Gauriel von Muntabel. Edited by Siegfried Christoph. German Romance, II. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007. Pp. 360. $85.

In the last fifty years students and scholars have had recourse to numerous editions and translations of the so-called canonical works of medieval German literature. This "virtually universal accessibility" (p. 1) has not been the case for many "postclassical" works, which, as Siegfried Christoph points out in the introduction to his translation and edition of Gauriel von Muntabel, are better characterized by neglect and inaccessibility. Like Wigamur and Meleranz, which have suffered similar plights, Konrad von Stoffeln's Gauriel von Muntabel has been plagued by "a combination of inaccessibility, neglect and […] invidious comparison" (p. 1). Ferdinand Khull's 1885 edition of Gauriel was reprinted once in 1969, but the text was essentially unavailable until Wolfgang Achnitz's critical edition in 1997. But only ten years later, Achnitz's edition is already out of print. Christoph's contribution to medieval German literature and Arthurian scholarship is therefore two-fold, inasmuch as he makes Gauriel available for the first time to a wider audience with his English translation and also reprints Achnitz's edition of Konrad's romance.

Jon Sherman
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign