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Title: Robin Hood: An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism by Stephen Knight ISBN: 0-85991-525-5 Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Pub. Date: 11 February, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $110.00

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Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: Great survey of Robin Hood scholarly writing...
Comment: Okay, this book isn't for people beginning to study the Robin Hood legend. For that, I'd recommend Stephen Knight's Robin Hood: A Complete Study, J.C. Holt's Robin Hood and R.B. Dobson and J. Taylor's Rymes of Robin Hood.

But for those of you somewhat familiar with the history and development of the outlaw legend, this book makes great reading. It collects a variety of articles and chapters from over two centuries of Robin Hood scholarship. Detailed discussions on the earliest ballads, historical outlaws, mythic themes, Renaissance plays, and modern movies (in particular, Flynn's Adventures of Robin Hood and Men in Tights).

Many of these articles are classics in the field of Robin Hood scholarship. For example, Joseph Hunter's 19th century examination of a real-life man named Robin Hood from the court of Edward II. Or the 1950s-1960s debate between Rodney Hilton and J.C. Holt on the audiences of the early ballads. Their debate triggered much of the modern academic writing on Robin Hood.

If you've heard of (but never read) those articles before, then this book is definitely for you.

Rating: 3
Summary: Mixed bag of scholarly darts
Comment: The strength of this volume is that it is a good compilation of essays that focus in on scholarship on Robin Hood. There are treatments of Robin Hood in relation to literary criticism, history, media, and a range of topics. I found the section on history to be the most interesting. Some of the essays provide model studies for investigating intriguing issues that relate to the development of ballads and stories about Robin Hood, and there is a great deal of scholarship for investigating historical kernels associated with the stories. The section on media includes a few strong essays -- I enjoyed the treatment of Robin Hood on screen from the earliest movies into contemporary cartoons and even satires. But some of the essays and in fact entire sections are really weak. I thought that by far the least interesting (and the poorest written) essays were in the area that focused on literary criticism. This facet of scholarship surprised me because I thought that literary critics would know how to write due to the nature of their study.