1987 Presidential Address: King Arthur, Banqueting, and Cultural Literacy

Abstract

The SCMLA luncheon is not usually remembered as the highlight of one's trip to our annual convention; much less so the presidential address. Yet here I am, standing before you, to play my appointed role in a ritual that perhaps bears some examination from time to time. It might be a good idea, I think, to ask ourselves why we are here this afternoon-and, also, why more of us are not here. Those of us at the head table are here by virtue of our varying functions within the organization: officers of the association, members of the executive committee, members of our journal's staff. We're here because we have to be here; but the rest of you had a choice, and I would wager you didn't spend $12 for a catered hotel lunch in the expectation of culinary delights. Perhaps you came because you had arranged to meet a friend, or because you were not adventuresome enough to risk the multiple offerings of the Galleria, or because you wished to lobby for a specific item on the agenda. But most likely you came here because you wished to reaffirm your own role in the association, to indicate that you too are a member and wish to be counted, to make your own silent statement of belief in the value of this society. Although our organization modestly calls today's meal a luncheon, as a shared and festive occasion it is more properly termed a banquet, though today that implies tastier and more copious food than one can reasonably expect in these circumstances. Nonetheless, a banquet it is and, being a medievalist by profession, I cannot resist drawing an analogy between our situation here and that of medieval banqueters. It would be almost impossible, I suspect, to find a medieval romance that does not contain a banquet, for feasting and rejoicing were two of the principal pleasures of medieval man. At its simplest, a medieval banquet was a meal shared by a host with his guest, an essential component of the hospitality motif. At its most complex, it was a Burgundian court festivity of the fifteenth century. Olivier de la Marche, who chronicled many of these fetes, needed almost a hundred pages to describe the week-long feast for Charles of Burgundy and Margaret of York at Bruges in 1468, at which a tower forty-six feet high was erected on the banquet table and the twelve labors of Hercules were