Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood: Alterity and Context in the English Outlaw Tradition

by Stephen Knight

234 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

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Stephen Knight - Thrillers

Reviews

[Geoff]

Without doubt Helen Phillips essay "Reformist Polemics, Reading Publics, and Unpopular Robin Hood" is the best thing about this collection. Entertaining and enlightening Phillips outlines how RH was used as stick by competing Christianities: for example the Catholic Thomas More comparing Martin Luther and his wife to "frere tuk & mad Maryone" in an anti-Protestant tract.

Other essays of note were Rob Gossedge "Thomas Love Peacock, Robin Hood, and the Enclosure of Windsor Forest" and Valerie B. Johnson "Agamben's homo sacer, the 'State of Exception', and the Modern Robin Hood". Usually reliable contributors Stephen Knight and Alexander L. Kaufman delivered sub-standard essays. Indeed Kaufman's "Nietzsche's Herd and the Individual: The Construction of Alterity in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode" was close to incomprehensible.

This collection may be the first step in the professionalization of Robin Hood studies but it is just as much a mixed bag as those produced by the RH conferences.