Content area
Full Text
THOMAS H. OHLGREN, Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465-1560: Texts, Contexts, and Ideology, with an Appendix: The Dialects and Language of Selected Robin Hood Poems by Lister M. Matheson. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Pp. 278. isbn: 0-87413-96-3. $55.
Two issues have dominated Robin Hood studies for the past half century. Historians have sought the 'real' Robin Hood in archives and in references to people, places, and events in the early poems. Literary critics have tended to dismiss this path through the Greenwood as an impossible quest, choosing instead to interrogate the social and cultural identity of the audiences that read and listened to those early poems. Thomas Ohlgren's new book deliberately avoids the first question to concentrate on the material reality of the poems as a means of uncovering their intertextual and cultural contexts. In so doing, he produces a fascinating and provocative revision of prevailing views on dating, ownership, and provenance.
The texts central to this study are the earliest extant Robin Hood poems in manuscript known as Robin Hood and the Monk (Cambridge University Library MS Ff.5.48) and Robin Hood and the Potter (Cambridge University Library MS Ee.4.35) and the earliest Robin Hood poem in print, A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode, which survives in seven whole or fragmentary editions. In the case of the first two, Ohlgren provides the fullest and most reliable descriptions of the physical condition and appearance of the manuscripts to date. He further details the contents of the manuscript miscellanies in which the Robin Hood poems are embedded and explores the meaning and consequences of interpreting the inscriptions of ownership. He locates Gilbert Pilkington, owner of Robin Hood and...