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COPYRIGHT 2003 Modern Humanities Research Association
Magic in Medieval Romance from Chretien de Troyes to Geoffrey Chaucer. By MICHELLE SWEENEY. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2000. 199 pp. 35 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 1-85182-536-3.
It is the virtue of this book to draw attention to an area which, one suspects, many earlier medievalists have regarded as just too silly to merit serious attention, but as the author--quite rightly--says of magic in the romances, 'to fail to acknowledge its influence is to diminish [...] a phenomenon which medieval authors saw as a means of interrogating their own community's sense of self and purpose' (p. 53). Sweeney's conclusion, expressed already in the introductory chapter, is that 'magic is used to achieve a similar purpose across the range of texts under discussion, that is, evaluation of the characters' values, identities or moral beliefs' (p. 19).
The 'texts under discussion'...
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