Donald L. Hoffman

Assimilating Saracens: The Aliens in Malory's Morte Darthur

The trajectory of Malorys whole work implies a complicated pattern of understanding and misunderstanding of the Saracen climaxing in a kind of whinging Armageddon as the remnant of Camelot surrenders to martyrdom in the Holy Land.

Re-Framing Perceval

Cinematic re-framings of the Perceval legend tend to examine the locus of guilt. On the continent, Brechtian techniques shock the viewer into rethinking the narrative (Rohmers Perceval le Gallois and Syberbergs Parsifal ). The American Fisher King distracts from its mystification of the real issues of the narrative and enacts a materialist consolation that it appears to dismiss.

Brickdale's Idylls Re-Viewed

This essay resituates Brickdale in her time, the Edwardian period, rather than the—by that time—rather passé era of the Pre-Raphaelites. Although indebted to the earlier artists, she is more accurately conceived of as, in Kyle Stoneman’s felicitous phrase, a ‘neo-Pre-Raphaelite.’ From this perspective, a close reading of her Arthurian images helps to clarify her difference and, perhaps, suggest a new assessment of her originality, although, in the absence of essential biographical sources, any attempt to define her program must remain extremely tentative.

The Round Table: Bearing The Grail

The attempt to reconstruct the legendary appearance of Valerie Lagorio as a Grail bearer in a Met production of Parsifal leads to a reconsideration of gender and the meaning of the Grail in Wagner’s opera. This reconsideration finds a fairly powerful feminist subtest undermining much of Wagner’s overtly masculinist ideology and concludes with a consideration of Parsifal’s shift from was to wo. In this shift in the definition of the Grail from a thing to a person, one finds a model that is reflected in the career of the archetypal Grail bearer, Valerie Lagorio. (DLH)

Who's Who in the Middle Ages by Mary Ellen Snodgrass (review)

Mary Ellen Snodgrasss Whos Who in the Middle Ages is not an easy volume to review. It is a bit like reviewing the phone book. A reviewer is not likely to know the names and addresses of everyone relevant to the particular area code, so he could not easily check for completeness; what he might be able to do is to spot check the accuracy of the entries of his particular friends and neighbors. Are they all included? Is the information accurate? As a variant ofthat principle, I have chosen Dantes poets as my friends for this occasion, and I checked the completeness and accuracy ofthe listings for the poets mentioned in Dantes Divine Comedy. For easy reference, I have included a table with names ofthe poets and an indication whether they have been in included in the Whos Who.