Lesley Coote's monograph follows two volumes she coedited on the Robin Hood tradition: Robin Hood in Outlaw/ed Spaces: Media, Performance and Other New Directions (coedited with Valerie Johnson [2016]) and Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Literary Canon (coedited with Alexander L. Kaufman [2018]). These volumes provide a welcome overview of how and when Robin Hood emerged as a particular figure in British and American popular consciousness from the Middle Ages through the modern day. The recurrent reminder of Robin Hood's outlaw status in Coote's titles speaks not only to the character as the quintessential medieval English outlaw but also to the ways in which primary texts about Robin Hood and his companions have existed on the borders of the English literary tradition. Next to King Arthur, Robin Hood, it seems, may be the most significant representative of popular medievalism in the past six centuries, but until recently he has been of little interest to academic medievalists.
Perhaps this is because even in a literary field accustomed to dealing with fragmentary texts and gaps in the historical record, relatively little survives as medieval Robin Hood literature. To offer a fuller account of Robin Hood's presence in medieval culture, The Storyworlds of Robin Hood highlights the extant Robin Hood texts and positions them alongside complimentary literary modes. The book, Coote says, is “an attempt to understand the culture that surrounded the early Robin Hood stories, in light of some of the other storyworlds that complemented and competed with Robin's” (7). She posits that the earliest Robin Hood stories may have been written in French (though the only extant texts are in Middle English) and influenced by French medieval literature, including pastourelles, Marian miracle stories, and fabliaux.
Chapters 1 and 2 describe the earliest surviving manuscripts and printed texts presenting Robin Hood stories: “Robyn and Gandeleyn,” “Robin Hood and the Monk,” the surviving fragment of “A Robin Hood Performance Script,” “Robin Hood and the Potter,” and The Little Gest (Little [Book of] Deeds) of Robin Hood, the last of which was published in a printed edition by Richard Pynson in 1492. (Coote provides modern English translations of these Middle English texts in her appendix.) These chapters establish the popularity and adaptability of the Robin Hood stories in late medieval English popular culture in text and performance. Robin and Maid Marion frequently appeared as characters in spring festivals, and various enactments of Robin Hood stories were staged as civic entertainment in the first half of the sixteenth century.
In chapter 3, Coote locates the origin of the Robin Hood tradition in medieval French pastourelles, romance poems popular with aristocratic audiences in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. The poems concern a male peasant, most frequently called Robin, who attempts to seduce a shepherdess, usually named Marion (or a variation such as Marote or Mariette). The name of Robin's beloved and the themes of some of these poems explicitly link her to the Virgin Mary, which leads Coote to a discussion of Marian miracle stories from the fourteenth century in chapter 4. Chapters 5 through 8 describe thematic similarities between French romance and fabliaux and the early Robin Hood tradition, with a particular focus on the forest as a site of outlaw narratives, class conflict, and moral lessons. The final chapter identifies echoes of the medieval tradition in the British and American Robin Hood narratives of the modern era.
For anybody who first encountered the Robin Hood legend through twentieth-century films, which may be most of Coote's audience, her description of the few surviving medieval and early modern texts in the opening chapters provides a welcome overview of how stories about Robin Hood, Maid Marion, Little John, and the band of merry men appeared from the start as outlaw literature. The chapter on Robin and Marion in the French pastourelles offers excellent insight into the French origins of a British popular legend. In later chapters, however, some of the storyworld connections seem tenuous, as in the discussion of Marian miracle stories where Coote notes “many points of similarity” (90) but no direct evidence of textual influence. The chapters on romance and fabliaux perhaps wander a bit in search of Robin Hood connections, but they highlight recurrent themes in medieval popular culture. Storyworlds of Robin Hood invites us to reconsider our sense of an iconic British legend when placed in the context of his European roots and demonstrates the rich possibilities therein.
