Robin Hood is a myth, which has been continuously reinvented since the High Middle Ages. A new book tells the story from the beginning and into the 21st century.

Reading Robin Hood. Content, form and reception in the outlaw myth
By Stephen Knight
Series: Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture
Manchester University Press 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7190-9526-9

Reading Robin Hood explores and explains stories about the mythic outlaw, who from the middle ages to the present stands up for the values of natural law and true justice.

This analysis of the whole sequence of the adventures of Robin Hood first explores the medieval tradition from early poems into the long-surviving sung ballads, and also two variant Robins: the Scottish version, here named Rabbie Hood, and gentrified Robin, the exiled Earl of Huntington, now partnered by Lady Marian.

The nineteenth century re-imagined medieval Robin as modern – he loved nature, Marian, England, and the rights of the ordinary man – and in novels and especially films he has developed further, into an international figure of freedom, just as Marian’s role has grown in a modern feminist context.

The vigour of the Robin Hood myth still reproduces itself, constantly with new forms and new meanings.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: drawing an academic bow
1. Interfacing oralcy and literacy: the case of Robin Hood
2. Rabbie Hood: the development of the English outlaw myth in Scotland
3. Robin Fitz Warren: the formation of the gest of Robin Hood
4. Robin Hood for a penny: reconsidering the outlaw Broadside Ballads
5. Romantic Robin Hood
6. A novel Robin Hood: nineteenth-century outlaw fiction
7. The making and re-making of Maid Marian
8. Rhizomatic Robin Hood
Index