Re-viewing Le Morte Darthur: Texts and Contexts, Characters and Themes (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Re-viewing Le Morte Darthur: Texts and Contexts, Characters and Themes Cheryl Taylor Whetter, K. S. and Raluca L. Radulescu , eds, Re-viewing Le Morte Darthur: Texts and Contexts, Characters and Themes ( Arthurian Studies, 60), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2005; cloth; pp. xi, 165; 6 b/w plates; RRP £40; ISBN 1843480359. This book's conventional title acknowledges its comparatively late arrival in the field of medieval Arthurian studies. However readers who persist will be rewarded with significant new facts and challenges to received notions, as the 're-viewing' advances the Malory debate in several areas. P. J. C. Field's introduction elucidates the book's subtitles by noting that the first three essays focus on text, the next three on geography and politics, and the last four on theme and genre. Since Walter Oakeshott's momentous discovery of the Winchester manuscript in 1934, textual study of the Morte has produced equal measures of agony and ecstasy. The exhilarating discoveries arrived at through minute textual observations in the two essays that open this collection clearly belong in the latter category. Takato Kato's analysis of 'Corrected Mistakes in the Winchester Manuscript' concludes that the archetype of the manuscript and of Caxton's print cannot have been Malory's holograph; that at least one intermediate copy intervened between the archetype and Winchester; and that the Winchester scribes were not the unthinking mechanical copyists postulated in Eugène Vinaver's first manuscript edition. D. Thomas Hanks' essay, 'Textual Harassment', demonstrates [End Page 236] the 'omnipresent' and 'radical' bibliographical and lexical changes that Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde introduced in negotiating the transition from manuscript to print. Hanks' pictorial reconstruction of Malory in the act of composition is a model of engaging scholarly writing. He further defends the importance of the bibliographical text by contending that modern editing 'eliminates much of the Middle Ages from medieval works' including features of presentation chosen by the author as part of the message (p. 45). The third textual essay, by Thomas H. Crofts, bases a consideration of fifteenth-century historiography on an analysis of Caxton's preface. Crofts argues that after ingeniously constructing a provisional historicity for Arthur as an English Worthy, Caxton edits the Morte Darthur as a series of exempla for readers' moral upliftment. Meg Roland's sketching of the geographical-textual world view that Caxton imported into his edition forms a bridge to the collection's political studies. Roland suggests that divergences from Winchester in Caxton's text mediate an intensification in East-West polarization following the fall of Constantinople in 1453. More limited in geographical scope is Robert Kelly's application to the Morte Darthur of Paul Strohm's notion of the 'structuring idea' to be drawn from a text's 'larger environment'. Under this theory, Malory's Arthurian world can be recognized as incorporating such contemporary realities as the king's failure to control border regions and the intense North-South conflict featured in the Wars of the Roses. The third essay in this group, by Dhira B. Mahoney, begins by summarising the binary values attached in medieval aristocratic life to public, open, masculine spaces as opposed to private, enclosed, feminine spaces. This provides a foundation for persuasive, culturally-informed interpretations of climactic episodes in the Morte that involve penetration of Guenevere's chamber or curtained bed. In the final group, essays by Lisa Robeson and Raluca L. Radulescu confirm that analysis of repeated words or phrases, as modelled in publications by Field and R. T. Davies, is a fruitful approach to Malory, who creates his most powerful effects by manipulating surfaces. Robeson's survey of the word 'worship' concludes that the Morte Darthur understands men's and women's worship in parallel terms, and that the sexes depend on each other for maintaining their worship. She is thus able to challenge the judgment that Malory presents women purely as objects or commodities. Radulescu traces escalating occurrences of the phrase 'oute of mesure' through 'The Tale of Sir Trystram' and the last two Tales, in order to understand the part played by excess – of anger, love and grief – in the tragedy that overtakes the civilized Arthurian world. [End Page...