area where local law enforcement has little or no control. It is akin to the “wild west” in North America and the “outback” in Australia during the nineteenth century. She also notes that the title “reflects the fact that most of the essays are concerned with crossing between territories: lowland/highland; gay/straight; male/female; Scotland/ England; Wales/England; king/rebel” (21); to this list, I would add history/fiction as well as low/high culture. The essays also record “the changing reception and appropriation of bandit traditions in different centuries and for different ideologies and causes” (1). Later retellings often reveal the adaptation of the legends to the culture of the times, as is most strikingly the case here in the essays by Allan W. Wright, Jeffrey Richards, Helen Phillips, and John Beynon.

Phillips has taken great care to ensure coverage of the topic from medieval to modern texts as well as a range of more contemporary media, including film, television, and comics. Her introduction, not typical of the sort found in edited collections, offers an excellent and highly readable survey of the field of outlaw literature. The essays also display a variety of critical approaches, ranging from traditional character analysis (Blunk) and cultural studies (Wright) to modern theories of postcolonial discourse (Knight and Price) and gender and sexuality (Knight and Hahn).

A common theme shared by many of the literary versions is the “good outlaw”; that is, the heroes in these stories pose the paradoxical problem of being outlaws, having committed real crimes, and being admired and supported by the people. Instead of bringing shame upon them, their outlawry proves them to be superior physically and morally to the very representatives who should be upholding the law. Victims of unjust actions by the king (Hereward the Wake, Eustace the Monk, Fulk Fitz Waryn, William Wallace) or his agents (Gamelyn, Robin Hood, Adam Bell) have the legal and moral right to rebel.

Since space is limited, I will highlight the Hahn and Knight essay, whose title is taken from one of the captions in the 1922 silent film starring Douglas Fairbanks: “Exempt Me, Sire, for I Am Afeard of Women.” After winning the opening tournament, the Earl of Huntington (the future Robin Hood) runs away from a mob of adoring young damsels and dives into a river to escape from them. This scene is the springboard for the authors’s provocative claim that the film as well as the entire tradition contains a range of same-sex relationships, ranging from homosocial male bonding activities such as archery contests, wrestling, and robberies to more explicit homoeroticism in characters such as Prince John in the Fairbanks film and Will Scarlet in the Flynn film, who represent the “homophobic inverse of true masculinity” with “their effete personal demeanour, habitual nervousness, and distaste for action” (28). Even Robin Hood himself is suspected of being gay. Stephen Knight relates what happened in 1999 when a reporter from the London Sunday Times read that Knight was scheduled to give a paper at the International Robin Hood Studies Conference at the University of Nottingham on the nineteenth-century novel Maid Marian: The Forest Queen. Since the conference program listed the paper simply as The Forest Queen, the reporter mistakenly assumed that Knight was claiming that Robin Hood was gay, and Knight, ever the provocateur, encouraged this interpretation in a lengthy interview that ended up on page three of that weekend’s Sunday Times. The story became viral worldwide, and Knight was subjected to numerous interviews in which he playfully defended and expanded on “this outrageous idea” (39). This account is embedded in the larger grandiloquent context of gender theory, but this reviewer wonders if the authors, to use another English idiom, are having a laugh.

One topic the book does not directly address is the continuing debate over the existence of a historical Robin Hood; that is, was the legend based on an actual person named Robin (or Robert) Hood, or was it the invention of what F. C. Child called the “ballad muse”? Opposing camps of scholars, much like the Stratfordians and the Oxfordians in the Shakespeare debate, continue to argue their cases. I personally identify with the middle ground; that is, the poems and plays were not written in a vacuum but reflect the times and places in which they were created. By closely examining the historical and linguistic contexts of certain surnames, place names, and social practices in the surviving texts, we are able not only to appreciate more fully the literature itself but to come closer to its time of production and dissemination. For example, a document in the National Archives (SC1/33/202) contains a reference to “Robin Oeds Bay,” and based on an analysis by David Crook (assisted by Robert Lynley and David Hepworth), we can confidently date the letter from Louis, Count of Flanders and Nevers to a King Edward, to 1324–46. The bay, located south of Whitby, was famous for smuggling, and it is perhaps for this reason that it became associated with the legend of Robin Hood. If the dating is correct, we now have evidence that the legend was circulating half a century before William Langland’s reference to the “rymes of Robyn Hode” in 1377. In spite of some minor inconsistencies in spelling and punctuation, the collection will appeal to the general reader as well as to specialists in the field.