Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts by Paul Strohm
1995; Scriptoriun Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/art.1995.0042
ISSN1934-1539
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Literary Analyses
Resumofrom seeing an alternative to his hypothesis that Arthurian writers imbibed their pagan influences from information passed 'from mouth to ear.' The inaccuracy is committed early in the Introduction: The matter of Britain began with four (sic) verse epics of ChrZtien de Troyes, the heroes of which were Erec, Lancelot, Yvain and Perceval' (3). Did he leave out Clig^s on purpose, as the absence of any mention in his bibliography suggests? In that text he might have noticed in ChrZtien's prologue the allusions to Ovid (some of whose texts the French poet declares to have translated). In at least two of his books, Metamorphoses and Fasti, Ovid provides ample reports of the legends and rituals attached to Nemi. It is more than likely that ChrZtien's Yvain (which Darrah correctly considers as a major instance of the Nemi pattern) owed far more to his readings of Ovid about this most famous temple of Diana than to the scarce information about Broceliande and Barenton that he probably took from Wace's Roman de Rou. The imperial Laudine, described by the poet as fairer than a goddess, combines in her name both 'Diane' and 'Lune.' Darrah would enjoy watching how king Numa, lover of Egeria, was instructed by Picus and Faunus to propitiate Jove not to destroy the land with his thunderbolts, and how Aesculapius brought Hippolytus back to life with the herbs that a serpent had used to revive a fellow-serpent. Darrah would hurry to include the Fasti in his bibliography, had he noticed that one readily available translation is due to sir James Frazer himself! (Loeb Clasical Library No. 253, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2nd edition, 1989). Clearly, oral tradition should not be discarded as a vehicle for Greek, Roman, and Celtic lore, but the reader interested in further research will bear in mind that the then fashionable ancient classics, directly responsible for the 'romans d'antiquitZ,' did certainly extend their influence to the Arthurian cycle. ANTONIO L. FURTADO Pontif'eia Universidade Cat— lica do RJ. PAUL STROHM , Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination ofFourteenth-Century Texts. With an appendix by A. J. Prescott. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Pp. xii, 205. isbn:0-691-01501-5 (paper). $12.95. Perhaps no other literary field is so clearly constituted at the intersection of history and fiction, or documentary truth and literary lies, as the field of Arthurian studies. Questions about the 'historicity of Arthur' are still most often pursued in readings of texts whose own degree and kind of historicity are widely contested. In addition, Arthurian fictions themselves have been regularly scrutinized (and, in the case of some romances like ChrZtien's Story ofthe Grail, allegorized) for information about their own periods of composition (the varying relations of author to patron, for example). Paul Strohm's collection of essays entitled Hochon's Arrow, recently issued in paperback, should, therefore, prove instructive reading for Arthurians, even though it is nowhere concerned with any Arthurian text, either 'fictional' or 'historical.' Instead, it calls those very categories radically into question, and demonstrates that this reconceptualization by historians and literary scholars can provide us with a powerful tool for studying the production of meaning in both social and verbal texts. Arthurians may find in it a sophisticated model for analyzing different kinds of 'historical truth' in the texts, usually distant from us in time, that we most often study. Strohm's brief introductory essay, 'False Fables and Historical Truth' (3-9), gives as good a definition as I have seen of the so-called 'New Historicism,' though it does not use that term. It also marks a distinct theoretical and methodological advance over Strohm's earlier book, Social Chaucer, which retained, as its title suggests, a more traditionally historicist assumption about text and context: Chaucer's poetry remained at the center ofthat book's concerns, with what Strohm now calls its 'textual environment' (legal documents, 'historical' accounts, etc.) reduced to context or background. In Hochon's Arrow, on the other hand, we find a focus on the total textual environment itself rather than any single element in it: Strohm is proposing a belated Copernican, or even post-Copernican, revolution in...
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