Paving the Way for the Arthurian Revival: William Caxton and Sir Thomas Malory’s King Arthur in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how Malory’s Morte Darthur re-emerged from the shadows in the eighteenth century. It considers how the fates of Malory and Caxton were intertwined, the reputation of one closely connected to the reputation of the other: the perception of Malory as ‘light’ or morally questionable reading first impacting on Caxton’s standing, then later the resuscitation of Caxton’s reputation impacting in turn on Malory’s growing status as a literary hero. Questions about the reputation of Malory’s Arthuriad surfaced across a wide variety of literary media in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and these ongoing discussions about the morality and value of Malory’s work occurred at the same time as the first flowering of English historical bibliography. This serious historical study of typography and printing was central to the revival of Caxton’s reputation, and thus also central to the establishment of Malory’s work as worthy to be included in the canon of English Literature. Hence, I argue that a series of key early publications by notably John Lewis (1675–1747), the first biographer of Caxton, who championed the reputations of Caxton and Malory, and by Joseph Ames (1689–1759), a ‘pioneer historian of printing’, should correctly be viewed as part of the continuum which ultimately led to the Arthurian Revival.