Wirnt von Gravenberg's Wigalois. By Neil Thomas. Arthurian Studies, 62. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2005. Pp. 167. $80.

In this well-conceived and compactly written volume, Neil Thomas offers a number of decisive arguments for Arthurian scholarship to reassess Wirnt von Gravenberg's sole Arthurian tale, Wigalois. Wirnt's story stems from the early decades of the thirteenth century and is transmitted in no fewer than forty extant manuscripts—persuasive testimony to its popularity in courtly circles. Indeed, Thomas points out that contemporary, medieval appraisal of Wigalois must have been notably more affirmative than that of the influential early philologists of the nineteenth century. Characteristically, those early scholars dismissed Wigalois, along with most of the post-Hartmann and post-Wolfram Arthurian tales, as post-classical imitations. Due in part, no doubt, to sheer intellectual inertia, modern reception has by and large persisted in that early assessment. In a sense, if Thomas's book achieved nothing more than a broad-based reevaluation of this enchanting tale of the chivalric quests by Wigalois (depicted by Wirnt as the long-lost son of Gawein), then the author would already have realized a worthy enough ambition.

Michael Resler
Boston College