Extending the work of Caroline Walker Bynum and Jane Bennett, Tara Williams argues in Middle English Marvels that “magical spectacles can provoke forms of wonder that lead to moral actions by characters and open up moral reflection for the audience, particularly on the limits and limitations of ethical systems” (1). Williams defines her titular “marvels” by explaining that “when a spectacle involved supernatural agency and induced a wonder reaction, it might more precisely be described as a marvel” (69). She believes that the cluster of texts that include Sir Orfeo, Lybeaus Desconus, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Geoffrey Chaucer's “Squire's Tale” and “The Wife of Bath” defy medieval romantic conventions by “representing magic that works both as a marvel and as a critical plot element and by exploring the multistage moral reactions that such marvels could inspire, from wonder to action to reflection” (132). As such, she contends, these works reveal a heretofore unrecognized countertrend in medieval romances.

Williams's first chapter, “Mirroring Otherworlds,” redefines “wonder” and “fairy magic” historically before analyzing Sir Orfeo, specifically in the context of Heurodis's kidnapping and the fairy world's gallery of suffering. After exhaustively documenting conventional readings, Williams persuasively argues that the fairies’ near-parallel otherworld conjures a mirroring effect that invites readers to empathize with the fairy culture's moral codes and to question human virtues. Chapter 2, “Revealing Spectacles,” examines how the marvel in Lybeaus Desconus, figured by the winged “worm” with a woman's face, functions to reveal the hero's virtue and identity. Williams contends that Lybeaus's response to the marvelous “dragon lady,” often read as simple passivity, is not only a narrative expedient that will lead to the revelation of a beautiful naked woman and subsequently his identity, but also represents a moral reaction: “in other words, not resorting to violence may be a further sign of Lybeaus's virtue” (54). According to Williams, this marvelous spectacle is at the crux of these revelations, inextricably linked in this tale to personal virtue and identity.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and its surrounding paratexts in MS Cotton Nero A.x are the subjects of chapter 3, “Moving Marvels.” Williams first suggests that the crowning of Richard II by an angelic automaton during his public procession, an action repeated during his formal coronation, analogizes the trajectory of marvels in Sir Gawain. The recurrence of Richard's crowning, she contends, established a form of persistent singularity that correlates to the figure of the Green Knight; his supernatural qualities inspire repeated wonders pre- and post-decapitation, which allow him to test overarching Arthurian chivalric codes, plus Gawain's own chivalric virtue. This chapter additionally includes a discussion of the scientific and philosophical discourses surrounding fourteenth-century theories of vision in the context of establishing the poem as a “continuous and multifaceted marvel” (84). Williams's final chapter, “Talking Magic,” provocatively investigates whether an absence of visual spectacle can incite moral reflection among readers, offering Chaucer's “Wife of Bath” and “The Squire's Tale” as case studies. She claims that speech acts enact magic in these tales, wherein the magical spectacle itself remains obscured. Williams's argument that “both tales center on a moral dilemma concerning how men and women interact, and in both cases that dilemma can only be revealed or addressed through magic” is quite persuasive in the context of her analysis of the loathly lady's revelation in the Wife's story, if slightly less so in “The Squire's Tale” (122).

One of Williams's strongest sustained arguments is that these tests of virtue and ethics may be generated by supernatural agency, yet they are effective primarily because the enchanted figures retain part of their human nature, especially in Sir Orfeo, Lybeaus Desconus, and Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. These figures and their native environs present enough otherness to explore a contrasting culture's moral values, while exercising those of the audience. Readers will find this learned offering a valuable addition to critical conversations surrounding magic, spectacle, and morality in the fourteenth century.