Layamon: Contexts, Language, and Interpretation (Kings College London Medieval Studies

by Rosamund Allen (Editor), Lucy Perry (Editor), Jane Roberts (Editor)

Contributors: Eric Stanley, Daniel Donoghue, Carole Weinberg, John Frankis, Cyril Edwards, Andrew Breeze, Herbert Pilch, Elizabeth J. Bryan, W.R.J. Barron, Richard Dance, Philip Durkin, Michiko Ogura, Robert McColl Millar, Gloria Mercatanti, Rosamund Allen, James Noble, Lucy Hay, Joseph D. Parry, Marie-Francoise Alamichel, Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley, Kenneth J. Tiller, Lucy Perry, Wayne Glowka

456 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

A welcome edition to the steady growing collection of books on critical interpretations of Layamon, edited by Rosamond Allen, who actually translated the poem a few years back. The whole book is actually a collection of papers that were presented at a Layamon conference that was hosted at Kings College in the year 2000.

The essays collected in this volume cover a range of topics relating to this strange alliterative Middle English version of the Brut. I particularly enjoyed the one by Eric Stanley and one by Daniel Donghue on Frederick Maddon, Layamon's first editor. The essays are divided into three sections on contexts, language and interpretations. A must for anyone wishing to know more about Layamon's text.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for anyone with any kind of academic interest or involvement with Layamon or Lawman. Especially useful for students wanting to know current academic trends in the tiny world of Lawman studies.

For the non academic reader of Lawman, if such a being exists other than me, I'm not so sure.

So little is knowable about Lawman,that scholars are trapped in a circle which only occasionally gets varied when new fashions in academic scholarship are applied to the same bits of information set out by Sir Fredrick Madden in the first modern edition of 1847.

Because so little is known the texts remain a fine starting point for scholarly investigation and performance and there are some good ones in here. But we don't seem to have come a long way from J.S.P Tatlock's inference that Lawman must have had Irish connections because the poem is violent and everyone knows the Irish are violent. These days the inferences are not so offensive, but reading these essays you can learn as much about the writers as the text they are writing about.