The
International Association for Robin Hood Studies, Tenth Biennial Meeting:
“Outlaws in Context” (2015)
Reviewed by Valerie B. Johnson (valerie.johnson@lmc.gatech.edu)
The International
Association for Robin Hood Studies meets
biennially, alternating between North America and Europe; the subject of this
review is the tenth meeting, “Outlaws in Context,” held 30 June – 2 July in Doncaster, UK. Doncaster
is in South Yorkshire, and the area is considered prime “Robin Hood Country”
due to local references in a number of early ballads, abundant references to
Robin Hood in local site names, and a rich tradition of highwaymen (real and
romanticized) through the 18th century.
Context:
“Outlaws in Context” offered
seven sessions, with no concurrent panels to split the attention of attendees.
Nineteen papers were presented, and enthusiastic conversations followed each
panel. Like many organizations, the IARHS encourages the participation of
graduate students alongside seasoned academics; however, the IARHS is also open
to independent scholars or enthusiasts, and several routinely attend and
present at the biennial conferences. This open approach mirrors the history of
Robin Hood scholarship, and encourages a diversity of voices in discussions.
The European meetings of the
IARHS are generally smaller and more intimate conferences than North American
counterparts. Consequently, “Outlaws in Context” represents organizer Lesley
Coote’s choice to replicate the success of past European meetings, such as Gregynog
in 2007 and Beverley in 2011, by selecting a residential conference center as
the site of the meeting. European meetings of the IARHS thus often qualify as “boutique
conferences,” since their small size and centralized location ensures that all attendees
can meet and speak to each other within formal and informal settings. This
allows a rich exchange of ideas in various stages of development, and genuinely
collaborative discourse. The North American meetings are often larger and by
sheer size limit the depth of casual conversations even though they balance
this through increased opportunities. (A notable exception to this trend was
the 2013 meeting in St. Louis.) The great value of the small residential
conference center is the natural flow and development of the conversation. A
discussion begun over breakfast can flow into panel presentations and
questions, continue during lunch, and further resonate in afternoon
conversations.
Outlaws:
Presenters and audience
members were able to make connections between papers throughout the conference.
Because Robin Hood is a subject well suited to historical, literary, and media
study, the range of attendees is typically quite broad: medievalists are the
largest contingent by far, with eighteenth century studies and modern media
studies rounding out the remainder. The IARHS is not limited to members of the
academy alone; at any meeting, independent scholars, dedicated enthusiasts, and
casual fans are present, offering a more inclusive model for scholarly
conferences of the future.
“Outlaws in Context”:
The conference theme sought
to showcase the increasing diversity of topics within Robin Hood studies. When the
historian J.C. Holt published Robin Hood (1982),
few scholars interested in Robin Hood wrote on topics outside history or
historiography, and the overwhelming majority of scholarship focused on the
late medieval / early modern materials. Holt’s work, however, provided such a
thorough foundation in the historical facts of the tradition that it accomplished
what few monographs researched and written for academic audiences can hope to
do: it was eagerly read outside the academy. Over the next decade Holt’s Robin Hood was cited as inspiration and
research by novelists (such as Robin McKinley, author of The Outlaws of Sherwood) and filmmakers (such as Richard Carpenter,
Robin of Sherwood) who sought out historical
context and details of the tradition to better situate their own
interpretations of the tradition.
Consequently, “Outlaws in
Context” sorted papers as much by common material history and shared textual connections
as by thematic topics. For newcomers, this meant that context (historical,
thematic, genre, etc.) and shared vocabulary generally built over the course of
the presentations. Question and answer sessions, therefore, rarely had to
address basic concerns and were able to develop the discussions in greater
depth than isolated panels or papers addressing the Robin Hood tradition would
be able to accomplish. More crowded meetings of the IARHS do offer a broader depth
and range of papers, but – due to the size which permits such variety – the
conversations are necessarily limited since not all audience members have equal
chances to attend all the panels.
The conference opened, for
example, with a pair of keynotes addressing two radically different views of
Robin Hood within the context and restrictions of television programming: Mikee
Deloney examined parallels between Robin Hood and Jamie Fraser, hero of the
popular Outlander television series (a connection made in the source novels,
but developed in more depth by cinematography’s shared visual vocabulary); Michael
Easton provided a discussion of the writers and directors of the immensely
influential 1950s television series The
Adventures of Robin Hood. The shared medium of television allowed the group
to dig into the appeal of outlawry, whether for a fictional character like Fraser
or the writers and directors of the television series – several of whom were
Americans blacklisted by the McCarthy investigations. Outlander and The Adventures
of Robin Hood both adjust the expectations and requirements of outlawry to
fit the needs of their genres, since Outlander
is adapting a novel and furthermore a cable production running for a full hour.
Outlander’s 16 episodes per season
pales in comparison to Adventures of
Robin Hood’s seasonal average of 39 episodes, which were produced serially
and loosely adapt traditional stories and adventures, but without the deliberate
narrative arc of the Outlander
series.
From my perspective, the
shared keynote address signals several important moves in Robin Hood studies –
as well as larger issues in medieval studies and academia. First, and most
importantly, is the increasing interest in visual representations of the tradition
among scholars of literature and history. Scholars in these fields have long
noted Robin Hood’s dynamic visual presence as a key factor in the tradition’s
ongoing appeal on stage and screen, but study of television programs has never
featured as prominently as cinematic offerings. Perhaps this reluctance by
medievalists to take up television stories (proportionally to our embrace of
cinema) is the fault of serial narratives and the sheer bulk of material: the
1950s television series, for example, produced 39 episodes per year for four
years, and many of those episodes function more effectively as standalone
stories, with different directors, writers, editors, and actors contributing to
the viewing experience. Fragmentation is also at play in Outlander, because a portion of the appeal of the male lead derives
from the character’s resonance with Robin Hood – but since the character’s name
is not Robin Hood, James Fraser’s
connections to the tradition must be largely meta-textual, with brief and
disconnected references that do not touch on the most obvious symbolism of the
tradition. These references depend on common knowledge, even tropes, about
Robin Hood; but they also depend on the audience’s flexibility and willingness
to adapt Robin Hood to many different contexts. Medievalists, of course, often
participate in these conversations – but often we return to source material, a
move that often disadvantages modern stories and histories in favor of those
originating in the Middle Ages. Clearly, a portion of this is due to specialist
bias: a medievalist will naturally privilege her own field over modern
television studies! However, these stories are not being told for medievalists,
and only incidentally to medievalists: we can join a conversation and contribute
fruitfully, or derail the discussion by insisting on medieval origins for
material that has embraced the medieval and also moved in medievalism,
neo-medievalism, and at times outright modernism.
The various panels and
discussions in “Outlaws in Context” shows that unity, for these stories, is
derived through common factors of the narratives, audience desire, and
distribution of media: consistency of transmission times and channels is a
factor which cinematic scholarship does not need to consider at all. Yet these
concerns are all adaptations, or translations, of issues that have informed the
gradual accretion of the core content that we now consider the greater Robin
Hood tradition – and the stories developed out of these material contexts of
audiences and storytellers. This encourages localization, and to some extent
fragmentation: this conference shows that any discussion of “Robin Hood” has to
be very careful to localize and specialize the conversation, since there is so
little that is shared in common across the broad range of places, times, texts,
and references. Sometimes all that makes a Robin Hood text is the name – or the
act of extra-juridical resistance to unjust authority. This broadening of who
and what Robin Hood can “be” is, I think, representative not only of the
increasing options available for modern audiences, but increasing
acknowledgment by scholars that multiplicity of meaning is not only possible
but vital.
Valerie B. Johnson
Georgia Institute of Technology
