Guinevere

The dust jacket of Guinevere bills Norma Lorre Goodrich as the world's most important living Arthurian scholar — dust jackets, of course, are completely unbiased sources. Maybe I'm missing something, but this book does not lead me to believe anything of the kind. In fact, in the end I was reduced

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to skimming, her egoism was so off-putting. She claims that she is qualified to do an unbiased study of Guinevere because she is an American (excuse me?), and later describes thirteenth century poet and translator Layamon as "an ignorant, ugly English monk." All questions of manners aside, how does she know he was ugly? It's clear that she is more interested in hurling insults his way than sticking to the facts.

This lack of good taste wouldn't be as troubling if her scholarship were less dubious. She often contradicts herself, as when she says that the "best source for this story of Guinevere is the voluminous Prose Lancelot manuscript," then writes on the next page, "Nothing in the Prose Lancelot comes very close to Guinevere's real life, marriage, betrothal, and alliance." If that is true, why does she regard it as the best source for these very events? And how does she know what Guinevere's life was really like? This is a problem throughout the book, in which she makes truth claims without explaining her reasoning process or providing citations. She seems bent on treating the Lancelot-Guinevere love story as fact (while denying any sexual relations between them) yet never offers an argument as to why he is left out of all the chronicles and doesn't appear until the French romances. Later she mentions a marriage contract between the queen and Arthur, of which I had never before read, yet fails to provide a reference.

Far from living up to the claims made by this book's dust jacket, Goodrich scarcely comes across as a professional.

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