Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Foreword Bonnie Wheeler
- Professor Peter Field: An Appreciation
- 1 The Grail Romances and the Old Law
- 2 What did Robert de Boron really write?
- 3 On Capitalization in Some Early Manuscripts of Wace's Roman de Brut
- 4 Tristan Rossignol: The Development of a Text
- 5 What's in a Name? Arthurian Name-Dropping in the Roman de Waldef
- 6 The Enigma of the Prose Yvain
- 7 Dreams and Visions in the Perlesvaus
- 8 La Reine-Fée in the Roman de Perceforest: Rewriting, Rethinking
- 9 The Relationship between Text and Image in Three Manuscripts of the Estoire del Saint Graal (Lancelot-Grail Cycle)
- 10 Wigalois and Parzival: Father and Son Roles in the German Romance of Gawain's Son
- 11 Reading between the Lines: A Vision of the Arthurian World Reflected in Galician-Portuguese Poetry
- 12 The Lost Beginning of The Jeaste of Syr Gaweyne and the Collation of Bodleian Library MS Douce 261
- 13 Enide's See-through Dress
- 14 A Note on the Percy Folio Grene Knight
- 15 ‘False Friends’ in the Works of the Gawain-Poet
- 16 Place-Names in The Awntyrs Off Arthure: Corruption, Conjecture, Coincidence
- 17 Lancelot as Lover in the English Tradition before Malory
- 18 Malory and Middle English Verse Romance: The Case of Sir Tristrem
- 19 Sir Thomas Malory's (French) Romance and (English) Chronicle
- 20 Romantic Self-Fashioning: Three Case Studies
- 21 Are Further Emendations Necessary? A Note on the Definite and Indefinite Articles in the Winchester Malory
- 22 Lucius's Exhortation in Winchester and The Caxton
- 23 The Historicity of Combat in Le Morte Darthur
- 24 Personal Weapons in Malory's Le Morte Darthur
- 25 ‘now I take uppon me the adventures to seke of holy thynges’: Lancelot and the Crisis of Arthurian Knighthood
- 26 Malory's Language of Love
- 27 P.J.C. Field's Worshipful Revision of Malory: Making a Virtue of Necessity
- 28 Old Sir Thomas Malory‘s Enchanting Book’: A Connecticut Yankee Reads Le Morte Darthur
- P.J.C. Field: Publications
- Notes on Contributors
- Tabula Gratulatoria
5 - What's in a Name? Arthurian Name-Dropping in the Roman de Waldef
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Foreword Bonnie Wheeler
- Professor Peter Field: An Appreciation
- 1 The Grail Romances and the Old Law
- 2 What did Robert de Boron really write?
- 3 On Capitalization in Some Early Manuscripts of Wace's Roman de Brut
- 4 Tristan Rossignol: The Development of a Text
- 5 What's in a Name? Arthurian Name-Dropping in the Roman de Waldef
- 6 The Enigma of the Prose Yvain
- 7 Dreams and Visions in the Perlesvaus
- 8 La Reine-Fée in the Roman de Perceforest: Rewriting, Rethinking
- 9 The Relationship between Text and Image in Three Manuscripts of the Estoire del Saint Graal (Lancelot-Grail Cycle)
- 10 Wigalois and Parzival: Father and Son Roles in the German Romance of Gawain's Son
- 11 Reading between the Lines: A Vision of the Arthurian World Reflected in Galician-Portuguese Poetry
- 12 The Lost Beginning of The Jeaste of Syr Gaweyne and the Collation of Bodleian Library MS Douce 261
- 13 Enide's See-through Dress
- 14 A Note on the Percy Folio Grene Knight
- 15 ‘False Friends’ in the Works of the Gawain-Poet
- 16 Place-Names in The Awntyrs Off Arthure: Corruption, Conjecture, Coincidence
- 17 Lancelot as Lover in the English Tradition before Malory
- 18 Malory and Middle English Verse Romance: The Case of Sir Tristrem
- 19 Sir Thomas Malory's (French) Romance and (English) Chronicle
- 20 Romantic Self-Fashioning: Three Case Studies
- 21 Are Further Emendations Necessary? A Note on the Definite and Indefinite Articles in the Winchester Malory
- 22 Lucius's Exhortation in Winchester and The Caxton
- 23 The Historicity of Combat in Le Morte Darthur
- 24 Personal Weapons in Malory's Le Morte Darthur
- 25 ‘now I take uppon me the adventures to seke of holy thynges’: Lancelot and the Crisis of Arthurian Knighthood
- 26 Malory's Language of Love
- 27 P.J.C. Field's Worshipful Revision of Malory: Making a Virtue of Necessity
- 28 Old Sir Thomas Malory‘s Enchanting Book’: A Connecticut Yankee Reads Le Morte Darthur
- P.J.C. Field: Publications
- Notes on Contributors
- Tabula Gratulatoria
Summary
The apparently random use of Arthurian names for characters in the Anglo-Norman Roman de Waldef may be a deliberately negative response to the Matter of Britain.
Any reader, medieval or modern, of the Anglo-Norman Roman de Waldef, could be disoriented by the apparently random occurrence of names from disparate traditions. Amongst the names redolent of earlier English tradition (Bede, Edwin, Erkenwald, Hereward) are several Arthurian ones – Uther, Merlin, Hoel, Morgan and Morderet. The editor Holden's understandably impatient dismissal of this – ‘banalité … peut être due au hasard’ suggests a carelessness, even ignorance, on the part of an author requiring a cast-list of hundreds. However, I would suggest that this judgement be reconsidered in the light of recent work on the purposes and the reception of the dominant British history of Geoffrey and Wace in twelfth-century England.
Waldef is a long, multi-layered narrative, eclectic to a fault but conspicuously well-informed of contemporary narrative developments. Its rambling account of factional wars between the petty kingdoms of an imagined pre-Conquest England has at first sight little to do with the carefully structured providential history of Geoffrey and his followers. Indeed, the Anglo-Norman romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries can be seen to distance themselves from the contemporary fashion for Arthurian material, offering what scholarship would later identify as a Matter of England legendary history as an alternative to the Matter of Britain. There is no comparable use of Arthurian names in other insular romances.
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- Information
- Arthurian Studies in Honour of P.J.C. Field , pp. 63 - 64Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004