Thomas Malory

Course description: More than any other secular variety of premodern writing, romances connect the literature of the Middle Ages with that of both earlier and later periods. They blend Classical myth with Celtic mystique, and oriental exotica with local concerns. Romances tell stories about King Arthur and his court, the crusades, and ancient English princes, many of which recur in the works of Shakespeare, Tennyson, or Eliot. In this course we will explore the romance tradition in England, with special attention to the origin and development of the Arthurian canon, the political meaning of Englishness and Britishness, the self-examination of courtly ethics and gender relations, and the ideological origins of the British Empire. The course will not only examine the aristocratic culture of medieval England but will also demonstrate how premodern writings inform the literature of later periods.

The Tale of Gareth combines Malory's interest in the ethics of the chivalric body with an emphasis on Gareth's conduct around food. Beginning his time in Arthur's court as a kitchen hand, he is deprived of courtly alimentation, particularly meat, and the associations of social entitlement that come with the consumption of such meals. Gareth proves his chivalric worth not only by fighting, but also through his exemplary behavior whilst consuming increasingly refined meals throughout the tale, culminating in his own wedding feast. Not only do these meals articulate the non-combative qualities that attest to Gareth's social superiority; they establish Gareth as a fitting symbolic successor to Arthur and his legacy, and thus offer an assurance of the inherent worthiness of the Arthurian regime despite its eventual tragic demise.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Law and Literature addresses the need for an authoritative guide  through the bewildering maze of medieval law as well as the need for concise examples of how the law infiltrated literary texts. The Companion combines accessible essays written by leading specialists in legal history with essays exploring literary conversations with the law in the works of later medieval authors
from Chaucer to Malory. The first half of this book contains detailed introductions to legal concepts, practices, and institutions in medieval England. In the second half, experts cover a number of texts and authors from across the later medieval period whose verse and prose can be understood as engaging with the law. In this way, the Cambridge Companion to Medieval Law and Literature forms the basis for students wishing to explore this rich area or for scholars to familiarise themselves with literary uses of the law.

ISBN: 9781316632345

“All of our images of the adolescent – the restless, searching teen; the Hamlet figure; the sower of wild oats and tester of growing powers ... are masculine figures.” – Barbara Hudson

In the world of medieval romance, women run the risk of being misidentified, ignored, over-looked, confused with or suffused into the identities of men. Perhaps especially studies of Sir Thomas Malory’s Arthurian epic Le Morte Darthur, women frequently fall through the cracks of analysis, often only examined in terms of their importance in relation to Arthurian men or assumed to be “outside the chivalric code” (Kenneth Hodges 86). And yet, throughout the Morte, women not only aid knights on countless occasions but partake in adventures alongside them. In both of Malory’s “Fair Unknown” narratives, “The Tale of Gareth” and “La Cote Male Tayle,” the damsels who first issue the quest remain with the young knights for the entire story. The Fair Unknown tales are exemplary of a genre which is primarily read in terms of masculine identity formation, following the trajectory of a hero whose identity is at first unknown, who passes from youth to manhood and becomes a knight. However, Fair Unknown tales have the potential to be read as stories of not just male but female identity formation. In Malory, bold young maidens – Lyonet in “Gareth” and Maledysaunte in “La Cote” – actively initiate and participate in the quests alongside the two young heroes, Gareth and Brunor. In a male-dominated Arthurian world in which girls are frequently ignored or seen as peripheral functionaries in male-focused stories, these two narratives may be read as examples of overlooked female identity. The two young women can be considered “Fair Unknowns” in their own right, for they are adolescent girls whose identities are initially unclear, who – like their male counterparts – partake in rites of passage leading to experiences of self-discovery and communal reintegration. The power that female Fair Unknowns yield is in large part a power of words, which – like a knight’s skill with the sword – must be properly developed. Lyonet and Maledysaunte use their speech in transformative ways – to motivate, to heal, to restore, and overall to instill a greater sense of chivalric purpose and community in their young companion knights. At the same time, their speech also undergoes an essential transformation; notably, each woman has a reputation of her own to uphold which is linked to the quality of her speech and, ultimately, to her communal identity. Over the course of each story, the two women provide strong support for the Round Table fellowship. Their presence and the bearing they have on events and those around them demonstrates not only that in Malory’s Arthurian world men and women are dependent on one another, but that women are essential not only to the quest but to the maintenance of chivalric ideals.

In an entry for the year 1455-56, the Chronicle of William Gregory, Skinner' recalls that some years previously, an alleged thief named Thomas Whythorne, or Whytehorne, had been captured in New Forest and imprisoned at Winchester. In order to postpone his own execution, he had become an approver: at regular intervals he appealed-that is, turned king's evidence on-many men, some of whom were presumably his former associates, but many of whom were probably innocent. Whythorne had kept himself alive in prison by appealing all and sundry and had even drawn a daily wage of one and a half pence for his services. This state of affairs had continued unchallenged for nearly three years, and no doubt it would have persisted for many more except that Whythorne, grown careless or desperate, accused one Jamys Fyscher, "that outerly sayde that he was fals in hys appelynge, and sayde that he wolde preve hyt with hys hondys, and spende hys lyfe and blode a-pone hys fals body." Fyscher was offering to prove his own innocence by way of trial by combat.

Since Rossetti executed most of his Arthurian works between 1857 and 1864, it has often been thought that his medievalist turn was primarily determined by his friends William Morris and Edward Coley Burne-Jones. Our paper attempts to foreground the existence of previous influences triggering his interest in Malory, which would crystallize in the watercolour Arthur’s Tomb (1854). By means of an interdisciplinary analysis, we will collect a set of evidences leading us to assert that Rossetti had already developed a personal view of Le Morte Darthur (1485) in the early 1850s. We will also state that his watercolour proves not merely a literal rendition of the last meeting between Lancelot and Guenevere: it rather points at the glory and fall of Camelot on the basis of individual failure and the prevalence of individual desire over a common, iconic structure of stability.

NOTE: A revised version of this article is included in: Mesa Villar, Jose Maria. 2014. Women in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Arthurian Renditions (1854-1867). Bern: Peter Lang (pages 64-81).

Who was Merlin? Real or fictional, Merlin's character is central to Arthurian legend and lore, not only as a mage but as the philosopher who departs to leave the world for men to rule.  His ambiguous role is shortly explored as well as the sources that have fed the imagination of those interested in Arthuriana.

This piece focuses on the development of the figure of Merlin over roughly a 900-year span of medieval history and culture.  First examining the genesis of this figure in the quasi-historical sixth-century Welsh bard Myrddin, I trace the character's emergence as a mouthpiece for Welsh political prophecies by the tenth century, his co-optation by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century, and his flourishing as one of the chief characters of the cycles of Arthurian romance during the thirteenth century and beyond.

A queer reading of the Lancelot character as he appears in BBC television series Merlin (2008–12) and the works of Malory, White, and Bradley, situates the cult series in the long heritage of Arthurian adaptation and reveals a secretive and troubled figure with a personal connection to his adaptors.

Courtly love convention is a medieval European concept of ennobling love which helped the shaping of the society and in return which was shaped by the society during the Middle Ages. The concept has its roots in many traditions such as classical literature, Hispano-Arabic poetry and philosophy, Troubadour poetry, feudalism and Christianity. However, there are also writers who were critical and suspicious of courtly love convention. Sir Thomas Malory (c.1410-1471) presents a subtle criticism of the concept in his Le Morte Darthur (1485), the first collection that brings together all the Arthurian stories in English. One-third of this work consists of a controversial love story, the case of Tristan and Isolde. Therefore, Malory’s different treatment of the courtly love tradition and the Tristan story will be illustrated with the critical information on the Celtic sources of the legend and a comparative method to other significant characters involved in the courtly love in this work.

The aim of my paper is to examine the themes of crusading and missionary activities in Sir Thomas Malory's romance Morte d'Arthur in the context of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. The principal objective of the paper is to determine whether Malory's representation of crusading in one of the Morte parts, Tale of the Sankgreal, would have corresponded to the expectations of his intended/real audience.

This chapter argues that Malory's depiction of emotional states is dominated by excess, itself often expressed by means of the phrase 'oute of mesure'. By means of an examination of key passages from the Morte Darthur I demonstrate the increase in the frequency of the use of this phrase and its equivalents as an indication of the growing sense of anxiety over the inevitable doom of Arthur's world. At the end of the Morte, I argue, the whole mood or atmosphere of the narrative is dominated by emotions that are 'oute of mesure'.
[Note: this is a pre-publication proof-stage version; typos and other minor errors still occur. For the final published version, check the volume]

Analysis of the development of Medieval Studies across Europe and north America in the 1930s, with special reference to Germany, France, Belgium, Italy (with Ethiopia and Somalia), Iceland, Réunion, Ireland, Istanbul, the USA, England, and the British empire; the Alps, the Danube, and the Rhine; Jewish Studies, women and the profession.

The article provides a summary of the doctoral thesis in English literature, entitled « Representations of the Grail Quest in Medieval and Modern Literature », was directed by Dr Raluca L. Radulescu and Prof Tony Brown. The thesis was presented on January 31, 2014, at the School of English, Bangor University.
By closely engaging with medieval and modern versions of the Grail quest and by examining the medieval romances through the experience of minor and non-elect characters, the thesis offers a new perspective not only on the studied texts but also on the entire tradition of the Grail quest in medieval and modern literature. Moreover, the thesis contributes to the burgeoning field of medievalist studies, showing how modern texts can reveal new meanings when examined in the light of medieval tradition to which they allude, both directly and indirectly.

This publication stems from the Medieval and Early Modern Student Association (MEMSA) community at Durham University, and the conference papers behind these articles were originally presented at the eighth annual MEMSA Student Conference, held in Durham Castle’s Senate Suite, 8–10 July 2014.

CONTENTS

– Natalie Goodison and Alexander J. Wilson, 'Outsiders and Otherness', 7–14
– Koren Kuntz, 'Ekphrasis, Cognition and Multimodality in Le Roman de Rose', 15–44
– Amy Morgan, 'Fairies, Monsters and the Queer Otherworld: Otherness in Sir Orfeo', 45–66
– Colin Davey, '"Noyse" Threshold: Gender, (Dis)courtesy and the Intrusion of the Other in Le Morte Darthur', 67–86
– Kathleen Reynolds, 'Unperceived Hands: The Role of the Female Assistant in Early Vernacular Gynaecological Literature', 87–111
– Gudrun Tockner, '"Shee is Cunning in All Things": Cunning Women and the Danger of Witchcraft on the Early Modern Stage', 113–135

Dans Catalina Girbea, Andreea Popescu et Mihaela Voicu (dir.), Temps et mémoire dans la littérature arthurienne. Actes du colloque de la branche roumaine de la Société Internationale Arthurienne. Bucarest, 14-15 mai 2010, Bucarest, Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2011, p. 389-399

Going down the memory lane of History and Literature, with the focus turned mainly on tracing aspects of the exercise of power during the Middle Ages; putting together references inter alia from Isidore of Seville, the lexicon of Souda, Orderic Vitalis, John of Worcester, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas Malory, William Shakespeare, Elias Venezis, T. H. White, Ernst Kantorowicz, Michael Crichton, Umberto Eco and Julian Barnes.
The legend of King Arthur in relation to its projections time and again, the correlations of Shakespearean texts (such as Henry II and Macbeth) to parallel political expediencies, the undercurrent references in The Name of Rose to persons and events of a (then recent) period of turmoil in Italy are some of the issues raised.
Without the discrepancies being considered as negligible, eventually there may be more convergences between History and Literature. In any case, a fundamental parameter that emerges from the above overview is the so-called “intentionality” of the narratives.

Μια περιδιάβαση στην Ιστορία και τη Λογοτεχνία, που εστιάζει κυρίως στην ανίχνευση πτυχών της άσκησης της εξουσίας κατά τον Μεσαίωνα, σταχυολογώντας αναφορές  μεταξύ άλλων από τον Ισίδωρο της Σεβίλλης, το λεξικό της Σούδας, τον Orderic Vitalis, τον Ιωάννη του Worcester, τον Geoffrey του Monmouth, τον Thomas Malory, τον William Shakespeare, τον Ηλία Βενέζη, τον T. H. White, τον Ernst Kantorowicz, τον Michael Crichton, τον Umberto Eco και τον Julian Barnes.
Ο θρύλος του Αρθούρου σε συνάρτηση με τις προβολές της εκάστοτε εποχής, οι διασυνδέσεις σαιξπηρικών κειμένων (όπως ο Ερρίκος Β´ και ο Μακμπέθ) με παράλληλες πολιτικές σκοπιμότητες, οι υπόγειες αναφορές του Ονόματος του Ρόδου σε πρόσωπα και γεγονότα μιας (πρόσφατης τότε) ταραχώδους περιόδου στην Ιταλία αποτελούν μερικά θέματα που θίγονται.
Χωρίς οι αποκλίσεις να θεωρηθούν αμελητέες, μεταξύ Ιστορίας και Λογοτεχνίας οι συγκλίσεις ενδέχεται να είναι τελικά περισσότερες. Σε κάθε περίπτωση, μία θεμελιώδης παράμετρος που αναφαίνεται από την ανωτέρω επισκόπηση είναι η λεγόμενη «αποβλεπτικότητα» των διηγήσεων.

The myths of Arthur and his exploits have developed over the last 1600 years; with hundreds of authors, chroniclers, and minstrels having wrought what was once a blurry Romano-British warrior into a mighty English monarch and emperor, surrounded by the finest men who ever existed. To Arthurian researchers and enthusiasts, names such as Wace, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Malory, Tennyson and even Mark Twain spring to mind. Few, however, realize that one of England's most important authors, John Milton, attempted to create his own Arthurian epic, before changing his focus to Satan's war in Heaven in "Paradise Lost". This article attempts to reconstruct what Milton intended for Arthur and his knights of renown, as well as to understand why he ultimately abandoned the Matter of Britain for the Matter of Heaven.

The hit HBO cable series Game of Thrones (2011-14) -the fantasy-medieval saga based on George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire novels -has provided more than its fair share of salacious sex scenes. Rape, marital rape, attempted rape, prostitution, group-sex, sodomy (of both heterosexual and homosexual forms), incest, sex leading to castration, sex leading to leechapplication, and even -occasionally -vanilla consensual sex, have appeared on the screen in the first three seasons of the show. The show, while generally well reviewed, has come under sustained criticism from certain sectors of the media for its depiction of a brutal medieval sexuality, a misogynous sexual culture replete with the threat of violent coercion. This popular

“THIS WAS DRAWYN BY A KNYGHT PRESONER, SIR THOMAS MALLEORÉ, THAT GOD SENDE HYM GOOD RECOVER.”

In 1934, these were the lines which made the Librarian of Winchester College realize that he had discovered a hitherto unknown version of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, a work known to all previous readers only through Caxton’s 1485 edition. For it was known that Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel had been imprisoned on numerous occasions between the 1450s and his death in 1471 – by Lancastrians and Yorkists. But who was Malory? Why did successive authorities want to lock him up? How did he come to write the Morte d’Arthur? And why has that text been so persistent a presence in English culture? Going in quest of Malory and of the meaning of the Morte the author addresses the text’s central preoccupations – violence, desire, and the nature of Englishness. Malory is placed in his social context, at a time of unprecedented national and regional unrest. Lustig traces the connections between writers and commentators – from Tennyson to T.S. Eliot – who have been fascinated by Malory’s work.

The Morte d’Arthur was one of the last great literary works of the Middle Ages. But it was also one of the first to articulate a distinctively modern set of concerns – particularly with the nature of identity, both personal and national. Knight Prisoner: Thomas Malory Then and Now will send readers back to Malory’s work with renewed enjoyment and understanding.

The paper explores medieval knighthood as a complicated matrix of various cultural, historical, and ethical concepts. We hypothesize that we can access the way people conceptualized the chivalric ideal through analyzing the romances by means of linguistic and conceptual analysis. The justly prominent place among numerous romances is taken by Malory’s Le Morte DArthur (1485), for it provided solid ground for a detailed classification of knightly virtues and vices in later decades. The present paper displays the role of negation in portraying the opposition of a good and a bad knight. We take into account that this category is realized linguistically on various levels: lexical, morphological, and syntactical. Contrary to the preliminary hypothesis on negation featuring the bad, it allowed the author not only to explicate the bad qualities of a knight, but also to stress the language means evaluating the positive ones. As the linguistic analysis unfolds, negation turns out to be not a logical counterpart of positive utterances, but a powerful tool for featuring knighthood as a socially and ethically important endeavour. Pragmatics of negation in the romance, as well as its role in direct speech of various characters,including women, are also considered.

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 mechanisms and rejection of prescriptive law.

Abstract: The analysis of chess motifs and motifs of space exploration in Bend Sinister, Speak, Memory, and Lance, under¬ taken in this essay, allows us to expand our understanding of Nabokov’s “metaphysical storyline” as well as re¬interpret the concept of “knight’s move” the writer borrowed from one of the founders of Russian Formalism Victor Shklovsky. In all three works, the hero or the narrator consider the possibility of escaping a tor¬turous fate either by moving away from harm through the inter¬ planetary space or by undertaking an interstellar journey for the sake of achieving a “transcendental” goal of overcoming death and reaching life everlasting. The possibility of their escape into the otherworld by means of a metaphysical shift, a dramatic plot twist, and a chivalric exploit is encoded in Nabokov’s play on the homonymic overlap of the words “knight” (as in chess) and “knight” (as a hero of medieval romances). In the first part of the essay, the death of Krug in Bend Sinister is explored as a break¬ through in a chess game as well as a flight from the circles of hell, encapsulated in the name of the hero, into the author’s reality encoded in the trope of a spiral galaxy. Further, the novel’s auto¬ biographical subtext and ontological structure are compared to Nabokov’s image of the interstellar¬-scale love for his wife and son in Speak, Memory. This comparative study ends with the re¬eval-uation of Lance’s journey to another planet in the context of Na¬bokov’s “spiral” dialectics and Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas about the chronotope of a chivalric narrative. Аннотация: Исследование космических и шахматных моти¬вов в романе «Под знаком незаконнорожденных», автобиографии «Другие берега» и рассказе «Ланс», предпринятое в данной ра¬боте, позволяет расширить наше представление о «метафизиче¬ском сюжете» В.В. Набокова, а также придать новое толкование заимствованному им у В.Б. Шкловского понятию «ход коня». В каждом из трех произведений герой или повествователь либо размышляют о возможности избежать мучительной участи по¬ средством перемещения в межпланетном пространстве, либо совершают космическое путешествие ради достижения «транс-цедентальной» цели преодоления смерти бессмертием. Возмож¬ность перехода ими в иную реальность с помощью сюжетно¬ метафизического сдвига и подвига, подобного рыцарскому, скрыта в обыгрывании писателем омонимического совпадения английских слов «knight» (шахматный конь) и «knight» (рыцарь). В первой части работы рассматривается смерть Круга в «Под зна¬ком незаконнорожденных» как прорыв в шахматной игре и, одновременно, бегство из воплощенных в имени героя кругов ада в инобытие автора, символом которого является спиральная галактика. Далее, автобиографический контекст романа и его онтологическая структура сопоставляются с развиваемой в «Дру¬гих берегах» мыслью о космическом масштабе любви автора к близким. Сравнительный анализ завершается переосмыслени¬ем путешествия Ланса на другую планету в свете набоковской «спиральной» диалектики и идей М.М. Бахтина о хронотопе рыцарского романа.

In the first half of the paper, I focus on these texts’ (Queste narrative and Morte d'Arthur) differing presentations of Galahad and, briefly, several of the other knights, while in the second Lancelot becomes the cynosure of the argument that the Morte’s Lancelot is spared some of the criticism that the Queste’s orderly, allegorized Universe necessitates. Malory’s work, rather than seeking to unite the Queste’s allegorical strain with the worldly demands of chivalry and flesh, mitigates the significance of the former and paints a tragic vision of the Universe fundamentally at odds with the vision of the grail-quest. They are irreconcilable visions, and his sensibilities lead him to choose the de-allegorized, knightly purview, which here is finally tragic, as no allegorical vision can be. In a sense, this makes him a realist – and one of the first moderns.

"Medieval writers were fascinated by fortune and misfortune, and yet the critical problems raised by such explorations have not been adequately theorized. Mitchell invites us to consider these contingencies in relation to an "ethics of the event." His book examines how Middle English writers including Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Malory treat unpredictable events such as sexual attraction, political disaster, social competition, traumatic accidents, and the textual condition itself - locating in fortune the very potentiality of ethical life.

Introduction: Conceptual Personae

1, "On Fortune, Philosophy, and Fidelity to the Event"

2, "Love and Ethics to Come in Troilus and Criseyde"

3, "Consolations of Pandarus: The Testament of Love and The Chaunce of the Dyse"

4, "Gower's Confessio Amantis and the Nature of Vernacular Ethics"

5, "Telling Fortunes in Lydgate's Fall of Princes"

6, "Moral Luck and Malory's Morte Darthur""

When talking about literature and King Arthur, the premise of the Arthurian legend is vague. The myth of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table might have been real or merely fairy tales. However, historical aspects of a questionable kingdom are one thing, and the fictional aspects of King Arthur and his knights in the realm of Camelot is another thing. Therefore, through literary myths, an intertextual analysis of Arthurian legacy will be applied to selected literary texts to display the radial transformation of the attempted meanings of King Arthur's legacy under the influence of history and pseudo-history. Öz Edebiyat ve Kral Arthur hakkında konuşurken, efsanenin öncülü görünen o ki belirsizdir. Kral Arthur efsanesi ve Yuvarlak Masa şövalyeleri gerçek ya da sadece bir masal olabilir. Bununla birlikte, şüpheli bir krallığın tarihi yönleri bir konudur, Kral Arthur'u ve onun şövalyelerini Kamelot Krallığında kurgulamak başka bir konudur. Bu yüzden, tarihin ve sözde tarihin gölgesinde, edebi efsaneler aracılığıyla, seçili edebi metinlere, yine bu eserlerde yüklenmeye çabalanan anlamların dairesel dönüşümünü göstermek adına Arthur efsanesinin metinler arası incelemesi uyarlanacaktır.

Balin, the Knight with the Two Swords, is Book 2 of Malory's Arthurian tales.  It is drawn from various tales and myths, and many scholars have wondered at its deviation from known sources.  I argue that Balin is best seen as a semi-autobiographical narrative by an author who had lost his faith while living through turbulent times, and which represents a modern and existential tale of misplaced faith.