Malory's Morte Darthur Research Articles

Guenevere's Raptus-Sanctus Triumphs in Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur

Abstract: Generally speaking, scholars of Malory's Morte Darthur have given Guenevere bad press. Terms like 'shrew' and 'virago' have been often applied, while her agency has been largely ignored or minimized. Recently, however, scholars have begun to reconsider her characterization and even her agency. Analysis of her response to Meleagant's attempted raptus , however, has been minimal; likewise minimal has been discussion of her response to Lancelot both with respect to Meleagant and to Lancelot's late and apparently marital desire. Both men become wholly subject to Guenevere's subtle but masterful agency.

Launcelot's Lovers: Ghostly Women in Malory's Morte Darthur

Abstract: This article looks at Malory's Gwenyvere and Elayne of Ascolat in the moments around their deaths and uses theories of ghosts and haunting to make sense of these moments. Both women communicate to Launcelot and the broader Arthurian community during death and from beyond the grave, and their messages call into question the male chivalric community and its understanding of love.

The Costs of Funerals in Malory's: Morte Darthur

Abstract: Using historical sources to provide context for funerary expenses, this article argues that whereas funerals early in Malory's Morte Darthur advertize the wealth and power of those who fund the burials, post-Grail Quest funerals emphasize spiritual growth, especially Lancelot's. Malory's changes to his sources increase drama and develop themes.

Anticipatory, Active, and Participatory Grief in Malory's Morte Darthur

Abstract: Malory employs three types of emotional experience to engage his readers in the scenes of King Arthur's death: anticipatory, active, and participatory grief. Through tragic plot and literary art, Malory leads the audiences of Le Morte Darthur to grieve with, and then for, the king.

Women Reading and Women Writing and Men Writing Women Who Read and Write: (Re-) Considering Women's Literate Practices and the Ethics of Women's Literacy in Malory's Morte Darthur

Abstract: Sir Thomas Malory's efforts in his Morte Darthur to represent Queen Gwenyvere and Queen Isode as being no more or less flawed than their male counterparts betray his own ethical uncertainty as author and adapter of his source materials for an audience including women.

Review of Disability and Knighthood in Malory's Morte Darthur by Tory V. Pearman

No abstract available.

Castles and Space in Malory's Morte Darthur by Molly A. Martin

Reviewed by: Castles and Space in Malory's Morte Darthur by Molly A. Martin Marisa Mills Molly A. Martin, Castles and Space in Malory's Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 2019) 305 pp., 8 ills. Centuries after its first printing, Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur continues to be a text of monumental influence, both upon Arthurian creators and scholars. T. H. White's The Once and Future King (1958) and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon (1983) both draw influence from Malory's text, as did the muchlauded film Excalibur (1981). Even contemporary Arthurian re-imaginings such as Kiersten White's The Guinevere Deception (2019) still turn to Malory specifically for influence. Malory's text also proves still popular with Arthurian scholars, and despite a significant amount of criticism, Molly A. Martin's Castles and Space in Malory's Morte Darthur finds an unexplored avenue through which to view Malory's text. Martin's Castles and Space is the first monograph to examine Malory's work through the spatial framework of the castles that populate Morte's landscape. Martin's foreword begins with a concise introduction of castle studies and how academics—such as R. Allen Brown and P. A. Faulkner—contribute to a "shift away from the earlier school of castle studies" which primarily considers castles through their "military capabilities of various architectural features" (12). The shift Martin mentions opens discussions of castles as something more than a physical edifice in which one could live and be protected during times of war. Instead, Martin argues that castles serve a variety of functions beyond the concrete, and, in Malory's text, castles embody "a physical, a symbolic, and a social space" which "inflects the behaviors and identities that [the castle] frames" (11). The following chapters in Castles and Space examine how castles play a role in identity and analyze some of the castle's inherent contradictions within Malory's text. The first chapter, "Castles as Political Centers," analyzes how castles work to cement political identity. More specifically, this chapter examines how ownership—or lack thereof—of a castle relates to one's power. The bulk of the chapter focuses on King Arthur's early reign and his establishment of Camelot as his center of power. Arthur's castle "becomes a particularly powerful manifestation of authority as he builds, cements, and expands his empire and his ideological reach" (29). Arthur's castle serves both as a physical place to build his empire from and also as a foundation for a "more community-focused identity" that exhibits the values Arthur wishes for his kingdom and his knighthood to uphold (54). While most of Martin's first chapter examines Arthur's castle, she also considers the significance of other Malorian episodes, such as Uther Pendragon's sneaking into Tyntagil Castle and what this—and his rape of Igrayne—indicate about castles and power. Martin's second chapter, "Castles and Community Identity," explores how spaces within the castle create identity for the community. She examines the Round Table, both as an object given to Arthur as a wedding present from Lodegreauns, Gwenyver's father, and as symbolic of Arthur's knights. Here, the castle's interior serves as the "conjunction of space and communal identity" (63). Camelot is here specifically a space in which community exists. Martin also explores episodes wherein characters—such as Balyn, Gareth, and Launcelot—leave the communal center and venture elsewhere and examines the significance of community existing outside of communal spaces. [End Page 286] "Castles and Ritual," the third chapter, examines the castle as an "intersection of the secular and the sacred" (116). Christian holidays, especially Pentecost, play an integral role in Arthurian literature. It is famously Arthur's custom not to feast on Pentecost until he has witnessed a marvel, and, in Malory specifically, Pentecost is the holiday upon which Arthur's knights make the somewhat obviously named Pentecostal oath, which reiterates the values Arthur's knights are sworn to uphold. A good portion of Martin's third chapter focuses on Pentecost and the events that occur around this holiday, including Arthur's final pulling of the sword from the stone and subsequent acknowledgement of...

Assembling the Fragments in Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur

Malory assembled a unified work from fragments French and English, adding original elements. His immediate audience was a few solo readers, no silent readers. Neither in 1469/70 nor in 1485 (Caxton's edition) were the various fragments of the Morte Darthur an assemblage. Malory's work, like Chaucer's, requires audience assembly. (DTH)

Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance; A Tribute to Helen Cooper ed. by Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne Saunders

Reviewed by: Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance; A Tribute to Helen Cooper ed. by Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne Saunders Ivana Djordjević Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne Saunders, eds. Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance; A Tribute to Helen Cooper. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018. Pp. xii, 295. $99.00. That Romance Rewritten is the second tribute to Helen Cooper in less than three years testifies both to the importance of Cooper's work and to her generous collegiality. The earlier book, Medieval into Renaissance (2015), celebrated her often pioneering work on bridging the supposed gap between two periods now seen as continuous; this one turns to the study of romance, another field on which Cooper has left her mark. Frequent references to her English Romance in Time show that the new volume's focus on the transformations of romance conventions and motifs is inspired by and indebted to the innovative recasting of romance motifs as memes in her influential study. There is some thematic overlap between the two collections, though only Megan Leitch appears in both, here as one of the editors and author of the lucid and informative introduction, informed throughout by Cooper's idea that romance memes are central to understanding a genre that is intertextual by default. Neil Cartlidge's characteristically witty opening chapter on romance "mischief" begins by reexamining long-established critical commonplaces about romances as "ideologically conservative, morally normative" providers of "wish-fulfillment fantasy" (27). While such views, most influentially formulated by Eric Auerbach and Northrop Frye, have long been silently ignored by romance specialists, they still color attitudes to the genre by scholars less familiar with it. More damagingly, they produce readings that disregard what texts say in order to make them fit preconceptions about what they should be saying. To such readings Cartlidge opposes his spirited analysis of "tonal dissonance, contrived incongruity or calculated provocation" (30) in romances, with special emphasis on the often deprecated Sir Tristrem. Marcel Elias looks to specific historical contexts to account for how central motifs (hostile challenger, noble Saracen, ambivalent hero) are reconfigured in fourteenth-century English Charlemagne romances, [End Page 325] compared to their French antecedents. Reacting against some excessively one-sided accounts of romance Saracens in recent criticism, he draws attention to pervasive "gestures towards parallelism" (53) in texts in which the virtuous Saracen, to take just one example, is often a foil for Christian shortcomings, a vehicle for self-criticism that at times questions the core elements of knightly morality. The first section, "Romance Disruptions," concludes with Christopher Cannon's incisive argument for the centrality of comedy to Malory's Morte Darthur. Cannon turns on its head a long tradition of reading humor in the Morte as intrusive, arguing instead that Malory's "dark" comedy is a shadow of his "most pessimistic understanding of chivalry" (70). Bringing in Buster Keaton's style of slapstick as a surprisingly apt parallel, he shows Malory's comedy to be a matter of perspective: what makes a situation humorous is the "clarity with which it glimpses the terrible outcome that has been narrowly avoided" (69). In this light, the inveterate joking of a Dinadan is more clearly seen as "a form of ethical judgment," even "a kind of goodness" (78). A point implicit in Cannon's analysis takes center stage in Jill Mann's illuminating rereading of Chaucer's Knight's Tale: narrative meaning greatly depends on how the action is cut up, when it ends, but also when and how it begins. Scholars have studied beginnings less often than endings, yet, as Mann notes, beginnings "implicitly suggest causes of which the stories are effects" (89), thereby directing how we read them. Like Cannon, Mann is interested in the way comedy and tragedy are determined by what follows an event but also by the perspective from which the event is described. Mann is excellent on the deliberate haphazardness of narrative links between events in Chaucer's tale, and the tale's general narrative "open-endedness" (89). She analyzes Arcite's death and its aftermath as a bravura display of shifts in style and...

The Manuscript and Meaning of Malory's ‘Morte Darthur’: Rubrication, Commemoration, Memorialization

The red-ink names that decorate the Winchester manuscript of Malory's Morte Darthur are striking; yet until now, no-one has asked why the rubrication exists. This book explores the uniqueness and thematic significance of the physical layout of the Morte in its manuscript context, arguing that the layout suggests, and the correlations between manuscript design and narrative theme confirm, that the striking arrangement is likely to have been the product of authorial design rather than something unusual dreamed up by patron, scribe, reader, or printer. The introduction offersa thorough account of not only the textual tradition of the Morte, but also the ways in which scholarship to date has not done enough with the manuscript contexts of Malory's Arthuriad. The book then goes on to establish the singularity and likely provenance of Winchester's rubrication of names. In the second half of the study the author elucidates the narrative significance of this rubrication pattern, outlining striking connections between manuscript layout and major narrative events, characters, and themes. He argues that the manuscript mise-en-page underscores Malory's interest in human character and knighthood, creating a memorializing function similar to the many inscribed tombs that dominate the landscape of the Morte's narrative pages. In short, Winchester's design creates a memorializing tomb for Arthurian chivalry. K.S. Whetter is Professor of English, Acadia University.

The Manuscript and Meaning of Malory's Morte Darthur: Rubrication, Commemoration, Memorialization by K. S. Whetter

Reviewed by: The Manuscript and Meaning of Malory's Morte Darthur: Rubrication, Commemoration, Memorialization by K. S. Whetter Cheryl Taylor Whetter, K. S., The Manuscript and Meaning of Malory's Morte Darthur: Rubrication, Commemoration, Memorialization (Arthurian Studies, 84), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2017; hardback; pp. xiii; 245; 16 colour illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843844532. Except for feminist and other theory-based approaches, this book provides comprehensive coverage of the vast and contested field of Malory scholarship and criticism. It also offers the most detailed study to date of the Winchester manuscript (British Library, Additional MS 59678) in the context of comparable manuscripts. The argument is twofold: concerning 'manuscript', that 'Winchester's rubrication pattern is unique and that the most likely source for Winchester's layout is Malory himself' (p. 105); and in relation to 'meaning', that 'Winchester's consistent rubrication of names and its marginalia recording seemingly random knightly deeds all reinforce Malory's focus on the earthly values of knighthood, love and fellowship, and worshyp' (p. 105). Because an unknown number of medieval manuscripts has been lost, and the number of surviving manuscripts makes comprehensive checking impossible, the first claim, that Winchester's rubrication is unique, is ultimately unprovable. In supporting it, Dr Whetter nevertheless provides useful first-hand comparisons with rubrication in a selection of English and French romance, chronicle, and mixed-genre fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts. He further explores the ways in which Winchester's rubrication differs from that in manuscripts, currently held in British libraries, of Malory's French and English sources. The 'manuscript' half of this book therefore combines comprehensiveness with meticulous attention to detail. However, it also revisits, admittedly with additions or expansions, theories that have previously been confirmed or rejected. For example, in 2000 Helen Cooper pre-empted an important part of the 'thesis'(p. 72) when she deduced from her reconstruction of Caxton's missing exemplar that Malory himself devised the pattern of rubrication preserved in Winchester. Conversely, a page-long recapitulation of Takato Kato's attempt in 2002 to reduce the stages between Malory's archetype and Caxton's print ends with an acknowledgment that a discovery by the Morte Darthur's most recent editor, P. J. C. Field, has ruled out Kato's theory (p. 73). Perhaps it is an inevitable consequence of the labyrinthine state of Malory scholarship that this book sometimes retraces scholarly processes. Regarding 'meaning', the view that 'the earthly values of knighthood'(p. 105) predominate in the Morte Darthur virtually to the exclusion of what the discussion sometimes pejoratively refers to as 'religiosity', is both extreme and, as its many iterations suggest, difficult to defend. Overall the argument is a backward step in an interpretative process which, following what have often been [End Page 213] more nuanced excursions into both chivalric and religious readings, has achieved a desirable equilibrium (see p. 115). Among the objections to, or plausible alternatives for, this book's expositions of 'meaning', only a few that are closely text-related can be outlined in this short review. While Dr Whetter concedes that 'religious' prayer and prayer 'that is both sacred and chivalric' do occur, he cites polite requests between characters as support for the proposition that prayer in the Morte is 'formulaic rather than pious' (pp. 105–06). This seems to confuse two senses of 'prayer'. Again, the omission of rubrication for 'Amen' in most of Malory's colophons is alleged to support the Morte's 'secularity'. However, the phrasing of these prayers surely suggests that they are heartfelt and urgent. Unless a source is found, 'The Healing of Sir Urry', strategically inserted between Books VII and VIII, will retain its value as evidence for the priorities that Malory as an originating auctor enshrined in his Arthuriad. After Arthur and 110 knights have failed to heal the pitifully wounded knight, the king's stated reason for commanding the latecomer Launcelot to make an attempt accords with Dr Whetter's view that the episode's 'emphases […] poignantly reiterate and celebrate earthly fellowship' (p. 176). Yet Arthur's preliminary command, that Launcelot should not be forewarned, reveals a deeper motive that aligns with the episode's overall purpose, which is...

Standing Up for the Stanzaic-poet: Artistry, Characterization, and Narration in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Malory's Morte Darthur

Standing Up for the Stanzaic-poet: Artistry, Characterization, and Narration in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Malory's Morte Darthur

'A Kind of Vessel to Carry on the Idea': Frustrated Taxonomies of Adaptation in T.H. White's The Once and Future King

The complex intertextuality of T.H. White's The Once and Future King problematizes definitions of source and adaptation in medievalism. Positioned as a footnote to, a preface to, and a commentary upon Malory's Morte Darthur, White's work demonstrates the productive possibilities of adaptive relationships that frustrate our attempts to 'taxonomize' them.

The Manuscript and Meaning of Malory's Morte Darthur: Rubrication, Commemoration, Memorialization by K.S. Whetter

The Manuscript and Meaning of Malory's Morte Darthur: Rubrication, Commemoration, Memorialization by K.S. Whetter

Re-evaluating the Stanzaic Morte Arthur: Content and Contexts

Re-evaluating the Stanzaic Morte Arthur:Content and Contexts Fiona Tolhurst (bio) and K.S. Whetter (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution the final folio of le morte arthur, showing the red coloring of opening initials in, and the explicit to, the poem: london, british library, ms harley 2252, fol. 133v. ©the british library board, harley 2252, fol. 133v. [End Page 3] The Middle English Arthurian poem Le Morte Arthur survives in a single manuscript—the commonplace book London, British Library, MS Harley 2252—where it occupies folios 86 recto to 133 verso. Although copied by two otherwise unknown scribes (A and B), the poem is clearly titled on its final folio as Le Morte Arthur. Neither the folios the poem occupies nor the manuscript as a whole is much decorated, although throughout the manuscript there is some slight red coloring of some letters: in the case of Le Morte Arthur, this red staining begins during Launcelot and Gaynour's final meeting, where, from folios 130 verso to 133 verso, the otherwise brownish-black initials of the opening word or two of each line get colored (at times almost highlighted) with red (see Figure 1, page 3). This paper miscellany, sometimes referred to as 'John Colyns' Boke' because of the ownership inscriptions by a London merchant on folios 1 verso, 133 verso (the final folio of the poem), and 166 recto, dates to the early sixteenth century; the booklets containing Le Morte Arthur and Ipomydon B, however, are older.1 Le Morte Arthur is in Midlands dialect, but its author and exact provenance are unknown. In order better to distinguish this poem from the Lincoln Thornton manuscript's (Alliterative) Morte Arthure and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, most modern scholars use Le Morte Arthur's verse form as a convenient means of identifying it, hence its commonly known title 'Stanzaic (with or without capitals or italics) Morte Arthur.' One folio from roughly the middle of the plot, between extant folios 102 and 103 and amounting to perhaps ninety-odd lines but comprising lines 1182–1317 in the lineation of all modern editions, has been lost.2 Based on the poem's diction and dialect, the manuscript's watermarks, and the scribes' handwriting, modern scholars date the poem to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, generally circa 1400, though earlier dates are sometimes proposed.3 The Stanzaic Morte Arthur is a translation, abbreviation, and close adaptation of the thirteenth-century French prose romance La Mort le roi Artu, the final section of the large prose narrative known as the Vulgate Cycle or Lancelot-Graal Cycle (circa 1215–30).4 Because of the Stanzaic-poet's [End Page 4] choice of source, this poem is also the first English text to give any details of—or credence to—the love affair of Lancelot and Guenevere, although in it the queen is called 'Gaynour.' Helen Cooper argues that the Stanzaic Morte was not widely read in its day, and that the story of Launcelot and Gaynour's adultery would have been considered by the few English readers who did know it to be a French fable.5 Qualifying this claim is Elizabeth Archibald, who makes a convincing case for the Lancelot-Guenevere story being reasonably well accepted by at least some English readers.6 We agree with Archibald, for much of the effect of the Stanzaic Morte depends upon the audience's familiarity with at least some aspects of the love affair as it appears in the French tradition. As she rightly insists, the 'poem would surely have been incomprehensible to an audience who did not already know the story of their love'; moreover, the poem 'must have had some success, for the one extant copy was produced commercially in booklet form before it was bound into [the] larger collection (British Library, Harley 2252).'7 In addition, the English poet makes his own powerful and original contribution to the Lancelot-Guenevere story by creating the scene of the lovers' emotional final meeting, a scene Malory borrowed and expanded upon—thereby making it well known to English audiences from perhaps the 1470s, when Malory's Arthuriad could have...

Malory’s Anatomy of Chivalry: Characterization in the Morte Darthur by Paul R. Rovang (review)

PAUL R. ROVANG, Malory's Anatomy of Chivalry: Characterization in the Morte Darthur. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015. Pp. xxi, 201. isbn: 978-1-61147-778-8. $75In Malory's Anatomy of Chivalry: Characterization in the Morte Darthur, Paul R. Rovang offers the first book-length study of Malory's art of characterization to be published since Robert Henry Wilson's exemplary 1934 study Characterization in Malory: A Comparison with His Sources. Rovang offers fifteen chapters that discuss sixteen Malorian characters: Arthur, Mark, Gawain, Lancelot, Tristram, Galahad and Perceval, Gareth, Kay, Dinadan, Mordred, Palomides, Guenevere, Isolde, Morgan le Fay, and The Lady of the Lake. Rovang's book differs from both Dorsey Armstrong's 2003 Gender and the Chivalric Community in Malory's Morte d'Arthur and Kenneth Hodges' 2005 Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory's Le Morte Darthur in that it focuses on individual characters rather than groups of characters. It also differs from Beverly Kennedy's 1985 Knighthood in the Morte Darthur in two ways: it examines monarchs and women as well as knights, and it focuses on the development rather than the classification of Malory's characters. Rovang does not engage in source study; instead, he 'examines Malory's thematic characterization of individual rulers, knights, and ladies in keeping with the twin trajectories of his history of the Round Table and contemporary English history' (xv).By presenting a series of separate yet related studies of Malory's characters as either positive or negative examples of or influences on chivalry, Rovang reflects what Le Morte Darthur is: a 'history of the Round Table [containing] a series of self-contained yet closely related tales' that provide readers with models of virtue and vice (xvii). Rovang uses these studies to demonstrate how kings, knights, and female figures contribute to the creation, undermining, and inevitable destruction of the chivalric ideal that Arthur's Round Table fellowship embodies. As he studies an impressively large number of Arthurian characters, the author engages in close-reading of Malory's book and frequent citation of literary criticism on Le Morte Darthur that make this work an insightful and useful introduction for students.Most Malory specialists will readily accept Rovang's conclusion that Malory's Morte Darthur engages readers today because it develops 'flawed, believable, flesh-and-blood characters . . . [that] exemplify different facets and varieties of . …

The Body of Law: Embodied Justice in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur

This article argues that Malory undermines paradigms of divine, sovereign, and common law justice while suggesting embodied justice as a viable alternative that depends upon the agency of the body in debate. It explores the implications for women who gain greater access to judicial process via the mechanism of embodied justice and rejection of prescriptive law.

Malory and His European Contemporaries: Adapting Late Arthurian Romance Collections by Miriam Edlich-Muth (review)

miriam edlich-muth, Malory and His European Contemporaries: Adapting Late Arthurian Romance Collections. Arthurian Studies LXXXI. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. 199. isbn: 978-1-84384-367-2. $99.Miriam Edlich-Muth examines five late Arthurian chronographies, including Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, the Italian Tavola Ritonda, Ulrich Feutrer's German verse Buch der Abenteuer, the Dutch verse Lancelot compilation, and Michael Gonnot's French BN.fr.112 manuscript, in order to show how the adaptation process of each author can offer a better understanding of the texts themselves. Much adaptation scholarship focuses upon identifying a text's sources, noting differences and similarities; however, Edlich-Muth's work digs into how those similarities and differences compare to other late Arthurian adaptations, more specifically an author's presentation of a story's chronology and its characters, as well as the solutions achieved in the problems of creating an adaptation. From this analysis, she outlines certain shared adaptation strategies. Through diligent, detailed, and well-organized comparisons, this work proves that how a text is adapted matters, thus contributing to our understanding of Malory's work most of all, but also opening new doors for discovery about the other late Arthurian chronographies. In this way, Edlich-Muth provides her readers with a different kind of context through which to access Malory and his contemporaries.Edlich-Muth consciously uses the word 'chronography' to describe these collections. In doing so, she resists the more commonly used word 'cycle' as it does not offer the best representation of her comparative method. For her, tracing the chronological developments of the story as they align with the biography of King Arthur provides a better way to distinguish between the chronological and structural consistency of the five texts, as she explains in the Introduction. After emphasizing the value of this better adaptation vocabulary, in Chapter One, she provides the general overview of the source use of each of the five authors. Edlich-Muth asserts the importance of placing too much focus on source identification as it obscures the text itself. Instead, she points to the value of reading prologues, noting divisions within the works, and marking the methods of compilation; each of these access points provides a place to begin recognizing the difference between source influence and adaptor innovation (31).Chapters Two, Three, and Four showcase Edlich-Muth's close reading of how the texts employ some of the adaptation strategies she has identified. …

Suche Werkes

Do we need a new edition of Malory's Morte Darthur? In addition to the three editions of Eugène Vinaver's standard scholarly text, the third revised by Peter Field himself, Amazon has pages upon pages of further versions of more or less academic probity, modernisations, ebooks, adaptations, illustrated books, and retellings for children. At first glance, too, the work would not seem to have a particularly awkward textual history. For over four centuries it was known only in the edition printed by Caxton in 1485 and in reprints of that by his successors, notably Wynkyn de Worde. The discovery of a manuscript in Winchester College in 1934 complicated matters, but compared with the situation of the Canterbury Tales or Piers Plowman, each with over fifty manuscripts surviving, the business of establishing a text would seem straightforward. In the event, the study of Malory's text has become a research industry in itself. Peter Field has made it his lifetime's work, Japanese researchers have contributed large numbers of theses and articles, and American and English academics all add to the accumulating pile of material.

Vision and Gender in Malory's Morte Darthur (review)

Reviewed by: Vision and Gender in Malory's Morte Darthur Benedick Turner Molly Martin . Vision and Gender in Malory's Morte Darthur. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010. 201p. In Vision and Gender in Malory's Morte Darthur, Molly Martin argues that the Morte is mainly concerned with "defining and valorizing the male community of knights and its specific version of romance masculinity" (1). According to Martin, Malory's "masculinist project" depends upon vision, in particular how masculinity is produced in images of masculine bodies and behaviors. Right at the start, therefore, Martin makes it clear how her work is supplying something that is lacking from the existing body of Malory scholarship: a book-length study of the relationship between vision and gender in the Morte. Martin rightly notes that this lack is especially surprising given our age's critical interest in vision, thereby encouraging her readers to believe that her book is an innovative contribution to a popular direction of scholarly inquiry. Martin's introduction explains how later-medieval ideas about seeing and being seen are more complicated than the theories of vision most commonly [End Page 95] embraced today: instead of being located primarily in the male gaze, visual power is apportioned between both the image and its viewer. Martin argues that the production of masculinity in the Morte depends in large part upon knights becoming "spectacle[s] of masculinity" that are viewed by a multilayered audience consisting of other characters, the narrator, and the readers: the reactions of these various audiences are essential to the text's valuation of masculinity. But Martin also describes how one of the most influential medieval theories of vision—the one asserted in the idea of courtly love as defined by Andreas Capellanus—manifests in the Morte to present the male lover as incapacitated by the sight of his beloved lady. While the knight's masculinity depends upon the images of his person and his masculine behavior being viewed by others, it is also endangered when he gazes upon his lady and is rendered passive by the suffering of desire. Martin's first chapter following her introduction focuses on "The Tale of Sir Gareth." It might seem imprudent for Martin to devote an entire chapter to just one episode; after all, her subject—the Morte in its entirety—is very long while her book is not (180 pages, quite a few of them dominated by notes, albeit ones justified by the breadth of Martin's research). However, "Sir Gareth" provides the clearest and most basic examples of the phenomena described in the introduction. Furthermore, the thorough examination of this story is especially welcome considering the one shortcoming of the introduction, which is that Martin is so busy explaining theories about vision and courtly love that she has to postpone presenting passages from the Morte. Admittedly, introductions are often light on evidence, but quotations from Andreas, Lacan, and Barthes show up before passages from Malory; a chapter that lingers on one part of the Morte and examines several substantial passages up close thus comes as a relief. Martin's ensuing chapters deftly expand the breadth of her focus without sacrificing depth of analysis, and in most cases it is immediately clear how each chapter will add a new layer to Martin's argument. Chapter Two examines the linked cases of Launcelot and Trystram, two men whose visibility is especially important to their status as champion knights and thus as ideals of masculinity: they must be seen fighting in battles and tournaments, and they must be seen as objects of female desire. But at the same time, the fact that their sexual desires are adulterous requires that they maintain a certain degree of invisibility. The third chapter might seem the least involving. It explores the cases of four more knights, including Gawayne, who either fail at creating masculine spectacles of themselves or choose not to do so. Martin's conclusion is that in every case, the knight who is not seen performing masculine action is marginalized by Arthurian society. Thus there are no exceptions to the rule Martin described in earlier [End Page 96] chapters, or rather the exceptions are punished so severely that...