Ethics in the Arthurian Legend (Arthurian Studies, 91) 9781843846871, 9781805430605, 9781805430612, 184384687X

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A RT H U R I A N ST U DIES XCI

ETHICS IN THE ARTH U R IAN LEGEND

A RT H U R I A N ST U DIES ISSN 0261-9814 General Editors: Norris J. Lacy and Cory James Rushton Details of previous volumes in the series are available at https://boydellandbrewer.com/

ETHICS IN THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND

Edited by Melissa Ridley Elmes and Evelyn Meyer

D. S. BREWER

© Contributors 2023 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2023 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978 1 84384 687 1 (hardcover) ISBN 978 1 80543 060 5 (ePDF) ISBN 978 1 80543 061 2 (ePUB) D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mount Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Cover image: Rubin Eynon, “Gallos” (2016), bronze sculpture created for English Heritage, Tintagel, Cornwall, UK. Image by MonikaP https:// pixabay.com/p-1507392, reproduced by permission. Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

Contents List of Contributors Foreword Jane Gilbert Acknowledgments

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Introduction Melissa Ridley Elmes and Evelyn Meyer1 1. Arthurian Ethics before the Pentecostal Oath: In Search of Ethical Origins in Culhwch and Olwen Melissa Ridley Elmes

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2. Too Quickly or Not Quickly Enough, Too Rash and Too Harshly: The Arthurian Court’s Lack of Ethics in Hartmann von Aue’s Erec and Iwein and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival35 Evelyn Meyer 3. The Ethics of Arthurian Marriage: Husband vs Wife in Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein65 Jonathan Seelye Martin 4. Arthurian Ethics and Ethical Reading in the Perlesvaus85 Joseph Derosier 5. Translation Praxis and the Ethical Value of Chivalry in the Caligula Brut Christopher Jensen

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6. Imperial Ambitions and the Ethics of Power: Gender, Race, and the Riddarasögur Nahir Otaño Gracia

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7. Lowland Ethics in the Arthur of the Dutch David F. Johnson 8. Contesting Royal Power: The Ethics of Good Lordship, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the March of Wales Steven Bruso

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9. “As egir as any lyoun”: The Ethics of Knight-Horse Relationships in Lybeaus Desconus198 Caitlin G. Watt 10. Malory’s Ethical Dinadan: Moderate Masculinity in a Crisis of Hypermasculine Chivalry Matthew D. O’Donnell

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11. Virtus, Vertues, and Gender: Cultivating a Chivalric Habitus in Thomas Malory’s Tale of Sir Gareth245 Holly A. Crocker 12. Kingly Disguise and (Im)Perception in Three FifteenthCentury English Romances Mikayla Hunter

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13. “Adventure? What is That?” Arthurian Ethics in/and the Games We Play Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand

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14. The Ethics of a New Edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur – and More Evidence for the Superiority of the Winchester Manuscript Fiona Tolhurst† and K. S. Whetter

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15. The Ethics of Writing Guinevere in Modern Historical Fiction Nicole Evelina Afterword Elizabeth Archibald Index

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Contributors ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD is Emeritus Professor of English Studies at Durham University. She has published widely on Arthurian texts, including A Companion to Malory, co-edited with A. S. G. Edwards (1996), and The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, co-edited with Ad Putter (2009). STEVEN BRUSO is Assistant Professor of English at Endicott College. His research focuses on medieval and early modern literature; fantasy medievalism; gender; and violence. His recent scholarship includes “The Sword and the Scepter: Mordred, Arthur, and the Dual Roles of Kingship in the Alliterative Morte Arthure,” published in Arthuriana, “Bodies Hardened for War: Knighthood in Fifteenth-Century England,” published in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and “George R. R. Martin’s ‘Muscular Medievalism’ in A Game of Thrones: Masculinity, Violence, and Fantasy,” published in Studies in Medievalism 32. HOLLY A. CROCKER is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. Most recently, she is the author of The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare (2019), and co-editor (with Glenn Burger) of Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion (2019). Currently she is completing a book, The Feminist Subject of Late Medieval Literature, editing an essay cluster for Studies in the Age of Chaucer on “Reconsidering the Subject,” and co-editing (with Carissa Harris) an essay cluster on “Theorizing Gender, Patriarchy, and Liberation: Imani Perry’s Vexy Thing and Medieval Studies,” for Exemplaria. JOSEPH DEROSIER is Assistant Professor and Lead of the French Program in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Beloit College. His research focuses on medieval French romance and hermeneutics, and the intersections of medieval race, gender, nation, territory, and biopolitics. His courses are designed as spaces for students to explore the stakes of literature in identity, nationalism, and history from the medieval period to the present. He recently published articles on the racial and biopolitical stakes of Arthurian romance and the queer hermeneutics of the Roman de la Rose. MELISSA RIDLEY ELMES is Associate Professor of English and affiliate Gender Studies faculty at Lindenwood University. Her research examines post-Conquest–fifteenth-century English, Welsh, Anglo-Norman, Irish,

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and Old Norse/Icelandic literatures and cultures and women’s and gender studies. She is the co-editor of Food and Feast in Premodern Outlaw Tales (2021) and Melusine’s Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth (2019), and her recent articles include studies on the Arthurian and Robin Hood legends, the Mabinogion, Chaucer, fairies and power, women’s friendship in medieval texts, and pedagogy. NICOLE EVELINA is an independent researcher and a USA Today bestselling historical novelist and biographer. She has spent more than a decade studying the Arthurian legend, especially in relation to Guinevere. She is the author of The Once and Future Queen: Guinevere in Arthurian Legend (2017), which traces the evolution of the character from her Celtic roots to today in relation to society’s views of women. Her other non-fiction focuses on history and pop culture and her fiction tells the stories of littleknown women. JANE GILBERT is Professor of Medieval Literature and Critical Theory at University College London. She works on medieval French and English literature both separately and in comparison, and is especially interested in dialogues between medieval literature and modern theoretical approaches. NAHIR OTAÑO GRACIA is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Mexico and a Member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. Her theoretical frameworks include Critical Race Studies, Translation Theory and Practice, and the Global North Atlantic – extending the North Atlantic to include the Iberian Peninsula and Africa. She has published on literatures written in Middle English, Old Castilian, Old Catalan, Old Irish, and Old Norse-Icelandic, and her articles have appeared in Arthuriana, Comitatus, Enarratio, English Language Notes, Viator, and Exemplaria. Her essay, “Towards a Decentered Global North Atlantic,” won the 2022 MAA Article Prize in Critical Race Studies. MIKAYLA HUNTER holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford. She has published research on Arthurian medieval romances as well as on medievalism in Game of Thrones. This includes articles in the Journal of the International Arthurian Society and in Arthuriana. Her current research focuses on themes of deception and perception in Middle English romances and Robin Hood ballads. CHRISTOPHER JENSEN is Assistant Professor of Arts and Humanities at Albany State University, a historically Black university (HBCU) in southwest Georgia. His scholarly and teaching interests include translation, ethics, the Arthurian legend, and the development of medievalism as a tool of imperialism. In 2019, he received the Fair Unknown Award from the International Arthurian Society–North American Branch, and he cur-

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rently serves as a member of the Executive Board for the Southeastern Medieval Association (SEMA). His articles have appeared in Arthuriana, Studies in Medievalism, and several peer-reviewed essay collections. DAVID F. JOHNSON is Professor of English at Florida State University. He is quondam President of the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society, and quondam co-editor of Arthurian Literature. He aspires to being the futurus author of a monograph on Jacob van Maerlant and the Matter of Britain. Together with Prof. Dr Geert H. H. Claassens of Leuven University, he has published several volumes of Dutch Arthuriana in facing-page text and translation. JONATHAN SEELYE MARTIN is Assistant Professor of German at Illinois State University. His current project focuses on the important role played by new notions of female consent to marriage in German romances from around 1200. In addition, he has published on questions of gender and literature and law more generally, in journals including Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, The German Quarterly, and Arthuriana. EVELYN MEYER is Associate Professor of German at Saint Louis University and there holds affiliated faculty status in the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Department of Women and Gender Studies, as well as in the Zentrum für Mittelalter Studien at the Otto-­FriedrichUniversität Bamberg in Germany. She is Secretary-Treasurer of the International Arthurian Society, North American Branch, and President of the Society for Medieval Germanic Studies. She teaches and publishes on gender construction in medieval German narratives, medieval manuscript culture, notions of evil and good, the racial, moral, and social continuum in medieval thinking, and has completed a monograph about depicting gender, race, and otherness in text and illuminations in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. MATTHEW O’DONNELL is a Visiting Lecturer at Indiana University specializing in masculinity in the Morte Darthur, as well as the French sources that inspired Malory’s work. His research interests lie in the second sons and minor knights whose impact on Arthurian texts often outweighs their relative obscurity. ALEXANDRA STERLING-HELLENBRAND is Professor of German and Global Studies at Appalachian State University, where she teaches courses on German language and culture as well as Arthurian literature. Her research focuses on medieval German literature and its afterlives with particular emphasis on the representations of literary narratives in the visual arts. Recent work includes Medieval Literature on Display: Heritage and Culture in Modern Germany (2020) and an essay in The World of Arthur (2022), entitled “Minding the Gaps: Topology and Gender in the Remediation of

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medieval German Arthurian Romance.” Current projects include a study of medieval literary heritage in contemporary Austria and an exploration of the American West as Arthurian narrative in the video game Red Dead Redemption II. FIONA TOLHURST† was Professor of Medieval English and, at the time of her death in December 2021, Chair of the Department of Language and Literature at Florida Gulf Coast University. She was the author of numerous studies, including two books on female figures in the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth (2012 and 2013). Tolhurst’s paper in this book is part of a series of projects undertaken with K. S. Whetter, especially a co-edited special issue of Arthuriana devoted to The Stanzaic Morte Arthur and the Middle English Tradition (2018), a forthcoming book titled Arthurian Intertextualities: Misreading and Re-reading Malory’s Morte Darthur and the Alliterative and Stanzaic Mortes, and an in-progress classroom edition of Malory’s Morte Darthur, forthcoming with Broadview Press. CAITLIN G. WATT is a lecturer in the Department of English at Clemson University. Her research focuses on gender and narrative theories of character in medieval romances as well as worldbuilding and medievalism in modern cinema. Her work has appeared in Neophilologus, Erasmus Studies, Medieval Feminist Forum, and postmedieval, and her coedited volume, The Worlds of John Wick, was published in 2022. K. S. WHETTER is Professor of English at Acadia University and a former President of the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society. His Arthurian publications include articles in Arthurian Literature and Speculum, as well as The Manuscript and Meaning of Malory’s Morte Darthur (2017). With Fiona Tolhurst, he co-edited a special issue of Arthuriana devoted to the stanzaic Morte Arthur (2018), co-authored a paper arguing that King Arthur is not a tyrant in the alliterative Morte Arthure (2019), and completed a book re-examining Malory’s relationship to the alliterative and stanzaic Mortes (forthcoming). As their essay in this volume makes clear, prior to Tolhurst’s death, she and Whetter were also at work on a classroom edition of Le Morte Darthur, which Whetter is completing.

Foreword JANE GILBERT

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hen Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter kindly invited me to contribute a chapter on “Arthurian Ethics” to their Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, I attempted to sketch a “bare bones” framework that, rather than considering the particular moral regimes of specific works, would assist discussion and comparison of how ethical questions were treated across, in principle, the entire range of Arthurian works in different media and discourses, produced over the past millennium and still to come – and including critical writing about Arthurian works among the modes of Arthurian discourse.1 Such a task is clearly impossible, but I enjoyed the challenge (more below on the role of failure in Arthurian ethics). I wanted, in particular, to outline some of the distinctive ways in which Arthurian works typically approach ethical questions: the kinds of things they construe to be “good” or “bad,” how they build the constructions through which they establish or question those values, and their attachment when doing so to particular narrative features (e.g. certain types of character, action, event, place, object, animal). I further aimed to sketch some of the characteristic parameters and scenarios in which ethical issues are both posed and debated in the Arthurian corpus: for instance, themes of loyalty and betrayal, adultery plots, or the decline-and-fall Mort ending that haunts some, though not all, Arthurian works. In writing this Foreword, I respond to the further kind invitation by Melissa Ridley Elmes and Evelyn Meyer to revisit my earlier chapter in the light of the essays contained in their excellent volume.2 1



Jane Gilbert, “Arthurian Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 154–70. 2 Nicole Evelina’s essay in this volume, discussing her own trilogy of Guinevere novels, captures beautifully the constraints of writing in the Arthurian mode

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In “Arthurian Ethics,” I focused especially on the complex relationship to “real life” that seems to me core to the ways in which Arthurian works stage their ethical debates and to their constructions of ethical meaning. I approached this relationship through three heuristic analogies: temporal (“Arthurtime”), virtual (“Arthurlife”), and psychoanalytic (“the Arthurian scene”). By “Arthurtime,” I wanted to indicate both the timeframes in which Arthurian works are set and those in which practitioners (readers, viewers, writers, painters, critics, etc.) engage with such works; the time of reception is also distinctively Arthurian. Recognized as “neither now nor never,” Arthurtime weighs significantly on the practitioner’s present and future, exerting imperatives and inspiring actions without ever becoming historically immanent.3 The coinages “Arthurlife” and “the Arthurian scene” recruited modern experiences and accounts of experience – respectively, avatar-based virtual experiences and FreudianLacanian accounts of fantasy, the unconscious, play, and theatricality – in order to delineate how encountering Arthurian works contributes to the practitioner’s lived experience and – crucially – to their reflection on that experience. Although there is generally no danger of their being hallucinated as “external reality,” Arthurian experiences manifest themselves in and impress themselves on historical events in a variety of ways. For many people, Arthurian experience forms a core part of their real ethical lives. The modern analogies available to help us understand this complex relationship have been significantly enhanced by the rise of social media since the Companion was published in 2009. Social media have brought a new edge to modern apprehensions of lives fashioned in, for, and by public consumption. The familiar account of modern civic life as a narrative of progressive internalization now appears outdated; moreover, the configuration of “public” and “private” in the public-private binary seems to have changed. New sensibilities and new opportunities have arisen with these technological and societal changes. Younger generations



and the ethical challenges writers face: how to be “true” while innovating in and improving on the tradition’s ethics? Evelina’s essay also exemplifies what I am calling the “practitioner”: a critical reader and producer of Arthurian discourse. Other than Evelina’s, I shall not refer explicitly here to individual essays in this volume; my remarks address some essays more than others at different moments, but are inspired by the multiple encounters the volume as a whole affords. Particular terms or themes can be traced using the Index. 3 I prefer “neither now nor never” (Gilbert, “Arthurian Ethics,” 155) to “once and future”; the former’s more subjunctive mood better conveys the ethical imperatives to make things happen, or prevent them happening, that weigh on characters and practitioners.

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are highly and differently sensitive to issues of surveillance, privacy, and consent. Acute concerns about the accuracy and justice of representations have become significant actors in many people’s ethical experience. We might explore what perspectives are enabled by “Arthurbook,” “Arthurgram,” or their antidote, “BeArthurian.”4 I am playing a game by suggesting such analogies, of course; but experimenting with living our contemporary ethical experiences in Arthurian terms, and vice versa, are practices of reflective distance that bring different possibilities both to the genre and to modern life. I consider the generation of new possibilities in this way to be a good thing, and moreover, I believe that this game was played also by medieval people, indeed by all Arthurian practitioners. However, my more specific point is that the new sensibilities that have arisen with social media chime with a major theme and premise of medieval courtly literature, which is in the bloodstream of Arthurian discourse: the awareness that someone is always watching, listening, and judging. To be highly sensitized to such things in today’s world therefore presents opportunities to tap into a crucial aspect of historical Arthurian artworks and to extend Arthurian criticism. Changing points of contact with older artworks and discourses offer new investments and new insights; and, no doubt, new obscurities. When writing for companion guides, one must be careful not to tread on other contributors’ toes, so in the 2009 chapter I was careful not to stray beyond my allocated territory. Nevertheless, were I writing this chapter today and in light of the essays in this volume, I would stress the links between ethics and what emerge here as closely related areas: politics and emotions. The intimate association between ethical and political thinking has been recognized at least since Aristotle. Nicole Oresme describes his translation project for Charles V of France in the early 1370s as “un livre divisé en deux, qui sont appelés Ethiques et Politiques”: Le Livre de Ethiques, c’est livre de bonnes meurs, livre de vertus ouquel [Aristote le souverain philosophe] enseigne, selon raison naturel, bien faire et estre beneuré en ce monde. Et politiques, c’est art et science de gouverner royaumes et citéz et toutes communitéz.

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Michael Sun, “BeReal: The Instagram Rival App Wants Me to Be ‘Authentic.’ I Can’t Imagine Anything More Boring,” The Guardian, 1 August 2022, www.theguardian. com/media/2022/aug/02/bereal-the-instagram-rival-app-wants-me-to-be-authentici-cant-imagine-anything-more-boring. Accessed 5 September 2022. “Fake news” is another contemporary trope that cries out for Arthurian experimentation.

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(A book divided into two [parts], called Ethics and Politics. The Book of Ethics is a/the book of good behaviour, a/the book of virtues, in which [Aristotle, the supreme philosopher,] teaches how to do well and to be happy in this world, according to natural reason. And politics is the art and science of governing kingdoms, cities, and all communities.) 5

The connection is clearer still when we turn our attention, as the essays in this volume do, to biopolitics. Biopolitical power justifies (and obscures) itself as ethical good, making “the good life” a matter of conforming to precepts that are presented as simply rational, healthful, and personally and socially beneficial: the seemingly apolitical norms that govern everyday life. As the old feminist saw puts it: “the personal is political.”6 Although Michel Foucault sees in biopolitics a characteristically modern mode of power, Giorgio Agamben argues convincingly that biopolitical control has been an essential feature of Western practices of sovereignty from classical antiquity onwards.7 Oresme would have agreed: living well depends on and enables good government. The contributors to this volume show how ethical norms and ideals appearing in Arthurian works relate to large-scale biopolitical programmes: for instance, how a chivalric adventure points to principles that create distinctions between groups or kinds of people. Chivalric and courtly aspirations have wide implications beyond those of the class, profession, and gender that they directly address. A feature of Arthurian discourse that actually helps practitioners to take a critical stance is its limitrophic nature. It shares this with medieval courtly literature, whose texts enjoy taking up a position at the edge or on the extreme of their presented worldview, testing its limits, and confronting outsides and outsiders. Knights endlessly (in very different ways, depending on the work) confront figures who require them to articulate or perform their understanding of the courtly order, thus offering both knight and order up to us for assessment and debate; lovers bemoan such uncourtly agents as jealousy and slander. “Others 5





Nicole Oresme, Le Livre de Ethiques d’Aristote, ed. Albert Douglas Menut (New York: Stechart, 1940), 97 (my translation; Oresme’s ethical terms are, obviously, complex in conception). 6 Christopher J. Kelly, “The Personal is Political,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 1 Mar. 2022, www.britannica.com/topic/the-personal-is-political. Accessed 5 September 2022. 7 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 133–59. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–12.

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within” further test individuals’ and communities’ relationships to ethical-political ideology, mapping external limits onto internal ones: Chrétien de Troyes’s casual mention of Le Bel Couart and Le Laid Hardi (the Handsome Coward and the Bold Ugly Knight) among the foremost “barons” of the Round Table, “qui furent li meillor del monde” (“who were the best in the world”), challenges expectations of class excellence;8 as do the lover’s rivals (false to a man, if only his lady could see it), who are also his doubles.9 Jacques Derrida’s description of limitrophie as a critical strategy in his biopolitical essay, L’animal que donc je suis, could have been adopted by medieval courtly literature: Il s’agira de ce qui pousse et croît à la limite, autour de la limite, en s’entretenant de la limite, mais [aussi] de ce qui nourrit la limite, la génère, l’élève et la complique. Tout ce que je dirai ne consistera surtout pas à effacer la limite, mais à multiplier ses figures, à compliquer, épaissir, délinéariser, plier, diviser la ligne justement en la faisant croître et multiplier. 10 (What sprouts or grows at the limit, around the limit, [while being maintained by] the limit, but also what feeds the limit, generates it, raises it, and complicates it. Everything I’ll say will consist, certainly not in effacing the limit, but in multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply.)11

Thus the characteristic Arthurian scenario in which ideals fail, or are failed, opens up rather than terminates discussion. To what and how should this character (knight, lover, lady, squire, hermit, giant, dwarf, king…) aspire? The Mort horizon is a specifically Arthurian realization of this limitrophic strategy: by positing that the Arthurian order failed for ethical and political reasons (rather than simply passing away), any work that invokes this horizon invites us to undertake a fundamental 8

Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, lines 1676–77, 1670. Erec is often considered both the earliest and among the most exemplary and least critical Arthurian romances. On courtly love as “aristophilia” or love of (a specific form of) ethical excellence, see James A. Schultz, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), especially chapter six. 9 Sarah Kay, “The Contradictions of Courtly Love and the Origins of Courtly Poetry: The Evidence of the Lauzengiers,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26 (1996), 209–53. 10 Jacques Derrida, L’animal que donc je suis, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 51. 11 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 29. Square brackets show where I have replaced Wills’ “by maintaining the limit,” which I consider an inaccurate translation.

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re-examination of Arthurian theory and practice. Arthurian discourse’s attention to outsides and outsiders encourages us to pose Achille Mbembe’s necropolitical question: who pays for the peace, health, prosperity enjoyed by the kingdom, city, or community as supposed entities, and by some of those who live there?12 Arthurian works abound in liminal figures around whom complicated negotiations over individual and communal “good lives” become especially intense. Exploring further the politics and ethics bound up with these figures, uncovering the blind spots that structure both particular works and Arthurian discourse generally, is itself encouraged by the discourse. Bio- and necropolitics express themselves also as regimes of feeling. As the essays in this volume show, Arthurian ethical and political constructions are entwined with Arthurian emotions. Sara Ahmed’s powerful Cultural Politics of Emotions analyses how pain, hate, fear, disgust, shame, love, and “queer feelings,” experienced viscerally and consciously, constitute political actions. The people, beings, bodies, experiences, things, places, food, and so on, who experience, trigger, or suffer these emotions are selected systematically as “belonging” or “not belonging” and as “good” or “bad,” with profound consequences for the kinds of life available to them. Arthurian artworks, like nonArthurian ones, approach “emotion as a form of cultural politics or world making” on many scales:13 they not only depict characters’ emotions but also incite strong feelings in practitioners. Studying Arthurian “affective economies” requires us to pay attention to how the emotions incited in and by different Arthurian works work to reinforce or alter ethical and political configurations of inclusion and exclusion through such affective responses as agreement or dissent, identification, differentiation, or repudiation.14 Performative reiterations allow for both reinforcement and change, inviting us to work towards better (Arthurian?) worlds. It is an essential aspect of Arthurian discourse’s limitrophic nature that we extend our imaginations beyond its limits. This is not to say, of course, 12

Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15 (2003), 11–40; and Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019) 13 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, second edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 12. 14 Ahmed’s term “affective economies” stresses that “feelings do not reside in subjects or objects, but are produced as effects of circulation,” 8, and especially chapter two, on hate. Ahmed’s main concern in this volume is political, as her title indicates; she addresses ethics most directly when discussing happiness and “the relationship between affective and moral economies” (219) in the Afterword to the second edition, especially 219–25. See further, Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

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that we can ever dispense with blind spots. In inventing an improved Arthurian scene, we inscribe our own limits: the ethical, political, and emotional lines that we draw and where we draw them.15 We generate new fantasies as we rethink Arthurian figures and scenarios in ways that relate them to our own, contemporary political and ethical lives. Luckily, a host of thinkers, working now or earlier, “here” or elsewhere, examining the surface of texts or practicing hermeneutics of suspicion, help us to detect and critique them. Justice remains an Arthurian ideal, however qualified and hampered its concrete realizations; and even as we work towards it, Arthurian discourse calls upon us to rethink and rework it, from its and our limits.16

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On “drawing the line,” see Gayle S Rubin’s classic “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (London: Routledge, 1984), 157–210. See also the extensive reassessment in Rethinking Sex, ed. Heather Love, special number of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 17 (2011). 16 On the “antinomie non dialectisable” (“non-dialectizable antinomy”) between ideal ethical absolutes on the one hand and contingent practices and norms on the other, see Jacques Derrida, De l’hospitalité: Anne Dufourmantelle invite Jacques Derrida à répondre (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997), 73; Of Hospitality: Anne Durfourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 77.

Acknowledgments

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his project began as a conversation between the volume editors on the return drive home from the 2018 International Congress on Medieval Studies (“Kalamazoo”). We were brainstorming ideas for sessions for the following year, when Melissa chimed in with, “What about a session on Arthurian ethics?” To which Evelyn replied, stunned, “Arthur has ethics?” Still debating the question hours later, we realized we did, indeed, have a conference session, or several. A year later, after organizing two such sessions and hearing several papers that could be tweaked to fit the theme in other sessions at both the Saint Louis University Symposium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Kalamazoo, we realized that interest in this topic was far wider than we had imagined and its scope far greater than we could hope to cover on our own, and embarked on this volume in response. First and foremost, then, we thank our wonderful contributors, most of whom presented early versions of their chapters in those sessions, and all of whom have been wholly engaged, responsive, and delightful to work with. Thanks as well to Jane Gilbert and Elizabeth Archibald, for their gracious acceptance of our invitation to contribute a Foreword and Afterword, respectively. It has been our pleasure to watch Jane revisit her earlier work with such generosity and clear enjoyment through the prism created by our collection. It has, similarly, been our pleasure to see how Elizabeth pulled together the many threads our contributors raised throughout this collection without unraveling them as she rightly shows there can never be a single definition of ethics in the Arthurian corpus. We also extend gratitude to Norris Lacy, then editor of the Arthurian Studies series in which this volume appears, for his enthusiastic support of this project in its earliest stages, Cory Rushton his successor, and of course, to Caroline Palmer, peerless editor of medieval studies for Boydell and Brewer, to whom so many of us are indebted both individually and collectively for her tireless support of medieval scholarship and her kindness. Thanks as well to the production staff at Boydell and Brewer for their work in bringing the volume to publication. The editors extend thanks to one another, for the friendship, intellectual curiosity and rigor, collaborative spirit, and collegial and

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editorial support that have mutually sustained us through the completion of such a large project, especially during the ongoing global pandemic. It would be unethical for us not to thank our family members as well, who also have sustained us through this work. Finally, we extend our gratitude to Christoph Neuendorf, husband of our late colleague Fiona Tolhurst, for granting us permission to publish one of her last essays in this volume. It is an honor, albeit a devastating one, and we are deeply grateful to be so entrusted with preserving her work in this way.

Introduction

MELISSA RIDLEY ELMES AND EVELYN MEYER

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his book began with two questions: how do we define “ethics?” And, how do we define “Arthurian ethics” more explicitly? We do not intend to answer these questions because, as Jane Gilbert noted in her 2009 essay “Arthurian Ethics,” they cannot be answered in any homogenous, one-size-fits-all way: “no single idea of the ‘good’ governs all Arthurian works.”1 In much the same way that we understand there is no single, overarching definition of “King Arthur” as a person, character, or figure, so must we, often to our frustration, acknowledge there is no single, overarching definition of “ethics” or of “Arthurian ethics.” This premise is the basis for the essays in this collection. While we do not define ethics as a homogenous term or Arthurian ethics as a monolithic enterprise, it is helpful to remember that the earliest appearance of the term “ethics” in vernacular English texts is in the fourteenth century, entering into the English language from the French following the Norman conquest and by the thirteenth century and, far earlier, originating in Latin in the writings of Quintilian and transmitted to England through British Latin texts in the twelfth century. Coming from the French éthique, the definition is “of or related to moral principles” and from the Latin ēthicus, “belonging to morals, ethical, expressive of character, psychological” deriving from the still earlier Greek ἠθικός, “moral; showing moral character,” and, in the plural, “manners.”2 In all its earliest iterations in English, first attested in works such as John Trevisa’s 1387 translation of Ralph Higden’s Polychron and Geoffrey Chaucer’s 1386 Legend of Good Women, the word is used to describe the branch of knowledge or study dealing with moral principles; it isn’t until 1



Jane Gilbert, “Arthurian Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 154–70: 154. 2 “ethic, n. and adj.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2022 (Oxford University Press). All subsequent discussion of this term in this paragraph from the OED.

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1659 that the word is divested of its ties to the concept of study to simply mean “A system or set of moral principles; a set of social or personal values.” This matters because, when we are investigating the idea of ethics in medieval texts, we locate it specifically employed as a branch of study or of knowledge dealing with moral principles – that is, ethics in medieval texts are a didactic program embedded within the narrative, intended to help the reader think through moral concerns. And in this, the Arthurian legend from its medieval origins through the present day is fundamentally an ethical enterprise. Although the Arthurian legend has at its core a set of ethical considerations – good kingship, ideal knighthood, national identity, the Grail Quest, relationships between men and women, the treatment of those socially, politically, economically, and physically weaker than oneself – Jane Gilbert’s essay was the first considered treatment of this subject on its own terms. In that study, she points out that “ethical literary criticism analyses the moral organisation of texts, assessing internal consistency, noting what is endorsed, condemned, obscured, or omitted. It examines both any specific precepts encouraged by a work and the ways in which readers are directed towards those precepts”3 and argues that “Arthurian ethics as a field of study relates to and reflects on… moral debates and their constraints.”4 Too few scholars have since its publication picked up the breadcrumbs Gilbert laid down in that study and followed them into the legends intentionally in an effort to locate, interpret, and understand the various ethical frameworks developed within Arthurian texts. Yet, as our global society today grapples with ethical concerns with increasing urgency – issues of police brutality, systemic racism, inequity and inequality for people of color, the LGBTQIA+ community, differently abled individuals, and women, in legal, medical, political, economic, environmental, and educational spheres – a turn to the study of ethics in historic and literary terms to frame our understanding of these modern concerns is both appropriate and necessary. The Arthurian legend provides us with an excellent body of work for the consideration of these and other difficult topics precisely because it is at once an infinite, ever-shifting corpus with a well-defined core – much as we might categorize the terms with which we are grappling in these essays: Arthurian; ethics; chivalry – as infinite, ever-shifting concepts which nonetheless each have a well-defined core. Of course, the danger is holding too closely and tightly to that core and ignoring the 3 4

Gilbert, “Arthurian Ethics,” 154. Ibid., 155.

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shifts that alert us to important moments of rupture, change, redirection, and the need to continuously interrogate and re-evaluate the terms we are using accordingly, if they are to remain useful to us and if we are to use them responsibly to articulate our past, present, and future ethical relationships to each other within our shared spheres of existence and influence. If we cannot conclusively define ethics, we can at least seek to understand the study of ethics as systemic and ever-evolving, not looking for some capital-T TRUTH, but looking for the various truths that inform human thought, action, and reaction in our texts, communities, and world, historically and in the present day. In a session on early English books at the 2021 medieval studies symposium hosted at Sewanee, University of the South, Elaine Treharne as respondent asked her panelists “what damage has been done to your text object regarding how people have left things out in their study, and what can your research do to recover it even more?” This question informs this collection of essays. The damages we explore in our studies include erasure, simplification, generalization, historiography that has been uncritical or asked the wrong questions, and an insistence that Arthurian texts say and do what we want or need them to say and do, rather than reading them on their own terms. These damages by and large have been the result of a too-stringent adherence to the conventions of genre studies – which often leads us, intentionally or not, to misreading or under-reading romances, for example – and to an inherited critical reception of medieval Arthurian literature that has been under-interrogated. Where it might be argued that “just because you can interpret it differently doesn’t mean you should,” we answer: “Well, actually, it is because we can, that we must.” Where questions might arise concerning the value of such studies “to the field,” we answer: “What is the value of never looking for what is hiding in plain sight or what has been forgotten or erased in efforts to preserve a status quo?” And while there are almost certainly critics who will find the readings presented in this book “good” or “bad,” we maintain it is not about whether they are good or bad in some generic or interpretive sense, but whether they are ethically undertaken and ethically presented in service of investigating what has come before to try to better understand it as it was, and not as past critics have characterized it, so that we can begin to imagine a future consisting of more than never-ending bids for conquest and glory in the long shadow of legendary kings who have never been capital-A KING ARTHUR. Understanding the ethical programs developed in Arthurian texts is one step toward articulating how those programs affect us and what we can learn from them, on our way to imagining new, hopefully

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more inclusive and equitable and less violent, ethical models. Therein lies the great value of approaching the Arthurian legend through the lens of ethics, as our contributors illustrate. We have ordered the essays in this collection in roughly chronological fashion regarding the texts being examined, to allow the discussion of their various ethical programs to unfold naturally as they did in fact throughout the medieval period into the present day. In the opening essay, Melissa Ridley Elmes investigates the idea of ethical origins in the earliest Arthurian narrative, the Welsh Culhwch and Olwen. Reading that text against the Pentecostal Oath from Malory’s Morte Darthur, widely considered the most formal effort at codifying Arthurian ethics, reveals points of convergence and divergence in ethical concerns presented in these texts through which to articulate a locus of ethical underpinnings spanning these narratives that can be deemed “Arthurian” and thus provide a foundational framework for the overall collection. Evelyn Meyer follows with a critical analysis of the ideal(ized) reputation of King Arthur and his court in the German tradition, to reveal their lack of ethical judgment and conduct in acting too quickly or not quickly enough, in acting too harshly or too rashly. She reinterprets Keye’s and King Arthur’s questionable and often unchallenged behavior in Hartmann von Aue’s Erec and Iwein and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, arguing that Arthur is continuously undermined and his reputation threatened by his close counselors; the only time he behaves in a clearly ethical fashion is when he ignores their advice. Jonathan S. Martin next considers the ethical and legal components of courtly behavior in Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein through the lens of marriage, ethical conduct, and canon law, focusing on the figures of Iwein and Laudine as providing readers with positive and negative exempla for imitation or avoidance, endowing their marriage with a similar function. He argues that in refusing to punish Laudine for banning him from her court, Iwein refuses to take part in the canon lawsupported right of men to punish their wives, showcasing a higher level of equality in their marriage than was customary in the German romance tradition at that time. Joseph Derosier argues that in reframing the Arthurian narratives of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chrétien de Troyes as a crusade-like militant campaign to convert the early inhabitants of Britain to Christianity, Perlesvaus shows how the imagined historicity of Arthur operates not simply as historical fiction but as geopolitical fantasy. Its exaggerated vision of an Arthurian past highlights that romance and fantasy can, have, and will continue to envision and exploit ideas of cultural and ethnic

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heritage, examining how romance responds to geopolitical upheaval and interrogating genre as a site of defining ethics, territory, and community. Christopher Jensen identifies how Laȝamon alters the chivalric context and content of his Brut to articulate an ethical construct notably at odds with the courtly one he inherited from Wace. Through the process of translation, Laȝamon alters the skopos of the narrative to reinterpret the legendary figures and events of the Roman de Brut and filter them through a less aristocratic, perhaps even proto-populist, ideology, critiquing the ethical practices of chivalry by an individual knight or knightly community and the pervasive ethical construct of chivalry as an ennobling grace available only to the ruling class. In her exploration of the ethics of power in the riddarasögur, Nahir Otaño Gracia analyzes the non-linear textual dissemination of Arthurian texts throughout Western Europe, investigating the ideologies of those texts through close and comparative reading from her own subject position as a marginalized scholar to argue that even in countries like Iceland where the Arthurian legend did not originate and which did not belong to the European world inscribed within early Arthurian texts, writers translating Arthurian tales into Old Norse linguistically and culturally also incorporated feudal ideologies of expansion, indicating their willingness to participate in the eradication of religious and racial diversity. David F. Johnson examines passages from the Middle Dutch Arthurian corpus to demonstrate that rather than fixing a code of knightly ethics as Malory does in his Pentecostal oath, in these texts the unspoken rules of Arthurian ethics unfold as they progress. Rather than trying to define “Arthurian Lowland Ethics” in any absolute way, he considers cases that contribute to the general formation of ethical behavior in Middle Dutch Arthurian literature, but which are also in some way ambiguous or surprising, rather than defining for the entire tradition. Steven Bruso suggests that where Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is often considered through a postcolonial framework, we can productively examine the ethics of lordship at the heart of the poem by situating it in the historical and political context of the March of Wales, a fluid and multicultural border region commanded by lords with considerable autonomy, wherein the writ of the king of England did not hold sway. In positioning Bertilak/The Green Knight as a Marcher lord and calling attention to his positive noble qualities, the poet uses his confrontation with Arthur and his interactions with Gawain to illustrate the often-conflicted relations between Marcher lords and English Kings in the later Middle Ages. Caitlin G. Watt next offers a highly focused study of Lybeaus Desconus, arguing that the titular character’s callous treatment of his

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horses signifies an ethical failure that, like his other failures in the text, must be remedied if he is to be integrated into the courteous, irreducibly masculine world of chivalry. At the same time, Lybeaus Desconus evinces an ambivalence toward chivalry as an ethical system that ultimately fails to contain its own violence. Turning to the Morte Darthur, Matthew D. O’Donnell contends that Sir Dinadan represents a rejection of traditional gender identities, an acceptance of marginalization and gender-based ridicule, and a queering of the heteronormative chivalric ethic. To disrupt the hypermasculine ethic from within his privileged position as a Round Table knight, Dinadan fearlessly becomes what other knights fear, turning cowardice into a virtue and transforming his own gender-based humiliation into a call for moderation that sees in the violence of hypermasculine achievement its own ethical discontent and eventual self-destruction. Writing about “The Tale of Sir Gareth,” Holly A. Crocker argues that much of this tale details the conditions through which women become supports for an ethical life that is avowedly masculinist in perspective. Through Gareth’s adventures, Malory seeks to establish a chivalric ethical habitus, a set of bodily, affective, and spiritual alignments that join members of this Arthurian community. By the end of Gareth, the hero is established in part through his marriage to Lyones; however, Gareth’s unseemly death results from the suppression of women’s virtues in the constitution of an ethical habitus, serving as a warning that failure to acknowledge women’s virtues as essential to chivalric ethics results in the destruction of Arthur’s community. Mikayla Hunter argues that in the three mid- to late fifteenthcentury king-in-disguise narratives serving as her case studies, kingly shrewdness is a quality necessary to the stability and prosperity of a kingdom; to be a good king requires a certain level of suspicion in others. However, to readily suspect one’s subjects of unethical behavior and to be able to quickly recognize a disguise plot suggests that a king is overly familiar with unethical practices himself; that when it comes to dishonest individuals, it takes one to know one. Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand explores Jane Gilbert’s concept of Arthurtime as a space that can exploit game-play to raise ethical questions and enact various responses from the Middle Ages to the present. Starting with a contextualization of the game of aventiure in Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, she highlights three modern adaptations that remediate the dangerous game of medieval aventiure. As a structuring principle, adventure opens a space for ethical engagement wherein games offer opportunities to reflect on

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the nature of knighthood then and now, consider the application of real or metaphorical knightly pursuits for the common good, and ponder the meaning of community. Bringing the discussion of ethical concerns surrounding Malory’s Morte into our own time, in the penultimate chapter Fiona Tolhurst and K. S. Whetter consider the ethics of editing Malory’s Arthuriad, undertaking a review of editions of the text currently available for teaching before turning to discussion of their own approaches to developing a new, student-centered edition. Measured against the standards of affordability, reliability, and readability, and based on analysis of both the ethical underpinnings of editing Malory’s book and the merits and shortcomings of Malory textbooks currently available, they provide an ethical justification for their forthcoming Broadview Morte Darthur that doubles as a study in textual criticism as an ethical practice. In the final essay, historical romance author Nicole Evelina explores the ethical considerations of writing medieval women characters for modern audiences. Beginning with a discussion of her own Guinevere’s Tale trilogy, she surveys how modern historical and fantasy writers negotiate tensions between received understandings of medieval women and their lived realities, and between academic and popular readers and professional writer’s organizations’ guidelines regarding expectations of the depiction of medieval women in various genres. To conclude, we turn to the questions David F. Johnson asks at the beginning of his essay: how do we define ethics in the context of Arthurian romance as a genre? How are Arthurian ethics encoded in these texts? Are we looking primarily at morals defined by the Church, or expectations raised by the secular courts, or both? Do the ethical conflicts described in this literature differ amongst the many “national traditions?” Do we find, for example, in the English Arthurian romances ethical dilemmas that can in any significant way be distinguished from those in the French, or German, or Italian romances? As David aptly notes, any attempt to answer these questions would require an overarching, comprehensive map of ethics in Arthurian literature. We hope this volume has begun drawing that map, and that our contributors offer preliminary responses to these questions, while leaving plenty of room for other readers to expand on these endeavors.  Tragically, in the process of developing this collection of essays, one of our contributors and longtime friend, Dr. Fiona Tolhurst, died. Her husband, Christopher, and collaborator, K. S. Whetter, both agreed that their co-written essay be included. We dedicate this volume to Fiona.

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Arthurian Ethics before the Pentecostal Oath: In Search of Ethical Origins in Culhwch and Olwen

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espite a clear understanding that the legend has deep roots in the medieval Welsh literary tradition and, in fact, originated in Wales, comparatively few Arthurian specialists engage with the Welsh materials even in translation. This is unfortunate, as these texts provide a great deal to think with, especially considering the early development of Arthur as legendary and literary king. In this essay, I examine ethical considerations in the earliest longform medieval Arthurian narrative, the c. twelfth-century Welsh Culhwch and Olwen, with an eye to how the narrative constructs Arthur as king in relation to his knights and subjects and how that representation, in turn, forms the contours of an ethics of Arthurian kingship and knighthood that poets in other traditions throughout the medieval period inherited and adapted either to uphold, develop, critique, or reject in favor of more culturally relevant approaches to these characters. Modern ethical inquiry focuses on the rightness or wrongness of actions and ways of being, where medieval ethical inquiry focused more so on the goodness or badness of lives. In both cases, ethics in general deals with the rightness or wrongness of a given course of action, while virtue, essential particularly in questions of medieval ethics, signifies certain specific points – for example in Christianity, the cardinal virtues of prudence, fortitude, justice and temperance – operating within an ethical program.1 Framed by the writings of philosophers such as Augustine, Boethius, Alcuin, and Eriugena, medieval ethics was preoccupied with 1

Eric Kenyon, “From Augustine to Eriugena,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Ethics, ed. Thomas Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 9–31: 11.

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ideas about living well, which were also ideas about virtue and human excellence.2 These ideas were grounded in the understanding that “human beings are metaphysical straddlers” with “one foot in eternity and the other foot in time”3 and therefore, in most of Western Europe, were not separable from Christian belief and thought. Ultimately, the goal is to transcend mortal, temporal life in favor of the virtue of contemplative life. There is a constant tension between civic and contemplative life that must be mediated, and this tension is certainly observable in the Arthurian legend, particularly in the juxtaposition of the Grail Quest with the program of chivalry in medieval Arthurian romances. Additionally, Alcuin’s Dialogues on Rhetoric and the Virtues advances an understanding of Rhetoric through “ethically charged insights into character, motive, and the nature of law”4 and these ideas are at the heart of most Arthurian narratives, indicating the need for attention to the rhetorical dimensions of such works in any discussion of their ethical program. Eric Kenyon posits that to understand the differences between modern and medieval ethical inquiry, “we must set individual passages within their larger contexts, engaging in something closer to formal, literary analysis that might be usual for some philosophers. Put another way, to see what is characteristic of Augustine, we must ask not merely what he thinks but what he is doing with those thoughts.”5 Such an approach can be taken as well with earlier medieval Arthurian works in comparison with later ones regarding the representation of ethical standards for the Arthurian community – that is, we can read each narrative for what it presents regarding Arthurian actions (what the author thinks) towards developing an ethical program for its particular readership (what the author is doing with that thought), and in so doing, come to some conclusions regarding differences in their emphasis and audience. Earlier Welsh texts such as Culhwch and Olwen do not include or participate in the Grail tradition and therefore may not be viewed as being so expressly concerned with the tensions between civic and contemplative life; yet, they do present and require the reader to consider 2



Ibid., 9. In fact, the terms “ethics” and “virtues” are regularly conflated and used interchangeably. In this study, “virtue” specifically signifies traits of a person associated with their behaviors in ethical situations and I am concerned more with the question of good and bad choices within a given situation than with the virtues involved in such decision-making – that is, with the general contours of ethics, rather than the explicit virtues of the actors involved, although virtue of necessity plays a role in the ethical considerations examined. 3 Kenyon, “From Augustine to Eriugena,” 9. 4 Ibid., 26. 5 Ibid., 11.

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ethical issues associated with character, motive, and the nature of law, and within a Christian framework. Culhwch and Olwen opens with the kingdom praying for an heir and Culhwch’s baptism (“The country went to prayer to see whether they might have an heir… And the boy was baptized”).6 Even the earliest, pre-Grail Arthurian texts broach ethical inquiry regarding the nature and virtue of men in positions of authority and power. This inquiry is undertaken by the author of each text through a particular socio-cultural lens in a particular historical moment. Paying attention to the rhetorical choices of these writers for what they reveal about character, motive, and the nature of law under Arthur’s rule reveals key similarities, continuities, differences, and divergences in terms of how authors across cultures and historical periods use Arthur to think through questions of rulership, knighthood, chivalry, and politics. While Sir Thomas Malory codified the ideal Arthurian ethical standard of noble (masculine) behavior in the Pentecostal Oath recorded in his Morte Darthur, it is clear in this much earlier Welsh text that many of the focal points of that ethical standard were part and parcel of good (literary) kingship and knighthood long before the fifteenth century – and equally as difficult to uphold. This essay investigates Culhwch and Olwen to ascertain points of the Pentecostal Oath which exist in some form within the ethical program of an Arthurian text before and beyond the late English tradition and thus, might be understood as overarching ethical concerns of the Arthurian world that transcend national and temporal boundaries at least as much as they may also inform them. Of necessity due to space constraints, this is an introductory foray into a single story from a single extra-English tradition. Where similar studies have occurred in other national traditions – indeed, occur in this very volume7 – locating an ethical program of kingship and knighthood in this earliest Welsh Arthurian narrative which resonates with that codified by Malory opens up an understanding of Arthurian ethics as not necessarily or even fundamentally nationally oriented, but in fact an essential theoretical 6



“How Culhwch Won Olwen,” in The Mabinogion, trans. Sioned Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 179–213: 179. All quoted passages are from this translation. For length considerations, except where exact phrasing is essential to points of my argument, I will not be including quoted passages in Welsh, but direct readers to the standard Welsh language edition, Rachel Bromwich and D. Simon Evans, Culhwch ac Olwen: An Edition and Study of the Oldest Arthurian Tale (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992). 7 See, for example, Stefka Georgieva Eriksen, “Arthurian Ethics in ThirteenthCentury Old Norse Literature and Society,” in Riddarasǫgur: The Translation of European Court Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, ed. Karl G. Johansson and Else Mundal (Oslo: Novus Forlag, 2014), 175–98 and, in this volume, the essays by David F. Johnson, Joseph Derosier, Nahir Otaño-Gracia, and Evelyn Meyer.

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framework for the legend, adaptable and customizable for individual writers, audiences, tales, and characters, but ultimately, left more or less intact as a central set of preoccupations regardless of time and place. That is, I seek to establish a baseline origin for ethical considerations, located in the earliest literary text available to us, that carries through the Arthurian legend’s various iterations to greater or lesser degree. The Pentecostal Oath, which as David Johnson notes in his essay in this collection is the most famous and explicit code of ethics in medieval Arthurian literature, appears in book three of the Morte Darthur (hereafter, Morte): … than the kynge stablysshed all the knyghtes and gaff them rychesse and londys, and charged them never to do outerage nothir mourthir, and allwayes to fle treson, and to gyff mercy unto hym that askith mercy, uppon payne of forfiture of theire worship and lordship of Kynge Arthure for evir more; and allwayes to do ladyes, damesels, and jantilwomen and wydowes socour, strengthe hem in hir ryghtes, and never to enforce them, uppon payne of dethe. Also, that no man take no batayles in a wrongefull quarell for no love ne for no worldis goodis. So unto thys were all knyghtis sworne of the Table Rounde, both olde and younge, and every yere so were the[y] sworne at the hyghe feste of Pentecoste.8 (… then the king established all his knights, and bestowed on them riches and lands. He charged them never to commit outrage or murder, always to flee treason, and to give mercy to those who asked for mercy, upon pain of the forfeiture of their honor and status as a knight of King Arthur’s forever more. He charged them always to help ladies, damsels, gentlewomen, and widows, and never to commit rape, upon pain of death. Also, he commanded that no man should take up a battle in a wrongful quarrel – not for love, nor for any worldly goods. So all the knights of the Round Table, both young and old, swore to uphold this oath, and every year at the high feast of Pentecost they renewed their oath.)9

The key points of this oath from an ethics standpoint are as follows; knights were: prohibited from committing crimes or acts of murder, required to be 8 9

P. J. C. Field, ed., Le Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 97–98. Dorsey Armstrong, ed. and trans., Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur: A New Modern English Translation Based on the Winchester Manuscript, Renaissance and Medieval Studies (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2009), 70–71. For discussion of the significance of the Pentecostal Oath to the Arthurian legend expressly as a delineator and enforcing standard for gender roles, see Dorsey Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003).

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loyal to king, one another, and by extension Arthur’s country (“allwayes to fle treson”), required to be merciful, expected to give aid to women and refrain from raping them, and to refrain from engaging in martial activity in service of unsanctioned, or unapproved (ostensibly by Arthur) conflicts (“take no batayles in a wrongefull quarell for no love ne for no worldis goodis”). The Oath is self-evidently aspirational, and there are ample instances throughout Arthurian literature, including in the Morte, of knights breaking one or all of its tenets, from Sir Patryse’s poisoning at Guinevere’s feast, recently examined by Dwayne Coleman within the context of murder and by myself within the context of treason,10 to the “chivalric necessity” of rape for the development of the knightly persona, as Amy Vines has shown and as illustrated in, for example, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale,11 the violence done to women in, for example, Sir Balin’s slaying of the Lady of the Lake in book two, and the Orkney brothers’ treacherous blood feuds and Lancelot’s activity against the knightly community in service of his love for Guinevere at the end of the Morte.12 There is no time at which all the knights adhere to all the tenets of the Pentecostal Oath, and even those knights deemed Arthur’s best and most loyal – Sir Lancelot, Sir Gawain – find it impossible to live up to these ideals. More importantly, there is no time at which Arthur does, or seemingly even can, hold all his knights accountable for their failures to adhere to the Oath. If Arthur does not insist on upholding his own oath by punishing knights who break it, and if knights cannot refrain from breaking that oath, then is it merely performative? What is the king’s role in shaping the ethical standards of his kingdom beyond requiring the recitation of this Oath? Are any of the points of this Oath traceable back into the older Arthurian texts that served as the foundation for Malory’s Arthuriad, and do they radiate out from the central figure of the king in those earlier texts? What are the contours of the ethical framework of Arthurian kingship and knighthood, and at what point 10

Dwayne Coleman, “Murder, Manslaughter, and Reputation: Killing in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur,” in Medieval and Early Modern Murder, ed. Larissa Tracy (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018), 206–26; Melissa Ridley Elmes, “Treason and the Feast in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur,” in Treason: Medieval and Early Modern Adultery, Betrayal, and Shame, ed. Larissa Tracy (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 320–39. 11 Amy N. Vines, “Invisible Woman: Rape as a Chivalric Necessity in Medieval Romance,” in Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. Amanda Hopkins, Robert Allen Rouse, and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 161–80. 12 For discussion of the intersections of violence and gender, particularly violence and women, in the Morte Darthur, see Melissa Ridley Elmes, “Public Displays of Affliction: Women’s Wounds in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur,” Modern Philology 116.3 (2019), 187–210.

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does it pivot from actionable and achievable ethical standards into this performative and illusory, and ultimately, failed, standard set forth by the Pentecostal Oath? In what remains of this essay, I turn to Culhwch and Olwen to locate an origin point for investigating the former portion of this final question; the latter part thereof is beyond my scope, but scholars have begun tracing these shifts13 and these developments, many examined in the essays in this volume, will, hopefully, become a focal point for further study. While much of my discussion could be extended to ethics in the romance genre more broadly, that is not my purpose here; and though broader claims might be extrapolated, my conclusions should be understood as pertaining specifically to the text under investigation in this essay.

Culhwch and Olwen Culhwch and Olwen survives in two Welsh manuscripts (the c. 1325 “White Book of Rhydderch,” Aberystwyth, NLW, MSS Peniarth 4 and 5, with the tale appearing in 4, and c. 1400 “Red Book of Hergest,” Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Jesus College 111) and the tale itself dates to South Wales in the eleventh or twelfth century based on linguistic, allusive, and topographical evidence.14 The bridal quest plot at its core is relatively simple: Culhwch, a young nobleman and cousin to King Arthur, enlists Arthur and his knights’ aid in winning the hand of Olwen, the giant Ysbaddaden’s daughter, by accomplishing a series of impossible tasks laid out by Ysbaddaden as the conditions to be met for the marriage to ensue. The tale itself is not at all simple, featuring digressions, allusions, long passages of description, moments of confusion in which the author provides contradictory information, and at its heart, a list of 250 members 13

See, for instance, Robert Rouse’s discussion of the tensions between historical political and military power and the chivalric ideal in “Historical Context: The Middle Ages and the Code of Chivalry,” in Handbook of Arthurian Romance: King Arthur’s Court in Medieval European Literature, ed. Leah Tether and Johnny McFadyen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 13–24. 14 Richard M. Loomis, “Culhwch and Olwen,” in The Romance of Arthur, ed. James J. Wilhelm (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 25–31: 25; see also Simon Rodway, “Culhwch ac Olwen,” in Arthur in the Celtic Languages: The Arthurian Legend in Celtic Literatures and Traditions, ed. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan and Erich Poppe (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019), 67–79: 67. There is scholarly debate surrounding this text’s original date of composition; it was believed to have originated in the eleventh century, but Rodway argues for a twelfth-century composition in “The Date and Authorship of Culhwch ac Olwen: A Reassessment”, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 49 (2005), 21–44. At the present time, it is still understood to be the earliest non-historical (i.e. not found in chronicles or the Welsh triads) Arthurian tale.

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of Arthur’s court serving as witnesses to Arthur’s pledge of aid to Culhwch, which is reminiscent of the literary tradition of listing heroes found in, for instance, epics like the Iliad, and also of the tradition of recording witness lists for charters to validate claims of property and authority that were occasionally embroidered with fictitious names alongside historically authenticated ones: such lists included for instance in the collection of charters found in the twelfth-century Book of Llandaf more or less contemporary to Culhwch ac Olwen.15 We also see a similar listing of real and invented individuals in Arthur’s kingdom employed as a means of establishing historical realism in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, lending credence to the idea that such a list is included as a rhetorical flourish providing a community foundation linked to the larger world of Britain, based on the presence of historical figures contemporary to the story like Sulien, Bishop of St David’s (whom Loomis suggests could be the figure referred to as “Sulien son of Iaen”)16 and William of Normandy (“Gwilenhin the King of France”)17; figures found elsewhere in Arthurian legend, such as Cai and Bedwyr (Kay and Bedivere), Gwalchmai (Gawain), and Gwenhwyfar (Guinevere); characters specifically from Welsh Arthurian tradition and broader mythology including Taliesin Chief of Bards, Manawydan son of Llŷr, and Creiddylad, daughter of Llud Silver-Hand; and even characters from Irish mythology, such as the son of the Ulster cycle’s Conchubar mac Nessa. Taken together, this list of individuals grounds the tale in a court comprising famous, well-known, hardly-known, and unknown or unidentified individuals, both indigenous to Britain and from elsewhere, establishing Arthur’s court as a bustling and cosmopolitan one, geographically located in Cornwall and culturally grounded in a Welsh socio-political worldview.18 Therefore, its ethical considerations can be understood to reflect a primarily twelfth-century Welsh stance that, while not necessarily or even probably historically accurate, would resonate with the story’s audience. As Richard Loomis notes, from a modern critical stance there is no ethical subtlety in Culhwch and Olwen.19 Throughout this tale the reader is 15

See Patrick Sims-Williams, The Book of Llandaf as a Historical Source (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2019), esp. chapters four and eleven. 16 Loomis, “Culhwch and Olwen,” 27. 17 Ibid., 27. 18 This overlaying of Welsh customs and beliefs over other spaces is not uncommon in the Mabinogion; for instance, in the Second Branch, Branwen is married to the Irish king and living in Ireland, but punished according to Welsh law, as I note in my article “Failed Ritualized Feasts and the Limitations of Community in Branwen ferch Lŷr,” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Studies Colloquium 38 (2016), 211. 19 Loomis, “Culhwch and Olwen,” 28.

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treated to clear and unambiguous characterization along cultural lines, the protagonists favored by the author and represented in positive terms and their opposition represented as being somehow innately deserving of the violence inflicted upon them.20 This consistent representation cues the reader to receive Arthur and his knights uncritically as inherently right and good in opposition to their inherently rude and often demonic or otherworldly antagonists; however, this uncritical positive reception only pertains if we are willing to accept that all violence enacted by Arthur and his knights in support of their goals is acceptable and necessary violence, and that all those upon whom this violence is inflicted are deserving of such physical brutality and punishment. Such a stance is only possible where Arthur’s right to act in whatever way he wishes to accomplish his goals, and the inherent evil of his enemies, go unquestioned. I do not think the author of Culhwch and Olwen intends this to be the case. As with most Arthurian romances across cultures and time, this tale places Arthur and his community under review regarding the rightness of their actions and, as with most of the medieval Arthurian romances, there are points at which Arthur and his men cannot be exonerated from their bad decisions and poor leadership, even while ultimately, they emerge as being successful in accomplishing their goals. That Culhwch and Olwen is concerned with questions of sin, redemption, and kingship and provides a negative critique of Arthur through these values has been ably demonstrated by Kristen Lee Over in her examination of the parallels between the figures of human Arthur and nonhuman Twrch Trwyth within the framework of God’s sovereignty.21 Agreeing with Over that “[r]ather than offering unmitigated praise of Arthur as the preeminent giant-slayer and defender of Britain, or defining warrior masculinity exclusively through Arthur’s aggression… Culhwch ac Olwen distorts conventional values to complicate conflicting images of British kingship and Arthur’s rule in particular,”22 where she is concerned with sin and redemption and the role of God and God’s sovereignty in informing Arthur’s portrayal in this tale specifically, I 20

Ibid., 28. Kristen Lee Over, “In God’s Image? Ambiguous Kingship in Culhwch ac Olwen,” in The Language of Gender, Power and Agency in Celtic Studies, ed. Amber Handy and Brian Ó Conchubhair (Dublin: Arlen House, 2014), 75–87. Here, Over is responding to Sarah Sheehan’s analysis of the complexity of Welsh ideas of masculinity bound up in this tale; see Sheehan, “Giants, Boar-Hunts, and Barbering: Masculinity in Culhwch ac Olwen,” Arthuriana 15.3 (2005), 3–25. Sheehan is specifically concerned with the tale’s representations of masculinity as these relate to Culhwch’s comingof-age as a man, as opposed to my concern with identifying an overarching ethical program for the tale. 22 Over, “In God’s Image?,” 84. 21

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am preoccupied with how ethics more broadly informs this tale and, by extension, the legend that develops beyond it. With the idea of looking for some semblance of origins of what might be deemed a baseline ethical standard that then develops organically through place and time to the codified ideal presented in Malory’s Pentecostal Oath, I examine here four essential points of that oath: murder, loyalty/treason, mercy, and the succor and chaste treatment of women, as they relate to the overall tenor of Arthur’s court and, by association, Arthur’s rulership. I undertake this work with the understanding that there are significant cultural differences between the Welsh and English traditions in which these texts were developed, and I am not performing a strict comparison; I am looking for ethical inquiry embedded within the text regarding these aspects of Arthurian ethics that could ultimately inform the codified Oath. I am also not looking for a direct line connecting Culhwch and Olwen to Malory’s Morte Darthur in terms of ethics, both irresponsible and an impossibility; my aim is merely to locate points of origin for understanding medieval Arthurian romance as a vehicle of ethical inquiry that leads toward the Pentecostal Oath as symbolic of its ethical ideal.

Murder in Culhwch and Olwen Although it is not the central subject of the plot, murder (and attempted murder) is present throughout Culhwch and Olwen and seems to be viewed as unproblematic so long as it is conducted in the service of achieving a goal set forth by King Arthur. It first appears in the list of tasks Ysbaddaden requires of Culhwch as a condition of marrying Olwen; over and over again, he states that Culhwch must get a man to do something for him, or a man or otherworldly creature to give something up to him, ending each order with some form of the statement, “he won’t [do or give the thing] freely, and you can’t force him.” As the litany of orders continues, it becomes clear Ysbaddaden means that Culhwch will either have to kill each of the men and beasts in question or fail his quest. Without batting an eye, to each of these orders Culhwch replies, “It is easy for me to get that, though you may think it’s not easy.”23 He must 23

Although I am not treating the idea of theft because theft is not one of the specific tenets of the Pentecostal Oath, many of these tasks also require theft of property, hounds, and horses, and these, too, are treated as tasks unremarkable and unproblematic to achieve, despite the seriousness with which the theft and maiming of horses, in particular, is treated elsewhere in Welsh literature; for example, in The Second Branch of the Mabinogion, in which Efnysien flays the horses

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know that, barring an exceptional job on his part in negotiating, each of these orders is, essentially, an order to kill the opposing force standing between him and completing each task, but he does not flinch or shy away from it. For Culhwch, such deaths are necessary to achieve his goal of marrying Olwen and therefore, because they comprise his quest for her hand in marriage, he understands them as essentially a to-do list to tick off one by one, rather than individual living beings he must kill; what in modern terms would amount to premeditated murder is presented as strategies for his success. This requirement that Culhwch either negotiate or outright kill to achieve his aims is understood as unproblematic by the Arthurian community of this tale, a point underscored when he is aided by others of Arthur’s knights, and even by Arthur, himself, in the carrying out of these various tasks involving the deaths of others. In the first task they set out to complete, the obtaining of Wrnach the Giant’s sword in order to slay the boar Twrch Trwyth, Cai gains the party entry into Wrnach’s fort by claiming to have a craft: that he is the best furnisher of swords in the world.24 Wrnach, being in need of a sword polisher, admits him and, after burnishing the sword, Cai tells Wrnach, “Your sheath has damaged your sword. Give it to me to remove the wooden side-pieces, and let me make new ones for it” and then, taking the sheath in one hand and the sword in the other, promptly and unceremoniously uses the sword to behead Wrnach.25 While he does so, others of the knights along on this mission “dispersed to their lodgings so that they could kill those gifted to his brother by the king of Ireland in retaliation for the slight of not being invited to his sister’s wedding. The theft of property and the maiming of horses are two elements in Culhwch and Olwen that speak to specific cultural preoccupations for the early Welsh audience of this tale more so than to overarching ethical considerations present throughout the medieval Arthurian tradition, as evidenced in their being featured in multiple of the stories with which Culhwch ac Olwen is bound. In early Welsh law, theft was serious enough that a distinction was made between stealing without the owner’s knowledge or consent, and borrowing something without permission, and this was distinct from other legal codes such as that of the English; see Ruth Kennedy, Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 89. Further, the only instance of capital punishment codified in medieval Welsh law was for theft, as Sara Roberts noted in a 2012 interview with BBC Wales (“The Story of Wales: Dr. Sara Roberts on Hywel Dda’s Laws,” by Rhodri Owen, 1 March 2012: www.bbc.com/news/ukwales-17186291). For more on the importance of horses in medieval Welsh culture and their presence in the medieval Welsh triads, laws, and literature, see the essays by Dafydd Jenkins, Nerys Ann Jones, Rachel Bronwich, Sioned Davies, and Bleddyn Owen Huws in The Horse in Celtic Culture: Medieval Welsh Perspectives, ed. Sioned Davies and Nerys Ann Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997). 24 Davies, “How Culhwch Won Olwen,” 201. 25 Ibid., 202.

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who lodged them without the giant knowing.”26 That these men are not actually and openly enemies of Arthur’s kingdom, but simply collateral damage in Culhwch’s quest for Olwen’s hand in marriage, and that they are killed with no recourse to protect themselves, renders their deaths murder; yet, none of Arthur’s men shows the slightest compunction over these killings. In fact, “they destroy the fort and take away what treasure they want.”27 In their next adventure, where the task is obtaining a hair from the beard of Dillus the Bearded to make a leash for an otherworldly dog needed for the boar hunt, Cai and Bedwyr again do not bother asking first for what they need from him; rather, they unceremoniously trick, and then kill, their target: “When Cai knew for sure that he [Dillus] was asleep he dug a pit under his feet, the biggest in the world, and he struck him an almighty blow, and pressed him down in the pit until they had plucked out his beard completely with the wooden tweezers. And after that they killed him outright.”28 Again, there is no suggestion this killing is either necessary or problematic, and no motive is given for Cai’s killing of Dillus after having achieved their objective. The next instance of murder takes place in a side-adventure: Creiddylad daughter of Lludd Silver-Hand is loved by two men, Gwythyr son of Greidawl and Gwyn son of Nudd. She agrees to marry Gwythyr, but before they can consummate the relationship she is abducted by Gwyn. Gwythyr brings men against Gwyn in battle, and Gwyn wins; taking several of the men prisoner, he “killed Nwython and cut out his heart, and forced Cyledyr [son of Nwython] to eat his father’s heart, and because of that Cyledyr went mad.”29 As these are all men of Arthur’s kingdom, Arthur gets involved; he arrives on the scene, releases Gwyn’s prisoners, and makes peace by returning Creiddylad to her father’s house and charging Gwyn and Gwythyr to fight with one another every year on May Day until Doomsday, when the winner of their fight will also win the girl.30 This incident, wherein one of his men is guilty of killing another over a personal quarrel and yet Arthur does not actually punish him for that killing, is an early instance in which Arthur abdicates his responsibility regarding justice for murder, one of the essential issues running throughout the Morte Darthur (for example, the feuding Orkney brothers not being held accountable for their various 26

Ibid., 202. Ibid., 202. 28 Ibid., 206. 29 Ibid., 207. 30 Ibid., 207. 27

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extrajudicial killings) and, indeed, one of the issues in response to which the Pentecostal Oath was developed. Arthur, himself, participates in the killings associated with Culhwch’s quest; one of the tasks set is to obtain “the blood of the Very Black Witch, daughter of the Very White Witch, from Pennant Gofid in the uplands of Hell.”31 Ysbaddaden states that the blood is necessary for him to stretch out his hairs in order to shave himself, and that “[t]he blood will be useless unless it is obtained while warm” – which means the witch must either be injured or killed in obtaining her blood.32 Arthur’s party approaches the cave wherein the witch dwells and he sends two of his men in to fight her; the witch “thrashed both of them and disarmed them, and sent them out shrieking and shouting.”33 In response, “angry at seeing his two servants almost killed,” Arthur continues to press the attack, ultimately overcoming the witch and “struck her in the middle so she was like two vats.”34 His men, for their part, object to Arthur’s participation in this incident: “It is not proper and we do not like to see you wresting with a hag. Let Hir Amren and Hir Eiddil go into the cave.”35 While Arthur only gets involved once he has sent this second set of men into the cave and, like the first two, they have been thwarted and turned back by the witch, yet there is clear dissent from the men concerning the appropriateness of his actions – not because they constitute assault and murder, but because fighting with a witch is beneath Arthur’s position as king. This moment reveals a crucial concern regarding the ethics of killing in this tale: the murder of the witch is not the problem; rather, Arthur’s involvement in that murder is, because it is dishonorable for him to stoop to such interaction with such an individual. This is consonant with the theme of personal honor in accordance with one’s position in society being represented as paramount in other Welsh tales, as I have discussed elsewhere.36 It also points to authorial concern that the reader understands there is, in fact, an ethical inquiry being undertaken here – not so much regarding murder, but regarding Arthur’s role as king. The final killing in this tale is that of Ysbaddaden, himself, once Culhwch has succeeded in completing the tasks set to him and returns 31

Ibid., 212. Ibid., 197. 33 Ibid., 215. 34 Ibid., 215. 35 Ibid., 215. 36 See Elmes, “Failed Ritualized Feasts and the Limitations of Community in Branwen ferch Lŷr,” passim. 32

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to claim Olwen’s hand in marriage, as agreed upon. This killing, too, is unnecessarily brutal in nature; it begins with Caw of Prydyn “shav[ing] off Ysbaddaden’s beard, flesh and skin to the bone, and both ears completely”37 – that is, flaying his head and cutting off his ears – after which Culhwch asks simply, “Have you been shaved, man?”38 “I have,” Ysbaddaden replies. Culhwch next asks if Olwen is now his, to which Ysbaddaden replies that she is, but “you need not thank me for that, but thank Arthur, the man who arranged it for you. If I’d had my way you never would have got her. And it is high time to take away my life.”39 Upon this, “Gorau son of Custennin grabbed him by the hair and dragged him to the mound and cut off his head and stuck it on the bailey post. And he took possession of his fort and his territory.”40 While from the beginning it was clear that for Olwen to marry, Ysbaddaden must die,41 the conditions of that death were as-yet unknown. Here again, we see one of Arthur’s men brutally murdering a giant and seizing his land and possessions, not because the giant is a danger but because the man views it as his due. However, in this instance, there is a reason beyond simple spoils – Gorau’s father, Custennin, is brother to Ysbaddaden, who “has ruined [Custennin]” because of his wife,42 a point not elaborated upon, but which seems to serve as a motive on Gorau’s part – revenge for his parents’ suffering at the hands of his uncle. In this action potentially borne of a family feud we again find possible resonance with the ethics of how the feuding Orkney brothers are (not) handled by Arthur in the Morte Darthur. In Culhwch and Olwen, then, the act of murder in itself does not appear to pose an ethical concern, particularly when executed in the fulfillment of a quest or oath. It is when a killing intersects with issues of personal honor, social position, and/or stems from a family feud that ethical inquiry is raised. Further ethical inquiry arises with the realization that Arthur does not hold his men accountable for murders they commit, even when these are committed against one another; the only time Arthur becomes involved is when he or his men are slighted, thwarted in their 37

Davies, “How Culhwch Won Olwen,” 215. Ibid., 215. 39 Ibid., 215. 40 Ibid., 215. 41 Olwen tells Culhwch when they first meet that she cannot simply leave with him because “in case you and I are accused of being sinful, I cannot do that at all. My father has asked me to give my word that I will not leave without consulting him, for he shall only live until I take a husband.” Davies, “How Culhwch Won Olwen,” 193. 42 Ibid., 191. 38

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aims, or attacked by someone from outside their community. The murders committed here are in pursuit of Culhwch’s goal of marrying Olwen and Arthur’s promise to support him in that goal, but they are not carried out expressly in legal terms and are not, in many cases, necessary to achieve the aims for which they are undertaken. These murders are opportunities not to critique the rightness or wrongness of murder, but to critique the rightness or wrongness of Arthur’s behavior and that of his men under his rule in a given incident involving murder. An ethical concern over murder on its own recognizance is missing from this earliest Arthurian romance – murder is nominally both morally wrong and illegal, but the real concerns it raises are about honor, authority, and social position, more so than about the ethics of killing someone. This is consistent with how murder committed by knights seems to function in the Morte Darthur, even under the Pentecostal Oath, which codifies that murder is wrong but does nothing actually either to deter the knights from performing it or encourage Arthur to adjudicate it.

Loyalty and Treason in Culhwch and Olwen The twinned concepts of loyalty and treason are essential in the Arthurian romance program that flowered during the Wars of the Roses, as scholars such as Megan Leitch have shown.43 It should be expected that any narrative dealing with the relationship between a king and his subjects, especially a king and his military community, and between nations, demonstrates some preoccupation with how those relationships are created and reinforced, and indeed this relationship is examined in literature throughout the Middle Ages – in, for example, the early English epic Beowulf with its emphasis on the relations between kings and thanes and families united through marriage, and the Second Branch of the Mabinogion, in which Branwen of Britain’s marriage to Matholwch, King of Ireland is intended to unify the kingdoms. Catherine Piquemal has identified Culhwch and Olwen as participating in this tradition, the union of Culhwch and Olwen reinforcing the reciprocal relationship between Culhwch and Arthur and Arthur and his people: “The focus rests not on the marriage itself, but on the consequences of the union between Culhwch and Olwen. Arthur has helped Culhwch to win Olwen, but this was only possible because Culhwch put his fate and trust in the hands of Arthur, his king, and submitted to his rule. Similarly Arthur, by helping 43

Megan Leitch, Romancing Treason: The Literature of the Wars of the Roses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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Culhwch on his quest, has united his kingdom, defeated his enemies, and enforced his rule.”44As Piquemal goes on to note, “the writer draws strong parallels between good kingship and marriage, demonstrating the grounds on which a civil society functions; the collective unit can accomplish more than the individual acting alone, and both enable the social unit to continue.”45 While this is true and Piquemal is correct in viewing Culhwch and Olwen as being a more structurally unified tale than most scholars have acknowledged46 and as at least in part responding to the Norman invasion of Wales,47 the writer also – and, in association with the development and employment of the Arthurian legend from this point through the end of the medieval period as critique of Arthur and his knights, crucially – undermines the civil society being constructed. Culhwch and Olwen readily meets the expectation of an emphasis on the ties between king and community, from the demonstration of kinship Culhwch exacts from Arthur in the ritual of having his hair cut by the king to show their kinship prior to Culhwch asking Arthur for a favor, to the support offered to Culhwch in his trials by both Arthur and his knights. However, while the overarching narrative clearly represents a positive and unified association between Arthur and his men, throughout the story are embedded cracks in that unified front that point to past and potential future disruption. Two such hints of dissent are located in the scenes discussed above, that in which Gwyn and Gwythyr feud over Creiddelad and are punished merely by being required to continue feuding, where Gwyn should have been put on trial for the murder of Nwython, and that wherein Arthur’s men openly criticize him for doing something they view as beneath his status as the king, rather than allowing him to act as he sees fit and following his lead without question. In addition to these moments included as developed scenes within the tale, the author of Culhwch and Olwen also embeds internal conflicts within the community deeply into its historical dimensions. Returning to the list of witnesses to Arthur’s oath of aid to Culhwch reveals multiple instances in which past conflicts are recorded with the named individuals, both in epithets appended to their names, as with Tathal Twyll Golau48 and short 44

Catherine Piquemal, “Culhwch and Olwen: A Structural Portrayal of Arthur?,” Arthuriana 10.3 (2000), 7–26: 22. 45 Piquemal, “A Structural Portrayal of Arthur?,” 22. 46 Ibid., especially 7–10. 47 Ibid., 23. 48 Described by Richard Loomis as Tathal Open-deceit” (“Culhwch and Olwen,” 35) and by Patrick Ford as “Tathal Twyll Gothau whose treachery was patent,” in The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales, ed. Patrick K. Ford (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 120.

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summaries of their deeds and actions, as with Gwydre son of Llwydeu by Gwenabwy daughter of Caw, his mother: “Huail his uncle stabbed him, and because of that there was hatred between Arthur and Huail, because of the injury.”49 We also learn in this witness list of “Gwyddog son of Menestyr, who killed Cai, and Arthur killed him and his brothers to avenge Cai”50 – an instance in which Arthur actively participates in the vigilante justice of feud killing rather than bringing Gwyddog to official trial and punishment – and see the first mention of the conflict between Gwythyr and Gwyn within the list of maidens witnessing the oath of Arthur to Culhwch: “Creiddylad daughter of Lludd Llaw Eraint, the most majestic maiden there ever was in the Three Islands of Britain and her Three Adjacent islands, and for her Gwythyr son of Greidol and Gwyn son of Nudd fight each May Day forever until the Day of Judgement.”51 Less overtly and thus, more sinisterly, the name of the character Canhastr Can Llaw52 can be glossed as “hundred hands” as Morris Collins notes and Patrick Ford confirms in his translation, suggesting as Rachel Bromwich and D. Simon Evans do that this character is a thief.53 While this thieving figure does not contribute in openly violent or blatantly critical ways to the fissures in the unity of Arthur’s court, theft is arguably even more an insidious intervention in the development of a unified and ethical community, because it is conducted in secret and causes suspicion that cannot be satisfied in any way other than the thief’s being caught and punished. That Canhastr is explicitly glossed in terms suggestive of a thief indicates his behavior is known, yet he remains a member of Arthur’s court, underscoring that the court consists not only of men who are beyond reproach and held to the highest of standards, but also of men who are at the very least nominally unethical – men with epithets suggesting they are thieves, men known to have killed their kin and the kin of their king, men known to engage in extrajudicial acts of revenge. Thusly recording conflicts between family members within an individual family, between Arthur and members of a feuding family, 49

Davies, “How Culhwch Won Olwen,” 186. Ibid., 186. 51 Ibid., 189. 52 Ibid., 184. 53 Morris Collins, “The Arthurian Court List in Culhwch and Olwen,” at The Camelot Project, 2004: https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/collins-arthurian-court-listin-culhwch-and-olwen; Ford, The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales, 120; Bromwich and Evans, Culhwch ac Olwen, 75: “y mae’r cyfenw hwn fel pe bai’n awgrymu fod ei berchennog yn lleidr” (“this surname seems to imply its owner is a thief”). Translation my own. 50

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between men of Arthur’s court over a woman, and through the suspicion caused by theft, this witness list, together with the scenes discussed above, provides evidence for reading Arthur’s court in this earliest narrative as being as much preoccupied with questions of loyalty and treachery as are later Arthurian romances. Although the words loyalty and treason are not expressly used in these representations, concern over the ethics of kinship and kingship – that is, the ongoing problem of who owes loyalty and service to whom, in what ways and for what reasons – is found throughout the narrative in individual adventures and the witness list embedded in the oath-taking scene. This concern is in keeping with the literary preoccupation with alliances and relationships in early British and English texts, pointing to cultural anxiety over the strengths and weaknesses of bonding activities such as marriage, fostering, and pledging loyalty to a thane, and their influence on peaceful relations both within and external to a given community. It is logical that considerations of alliances through kinship and kingship in earlier warrior communities become more structured concerns over loyalty and treason within the dynastic traditions developed in the later medieval period; however, that these concerns albeit unnamed as such are present in Culhwch and Olwen is irrefutable, and their careful (and otherwise unnecessary) incorporation into the “historical record” provided by the roll of witnesses is evidence that the writer meant the audience to mark and consider them as integral aspects of the ethical program being developed in this narrative.

Mercy in Culhwch and Olwen Of all of the points of the Pentecostal Oath, ethical origins concerning the question of showing mercy to one’s enemies are most difficult, and perhaps impossible, to locate within the pages of Culhwch and Olwen. There seems to be no place in this early Arthurian world for formal acts of mercy; as Sean Davies notes in discussing the apparent lack of mercy in the tale as indicative of its historical contexts, “literature of the early medieval period depicts a brutal society. This seems most clear in Culhwch ac Olwen.”54 From the earliest scenes, we are treated to instance after instance in which enemies and antagonists are overpowered, killed, and their lands, possessions, and women confiscated, by the British lords. In addition to those discussed above in the section on murder, we see as well an early scene in which Culhwch’s father, Cilydd, is advised 54

Sean Davies, War and Society in Medieval Wales 633–1283: Welsh Military Institutions (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014), 226.

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that the wife of his neighboring King Doged would be a good option for his second wife. The narrator informs us that “They decided to seek her out. And they killed the king and brought his wife back home with them, together with his only daughter. And they took possession of the king’s land.”55 There is no suggestion of the victim’s requesting, or the aggressor’s offering, mercy. The tale is mute entirely regarding criticism of the British lords’ actions in these instances; aggressive and typically unprovoked martial behavior appears to be both expected and accepted by the tale’s readership. Situations in which mercy of a sort is present, in the form of a king’s or lord’s dispensation towards strangers or intruders, are located in the scenes at the gate, first at Arthur’s court, then at Wrnach’s court; in the field with the shepherd Custennin prior to entry into Ysbaddaden’s fort; and at Gliwi’s fort. When Culhwch first arrives at Arthur’s court, he asks “is there a gatekeeper?”56 To which the man at the gate replies “there is. And as for you, you may lose your head for asking,”57 then proceeds to deny Culhwch entry to Arthur’s hall because they have already begun to dine. He next says that “apart from the son of a lawful king of a country, or a craftsman who brings his craft, none will be allowed to enter,”58 but tells Culhwch as well that: You shall have food for your dogs and corn for your horse, and hot peppered chops for yourself, and wine brimming over, and songs to entertain you. Food for fifty shall be brought to you in the hostel… A woman to sleep with you and songs to entertain you. Tomorrow, in the morning, when the gate is opened for the crowd that has come here today, for you shall the gate be opened first. And you may sit wherever you choose in Arthur’s hall, from its upper end to its lower.59

Culhwch refuses this offer and insists he be granted entry. The gatekeeper, Glewlwyd Mighty-grip, goes in to Arthur to tell him about this handsome stranger; when he has heard what Glewlwyd has to say, Arthur replies, “If you came in walking, then go out running… It is a shameful thing to leave in the wind and the rain such a man as you describe.”60 Cai objects, saying “if you were to take my advice, the laws of the court would not

55

Davies, “How Culhwch Won Olwen,” 179. Ibid., 181. 57 Ibid., 181. 58 Ibid., 181. 59 Ibid., 181. 60 Ibid., 182. 56

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be broken on his account,”61 to which Arthur replies, “not so, fair Cai. We are noblemen as long as others seek us out. The greater the gifts we bestow, the greater will be our nobility and our fame and our honour,”62 after which Culhwch is admitted into the court. Arthur therefore breaks the rules of his own court in order to admit this stranger, on the word of his gatekeeper, and because first, he believes it would be disgraceful to leave Culhwch out and second, it will bring greater honor to his court by showcasing his generosity. Is this mercy in the truest sense of the term? No, because per his own words Arthur is acting for his own benefit as king of this court. But can it be construed as mercy of a sort? Yes, if we consider that despite his terming it a disgrace to him and his court if he leaves Culhwch out, he is concerned not to do so because of the weather, choosing to bring the young man indoors in the face of wind and rain. At Wrnach’s fort, Cai and his party greet a man coming towards them by asking “What customs are there regarding guests and travellers who arrive at this fort?”63 To which the man replies outright, “Ah lord, may God protect you. No guest has ever left here alive. No one is allowed inside except he who brings his craft.”64 While because it so closely mirrors what was said to Culhwch and his party at Arthur’s gate in the prior gatekeeping scene we can understand this response to Cai’s query as formulaic in nature, there is a difference in that this gatekeeper tells them outright that the court they seek to enter is a hostile one. While as gatekeeper this man is obliged to answer the question posed to him, he is not obligated to divulge information regarding their probable reception at this fort. He thus shows a degree of mercy in alerting them that they are about to undertake a life-threatening encounter and offering them instructions for how to navigate it – though again, this is not mercy as it is conventionally understood, as he is not, himself, holding their life or liberty in his hands. However, because of his warning, Cai is able to successfully negotiate their entry by boasting he has a craft Wrnach has need of, and ultimately succeed in his goal of obtaining Wrnach’s sword (though, and significantly, Cai then shows no mercy at all toward Wrnach the Giant, slaying him in his own hall, as discussed above). This scene alerts us that while the ethical considerations of murder focus mainly on personal honor, feud, or social status, mercy isn’t among those considerations. Where it comes to mercy, the primary ethical consideration on the part of the individual offering that mercy appears 61

Ibid., 182. Ibid., 183. 63 Ibid., 201. 64 Ibid., 201. 62

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to be warning the other person of known dangers, then leaving up to him how he chooses to proceed – again, emphasizing personal decisionmaking and honor over any sort of standard of behavior for everyone to agree to adhere to. This idea that any ethics of mercy in this tale is tied mainly to providing warning or counsel to someone embarking upon a given course of action, rather than to a sense of mercy being offered for the sake of doing the right thing, is further supported in the scene leading to the party’s entry into Ysbaddaden’s fort. They encounter a shepherd in the field and greet him; when the shepherd asks who they are, they respond “messengers of Arthur, seeking Olwen daughter of Ysbaddaden Bencawr.”65 The shepherd Custennin responds “oh no, men. God protect you! For all the world, do not do that. No one who came to make that request has ever left alive.”66 Culhwch then gives him a ring, which he takes to his wife, soon revealed to be Culhwch’s aunt. When she hears their reason for being here, she too warns them of the danger: “for God’s sake, since no one from the fort has seen you yet, turn back.”67 Both Custennin and his wife respond to the men’s declaration of intent with alarm and try to offer aid in the form of counsel against this course of action; Custennin for no clear sense of obligation, though his wife may do so because she is speaking to her nephew. Thus, Custennin’s efforts to persuade them to abandon their goal and turn around rather than face death constitute a form of mercy, in that he indirectly has influence over their personal safety by either divulging or keeping to himself information regarding the likely outcome of their efforts. In a final scene in which a form of mercy can be detected, Arthur leads a group of his men to liberate Eidoel, son of Aer, who is the sole means by which they will be able to locate Mabon, son of Modron, these being two of the tasks set to them by Ysbaddaden. Eidoel is being held prisoner at the fortress of Gliwi. Arthur and his men approach, and Gliwi greets them by saying, “Arthur, what do you want of me, since you will not leave me alone on this rock? No good comes to me here and no pleasure; I have neither wheat nor oats, without you too seeking to do me harm.”68 Where, in similar scenes in which someone possesses something they are in search of, the result is Arthur’s men killing that individual, here Arthur immediately replies, “I have not come here to 65

Ibid., 191. Ibid., 191. 67 Ibid., 192. 68 Ibid., 203. 66

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harm you, but to seek the prisoner you have,”69 thus obtaining Eidoel’s release without injury or harm to anyone involved. Because this has not been the case in other instances, and because Arthur is clearly capable of injuring or killing Gliwi but chooses not to, instead turning to diplomacy, this can be read as an instance of mercy. Why this is the case here and not elsewhere throughout the narrative is frustratingly opaque. It may be a question of social status, that Gliwi is lower in status than Arthur, whereas Ysbaddaden and Wrnach, both giants and lords of their kingdoms, are higher in status than the men who kill them. This would be in keeping with the overarching ethics of social position seen elsewhere throughout the tale – as, for example, with the discussions of who would warrant entry to a hall once a meal has begun – but does not demonstrate consistent logic when we recall that Arthur does kill the Dark Black Witch in a later scene, and that he has also killed Gwyddawg and his brothers, who were beneath him in status, per the witness list. Ultimately, this act of mercy towards Gliwi on Arthur’s part suggests some underpinning ethical consideration that may have been understood by the original audience for this tale, but is not immediately evident to modern readers. There is no clear ethical standard in this tale regarding mercy; it appears to be offered at the discretion of the individual, always for undisclosed reasons; most often, to strangers by people who know they are entering perilous situations, in the form of warnings that may be taken into account or not. Arthur does grant mercy, or at the least hospitality, to strangers entering his court, even bending his own rules to offer it, as we see with Culhwch’s introduction into his hall because of the terrible weather. Yet, beyond this “home base hospitality” mercy in this tale is scarce and unpredictable in nature. Where mercy might be expected, such as when someone who has not (yet) done something to warrant it is killed by one of Arthur’s men, none is offered and apparently, none is expected. Given that in both such instances the killed individual is a giant, there is potentially a racial component in which the original Welsh author and audience of this text would find the unapologetic killing of giants to be unremarkable and acceptable behavior, an observation in keeping with other early Arthurian narratives such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae in which giant-killing features prominently.70 The idea 69 70

Ibid., 203. See Coral Lumbley, “Geoffrey of Monmouth and Race,” in A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Joshua Byron Smith and Georgia Henley (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 369–96. While it is the case in Arthurian texts throughout the medieval period beginning with their representation in Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae (hereafter, HRB) this viewing of giants through a negative racial lens that renders

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hinted at in this tale that there is a distinction between those who deserve mercy and those who do not, and that at least in some instances this can be racially charged presents an ethical consideration that we do see developed throughout the Arthurian legend in the medieval period, as Nahir Otaño Gracia shows in her essay in this collection. The idea which we see originating here that mercy should be shown to worthy enemies but those deemed unworthy do not receive mercy becomes a central tenet in the chivalric program of later Arthurian romances.

Succor and Treatment of Women in Culhwch and Olwen The treatment of women by their male counterparts in this narrative is uneven in nature and situationally determined. At the beginning of the tale, Cilydd son of Lord Celyddon selects for himself a wife, Goleuddydd daughter of Lord Anlawdd; they undergo the traditional bedding of the woman by her intended groom, and she gives birth to Culhwch. Upon the queen’s deathbed, she requests her husband not take another wife until he sees a two-headed briar grow from her grave, and he agrees to this condition. She, in turn, arranges with a counselor that he will strip her grave every year so nothing can grow on it, to prevent her husband’s taking another wife. The only explanation given for this plot are her words to the king that “I shall die of this sickness and you will want another wife. And nowadays it’s the wives who dispense the gifts. But you would be wrong to harm your son;”71 most likely, then, she seeks to preserve her son’s inheritance by preventing the king’s remarriage and possible future children. One year the counselor forgets his charge and the two-headed briar does, indeed, grow from the grave. The king, having faithfully adhered to his dead wife’s wishes, now turns his attention to finding a new wife. His advisers suggest the wife of King Dogel as a good match; the king sends men to kill Dogel and bring his wife and daughter to him.72 These opening scenes illustrate the unevenness with which them unproblematically the enemy of civilization is not a monolithic medieval European understanding of giants; for a counter-narrative in which giants are understood across a spectrum of antagonistic and heroic roles in courtly literatures, see Tina Boyer, The Giant Hero in Medieval Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Nahir Otaño Gracia remarks upon the broader implications of race in Welsh medieval Arthuriana on pages 134–35 of her essay in this volume. 71 Davies, “How Culhwch Won Olwen,” 179. 72 This presents something of a parallel to the story of King Arthur’s conception related in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s HRB, in which Arthur’s mother Igraine is also already married to King Gorlois when his father, Uther Pendragon, decides he must have her and arranges to come to her bed disguised as her doomed husband,

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women are treated throughout the tale – the first wife’s wishes being met to the letter at great personal cost to the king, the second wife’s entire life upended to meet the king’s desires. There is an indication that a woman already married to the king and under his protection may expect to see her desires and requests fulfilled, while a woman outside of the king’s immediate circle cannot harbor those expectations and, in fact, may be in mortal danger when she encounters Arthur and his men, as with the murdered witch discussed above. This is one way in which, ethically speaking, this earliest text differs enormously from later Arthurian tales in which, theoretically, (good) women can expect courteous behavior regardless of their status, although in actuality king and knights, alike, regularly fail in their obligations to women.73 There seems therefore to be an ongoing ethical inquiry as to the proper treatment of women by men that appears at the intersections of gender and social status and runs throughout the Arthurian legend, beginning with this first romance narrative. That this ethical inquiry regarding the treatment of women is significant to the Welsh audience of Culhwch and Olwen is corroborated by the overarching program of women’s punishment and violation present throughout the Mabinogion – most prominently, the punishments of Rhiannon in the first branch and of Branwen in the second branch, and the rape of Goewin in the fourth branch. Here, a word on the question of rape in Arthurian romances is warranted, as one of the tenets of the Pentecostal Oath is that Arthur’s men “never… enforce them [women], uppon payne of dethe.” That for Cilydd’s new wife this is not a reciprocated relationship but rather, she views herself as forced into it, is expressed in her own words; she speaks to an old woman in the village about “the man who violently abducted me.”74 Later in the story, Creiddylad, too, is spoken for by one man and abducted by another, although in her case King Arthur intervenes, returning her to her father’s house still a maiden,75 while Culhwch’s stepmother is kept as wife and gives birth to another daughter. possibly indicating a common origin or a trope to which audiences of these early Arthurian texts were accustomed. 73 See, for example, Vines, “Rape as a Chivalric Necessity” and Elmes, “Public Displays of Affliction” as well as Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) and Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001) for discussion of the raping, maiming, and murder of women at the hands of knights in medieval romance. 74 Davies, “How Culhwch Won Olwen,” 180. 75 “This is the agreement that was made: the maiden was to be left in her father’s house, untouched by either party.” Davies, “How Culhwch Won Olwen,” 207.

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Although the outcomes are different, that there are two instances in this single tale in which a woman of noble birth is forcibly removed from her chosen mate by another suitor points to a cultural anxiety over such situations. However, that in the case of Cilydd’s abduction and forced marriage of King Dogel’s wife this situation would not be understood by the original audience as rape as we understand it today, because the woman is married to the man who takes possession of her and a child ensues from the union, seems likely, based on an understanding of early Welsh law and custom76; this is also the resolution that Thomas Malory uses to legitimize the rape of Igraine by Uther Pendragon in the Morte Darthur and, as Corinne Saunders notes, this marrying of a woman to alleviate a charge of rape when both parties are of noble birth is a recurring narrative trend in romance literature generally and the AngloNorman era in which many Arthurian romances were written more specifically.77 Malory does not invent this resolution to the problem of Igraine’s rape; that resolution is already present in the earliest iteration of Uther Pendragon’s role as Arthur’s father, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. This indicates that the anxieties of rape present in Malory’s Morte Darthur might not be tied expressly to Malory’s own situation as a man who, himself, was charged with rape;78 present in these earliest Arthurian narratives as well, they point to a broadly overarching cultural anxiety over the possession and violation of women’s bodies that is preserved across time and place, until ultimately tied expressly to knightly ethics in the Pentecostal Oath in Malory’s Arthuriad. There is, then, a preoccupation with the ethics of the treatment of women, in particular concerning the intersection of rape, marriage, and progeny, demonstrably present from the beginning of the Arthurian legend, which may have informed their codification in Malory’s Oath. And, as with so many of the apparent roots for tenets of the Pentecostal Oath in these earlier narratives, the charge to never rape women is aspirational, rather than actually or consistently enforced. Culhwch and Olwen’s own relationship, on the other hand, is a textbook example of the perfect courtship for an Arthurian knight, one in which all of the tenets of the Pentecostal Oath regarding women are 76

For the Welsh laws governing marriage and rape, see Aneurin Owen, Ancient Laws and Institutes of Wales: comprising laws supposed to be enacted by Howel the Good and anomalous laws, consisting principally of institutions which by the statute of Ruddlan were admitted to continue in force, vol. II., Public Record Office of Great Britain, 1841. 77 Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, 57. 78 For discussion of the subject of Malory’s rape charges and their potential effect on his writing, see Catherine Batt, “Malory and Rape,” Arthuriana 7.3 (1997), 78–99.

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upheld, indicating this could be an ethical standard for the treatment of women expected by, at least, the knightly protagonist of an Arthurian romance, in these earliest tales. Culhwch first hears Olwen’s name from his stepmother, who curses him so that he can only marry Olwen; he therefore obligingly falls madly in love with her at first mention: “The boy blushed, and love for the maiden filled every limb in his body, although he had never seen her.”79 His father then sends him to Arthur’s court to request aid in marrying the giant’s daughter. Thusly reinforced he, together with a small party of Arthur’s men, undertakes the dangerous mission of going to the giant Ysbaddadden to formally request Olwen’s hand in marriage, during which Ysbaddadden’s own brother and sisterin-law warn them to turn back out of fear for their life. Refusing to heed this warning, Cai demands of the wife whether Olwen will “come to a place where we can see her?”80 The wife replies, “If you give your word that you will do her no harm, I will send for her.”81 Cai responds: “‘We do so.”82 Olwen then arrives, described as the most beautiful girl to be beheld, and Culhwch recognizes her as his intended bride: “as he saw her, he recognized her. Culhwch said to her, ‘Maiden, it is you I have loved. And will you come with me?”83 Rather than immediately accepting his love and doing as she is bidden, Olwen refuses, explaining: In case you and I are accused of being sinful, I cannot do that at all. My father has asked me to give my word that I will not leave without consulting him, for he shall only live until I take a husband. There is, however, advice I can give you, if you will take it. Go to my father and ask for my hand, and however much he asks of you, promise to get it, and you will get me too. But if he has cause to doubt at all, you will not get me, and you will be lucky to escape with your life.84

To which Culhwch replies, “I promise all that, and I will get it.”85 This moment in which he makes this promise to Olwen converts what was initially a curse set upon him by his stepmother into a charge and a quest presented to him by the woman he loves. To win her, he swears he will do everything she says; and for her part, she offers him counsel and advice on how to win her hand, indicating her willingness to enter into this marriage through her desire to see him succeed in his quest. That 79

Davies, “How Culhwch Won Olwen,” 180. Ibid., 192. 81 Ibid., 192. 82 Ibid., 192. 83 Ibid., 193. 84 Ibid., 193. 85 Ibid., 193. 80

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theirs is to be understood as a happily-ever-after tale is made explicit when, at the end of the successful undertaking of the many tasks set upon him by Ysbaddadden, we are told “and that night Culhwch slept with Olwen. And she was his only wife as long as he lived.”86 Having given and abided by his word not to do injury to her, given and abided by his word to do all that she counsels and asks of him, and done as he was bade to win her hand, Culhwch succeeds as a nobleman who has undertaken an extremely dangerous quest to break a curse laid upon him and marry she whom he is intended to wed, while also unambivalently adhering to a high ethical standard for the treatment of Olwen both before he has ever met her and after he has pledged her his love. Here in this earliest Arthurian narrative, we see the most idealized ethical treatment of women in a courtly sense play out through the central pair of lovers, among a backdrop of other relationships of greater or lesser success between men and women, setting the tone for such relationships as the legend develops throughout the medieval period.

Conclusion Spanning hundreds of years and filtered through at least one other national tradition (the French Arthurian legend to which Malory owes a great deal in the writing of his Arthuriad)87 the Arthurian legend as it is found in the early medieval Welsh Culhwch and Olwen and late medieval English Morte Darthur is necessarily foreign one to the other in many respects. However, it is clear that despite the vast span of time and cultural differences separating them, these texts are both preoccupied with the behavior of king and court in the literary Arthurian world. The primary concerns Sir Thomas Malory codifies in the Pentecostal Oath – that knights not commit murder, that they be loyal, that they show mercy, and that they treat women with care and respect and refrain from raping them – are concerns embedded to greater or lesser degree in the tale of Culhwch and Olwen as well. The similarities in ethical program that are located in these essential points of concern regarding kingly and knightly behavior set up a standard of ethics present from the earliest through the final medieval Arthurian narrative that is remarkably homogenous in nature given the disparity of their temporal, geographic, and cultural origins. Every Arthurian tale includes its own distinct and local cultural and moral 86 87

Ibid., 215. See Edward Donald Kennedy, “Sir Thomas Malory’s (French) Romance and (English) Chronicle,” in Arthurian Studies in Honor of P. J. C. Field, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 223–34.

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anxieties, tied to its own author, audience, place, and time independently of other tales, and because of this truth we cannot responsibly argue for any comprehensive and monolithic idea of “Arthurian ethics.” However, the presence of ethical considerations in Culhwch and Olwen that ultimately become codified expressly in the Pentecostal Oath in Malory’s Morte Darthur indicates that at its heart, whatever else it may be said to have achieved by way of cultural commentary and social critique on local and global levels, the medieval Arthurian romance was deeply concerned with the examination of ethics in kingly and knightly behavior. This point is most clearly, though by no means exhaustively or comprehensively, illustrated through the foundational-to-aspirational ethical standard I have traced in this essay, and further underscored and developed in each of the essays that follow.

2

Too Quickly or Not Quickly Enough, Too Rash and Too Harshly: The Arthurian Court’s Lack of Ethics in Hartmann von Aue’s Erec and Iwein and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival

EVELYN MEYER

K

ing Arthur is known generally as an exemplary king whose good behavior others should emulate. Throughout the German literary landscape, he is referred to by a plethora of positive descriptors such as “der tugenthafte Artûs” (Erec line 1891; “the worthy King Arthur,” p. 103),1 “der hövesche wise Artûs” (Parzival line 699.22; “the courtly, wise Arthur,” p. 223),2 and “Artûs der valsches laz” (Parzival line 310.8; “Arthur, slow to falsity,” p. 99). He speaks “ûz triuwen kraft” (Parzival line 150.26; “from the depths of his loyalty,” p. 49) and is “unlôse” (Parzival line 274.26; “unhaughty,” p. 88) in his actions. He always receives his guests “mit vil grôzer werdekeit” (Erec line 2069; “with the greatest of honour,” p. 113) and tends to them “sô er mohte beste” (Erec line 2118; “as best he could,” p. 115). Hartmann von Aue opens his Iwein with a more elaborate description of King Arthur’s reputation: des gît gewisse lêre künec Artûs der guote, der mit rîters muote

1



Hartmann von Aue, Erec, ed. and trans. Cyril Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014). All textual references and translations for Erec are from this edition and cited directly in-text. All translations from scholarly publications are my own. 2 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, Middle High German text according to the sixth edition of Karl Lachmann, trans. Peter Knecht, intro. Bernd Schirok (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2003); all textual references to Parzival are from this edition and cited directly in-text. English translations are cited according to Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, with Titurel and the Love-Lyrics, trans. Cyril Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004).

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nâch lobe kunde strîten. er hât bî sînen zîten gelebet also schône daz er der êren krône dô truoc und noch sîn name treit. des habent die wârheit sine lantliute: sî jehent er lebe noch hiute: er hât den lop erworben, ist im der lîp erstorben, sô lebet doch imer sîn name. er ist lasterlîcher schame iemer vil gar erwert, der noch nâch sînem site vert. (lines 4–20)3 (Good King Arthur, who knew how to fight laudably and chivalrously, gives clear proof of this. He lived in such a beautiful way that he wore the crown of honor in his time, and his name does so still. That is why his countrymen are right when they say that he still lives today. He has attained such fame that even though he has died, his name will live forever. Even now, whoever acts as Arthur did is completely protected from shame and dishonor).4

Not only was he the most honorable king during his lifetime, his reputation was and continues to be so unblemished that he lives on in the excellent name he made for himself through the ages.5 Furthermore, 3





Hartmann von Aue, Iwein, Middle High German Text according to the seventh edition of G. F. Benecke, K. Lachmann, and L. Wolff, trans. Thomas Cramer, third edn (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1981); all textual references to Iwein are from this edition and cited directly in-text. 4 Richard H. Lawson, trans., “Iwein” in Arthurian Romances, Tales, and Lyric Poetry. The Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue, trans. Frank Tobin, Kim Vivian, Richard H. Lawson (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 237. All translations from Iwein cite this edition unless otherwise noted. 5 Similarly, later on, The Pleier in Meleranz (mid thirteenth-century) writes: “Nevertheless I shall tell you a story of the great King Arthur, who in his day lived so honorably and in such an elegant manner that no other crowned head was as highly esteemed. Truly one must grant this, for you have often heard about the king’s excellence and the renown he has won. His like has never been seen anywhere, and his great fame was well protected from stain by true merit. His spirit always strove for honor” (Meleranz lines 112–26; J. W. Thomas, trans., The Pleier’s Arthurian Romances: Garel of the Blooming Valley, Tandareis and Flordibel, Meleranz (New York and London: Garland, 1992), 370). The Pleier, however, makes a much clearer separation between then, when King Arthur lived, and now, when he tells his story about King Arthur as an example to be emulated. Alexandra SterlingHellenbrand comments on the different notions of time expressed by Hartmann and The Pleier in their treatment of Arthur and his reputation. She posits The Pleier’s as chronological whereas Hartmann creates a “temporal elasticity” in “Past Present, Future Present? Visualizing Arthurian Romance and the Beholder’s Share

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his court is known as the place to go to when one needs help, as the best knights reside there, whose responsibility it is to help those in need. This is precisely what Iwein tells Gawein’s brother-in-law while he is under attack from the Giant Harpin. Iwein is rather stunned that his host had not thought to do so: er sprach ‘wie habt ir daz verlân irn suochet helfe unde rât dâ er iu ze suochen stât, in des künec Artûses lande? ir habet dise schande âne nôt sô lange erliten. (Iwein lines 4510–15) (“Why have you neglected such help where it can be found?” he asked. “Namely, in King Arthur’s land. There was no reason for you to suffer this outrage for so long,” p. 284).

This positive portrayal of Arthur is not unexpected, as it comes with the nature of the Romance genre, which was written to reflect, celebrate and confirm chivalric values for the noble, knightly class in an idealized fashion, and, as Derek Pearsall writes, “does not record their way of life so much as how they would like to think of themselves and be thought of as living, without the frustrations and expediencies of real life. Romance purges life of impurities and presents chivalry in heightened and idealized form.”6 Arthur provides the narrative frame for the stories of individual knights and “functions as a courtly ideal that attracts other characters. These others move around the center of gravity created by Arthur, ultimately leaving Arthur’s court but staying in his ethical sphere,” as Matthias Meyer states.7 “But this introduction makes equally clear that a completely faultless Arthur cannot create narration:… Arthur must commit a few mistakes so that his knight(s) can correct them.”8 Elizabeth Archibald notes, that “from the twelfth century on, the idealisation of the Arthurian world was questioned both in Latin and vernacular texts;… [and that] both medieval and modern writers of fiction celebrate Arthurian ideals but simultaneously challenge





in a World That Refuses to End,” in The End-Times in Medieval German Literature: Sin, Evil, and the Apocalypse, ed. Ernst Ralf Hintz and Scott E. Pincikowski (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2019), 144–67: 149. 6 Derek Pearsall, Arthurian Romance. A Short Introduction (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 21. 7 Matthias Meyer, “The Arthur-Figure,” in Handbook of Arthurian Romance: King Arthur’s Court in Medieval European Literature, ed. Leah Tether and Johnny McFadyen (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2017), 79–95: 87. 8 Ibid., 87.

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them by means of comedy, irony, parody, satire, and sometimes outright criticism.”9 This also reflects the case in the German tradition, where King Arthur is depicted both as an ideal king, or at least as having that reputation, and as failing to live up to these expectations, by making mistakes on account of acting ze gâh (too quickly),10 and in fact failing to act ethically. By examining the Arthurian court’s actions through the lens of ethics in three key medieval German romances – Hartmann von Aue’s Erec (c. 1185) and Iwein (c. 1200), and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (c. 1220) – cracks emerge in their ideal(ized) reputation and expose the court’s flawed ethics, their failure to live up to the central courtly virtues they are tasked to uphold: constancy, justice, moderation, and generosity. The adjective “ethical” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “A. adj. 1. a. Of or relating to moral principles, esp. as forming a system.”11 I will be looking precisely at the moral principles that govern or shape what can be considered to be “ethical behavior” in these texts along with behavior that falls short of such expectations. Jane Gilbert offers us the following definition for “ethics”: ‘Ethics’, as I understand the term here, concerns reflection on the ways in which particular fields of moral criteria are constituted. Ethical literary criticism analyses the moral organisation of texts, assessing internal consistency, noting what is endorsed, condemned, obscured or omitted. It examines both any specific precepts encouraged by a work and the ways in which readers are directed towards those precepts.12

Medieval ethics is a melding of ancient Greek philosophy with Christian values,13 a combination which causes its own set of problems when 9

Elizabeth Archibald, “Questioning Arthurian Ideals,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arthurian Legend, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 139–53: 139. 10 This phrase appears frequently in Iwein, e.g., Iwein lines 827, 2308, 4140, and 7660. Hartmut Kugler identifies this as a leitmotif for Hartmann’s Iwein, in “Fenster zum Hof: Die Binnenerzählung der Entführung der Königin in Hartmanns Iwein,” in Erzählungen in Erzählungen. Phänomene der Narration in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Harald Haverland and Michael Mecklenburg (München: Fink, 1996), 115–24: 121. 11 “ethical, adj. and n.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. May 2020. Oxford University Press. www-oed-com.ezp.slu.edu/view/Entry/64756?redirectedFrom=ethical. 12 Jane Gilbert, “Arthurian Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arthurian Legend, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 154–70: 154. 13 Here, I refer the reader to an in-depth discussion thereof by Thomas M. Osborne, Jr, “Virtue,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Ethics, ed. Thomas Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 150–71.

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Christian views do not fit in with Greek philosophical ones and vice versa.14 The Christian message to love God above all else and to love your neighbor as yourself was central, and virtues were subordinate to the highest good. In the secular realm, wealth, power and virtue are aligned and built into the system of political and social values of the European aristocracy. As C. Stephen Jaeger writes: It [the alignment of wealth, power and virtue, E. M.] is a means of self-validation but at the same time contains an ethical imperative: aristocracy defines itself as the possessor of virtue, therefore it must make itself virtuous. Its right to power and privilege depends in no small measure on its moral superiority. Its self-definition as the aristoi, “the best,” imposes the need to assert and prove superiority. To maintain rule by the best people, aristo-cracy, the best had to structure society and their own manners so as to reflect their standing and maintain it through exclusivity and various forms of coercion. They also had to display and represent the position at the top of the hierarchy they had created.15

The aristocracy needed to live a more virtuous, more ethical life to hold on to this position at the top of social hierarchy. In fact, as Jaeger also remarks, it wore the admired ideal “as a badge of distinction. It is too valuable to remain hidden in the private dealings of individuals.”16 What we encounter in literary texts is not a representation of a “lived reality” of the aristocracy, but fictional constructs created by medieval poets to demonstrate the idealization of this world that surrounds King Arthur and his knights by means of a chivalric system of virtues. Even though not real, the aristocracy would not have objected to such a favorable portrayal of itself found in literature because it legitimized their claim to superiority, both in the political and social sense, as well as in the moral and ethical sense.17 These fictional courtly knights were (expected to be) of noble birth, pious and virtuous, beautiful, rich, well-mannered, and always striving for a good reputation. This depiction of chivalry seamlessly connects secular values with virtues 14

See Paul Vincent Spade, “Medieval Philosophy” for a list of examples and comments on them especially in “2. The Main Ingredients of Medieval Philosophy” of this online encyclopedic article. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2018 Edition, ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/ entries/medieval—philosophy/. 15 C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love. In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 36. 16 Ibid., 36. 17 See Joachim Bumke, Höfische Kultur. Literatur und Gesellschaft im hohen Mittelalter ninth edn (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), 422.

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associated with a traditional ideal ruler, and with religious ethics, especially those of crusades.18 This is not new to the medieval era, as these virtues and their connections to each other are already found in Roman moral philosophy.19 A perfect knight had to possess both, “Adel der Geburt und Adel der Gesinnung” (“nobility of birth and nobility of disposition”).20 Hartmann von Aue gives us a perfect example of this combined nobility of birth and disposition, or as Bumke calls it the “Lehre vom Tugendadel” (“doctrine of nobility through virtue”)21 in his description of Gawein in Erec: Gâwein tet ez des tages dâ guot wie ouch anderswâ, und nâch sîner gewonheit. Diu was, sô man seit, daz niemer dehein man gesach, swâ ez im ze tuonne geschach, daz man ritterschaft urborte, er enschîne dâ ie in dem worte, daz ez niemen vür in tæte – des ist sîn lop noch stæte. Vil ritterlîchen stuont sîn muot – an im enschein niht wan guot. Rîch und edel was er genuoc. Sîn herze nieman nît entruoc. Er was getriuwe unde milte âne riuwe, stæte unde wolgezogen, sîniu wort unbetrogen, starc, schœne unde manhaft. An im was aller tugende kraft. Mit schœnen zühten was er vrô. Der Wunsch het in gemeistert sô, als wir ez mit wârheit haben vernomen, daz nieman sô volkomen an des künec Artûs hof bekam. Wie wol er im zuo gesinde gezam! Ûf êre legt er arbeit. Vil grôze manheit erzeigete er den tac. (lines 2721–49) 18

Ibid., 419. Ibid., 420. 20 Ibid., 421; similarly Jaeger, who writes: “Nobility of blood could justify itself through nobility of mind and soul,” Ennobling, 36. 21 Bumke, Höfische Kultur, 421. 19

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(Gawein acted as well that day there as he did elsewhere, and according to his custom. That was such, so they say, that never had any man been beheld, no matter what deeds it befell him to do when chivalry was exercised, that he always appeared in such repute that no-one excelled him – that is why his fame is still so constant. His mind was most chivalrous – nothing but good appeared in him; he was amply wealthy and noble. His heart bore no-one any malice. He was loyal and generous without any regrets, constant and well-bred, his words without deceit, strong, handsome and manly. All prowess resided in him. He was good-humoured in his good breeding. Perfection had so crafted him, as we have heard in all truth, that no-one so perfect ever came to King Arthur’s court. How well he graced his retinue! He worked hard at honour. That day he displayed great valour, pp. 145 & 147.)

Thomasin von Zerklaere in Der Welsche Gast (1215/16) supports this positive view of Gawein, when he suggests, that “[y]oung gentlemen should hear about Gawein, Cligés, Erec, and Iwein, and should lead their own young lives according to the pure virtue of Gawein. Follow the noble King Arthur, who sets a very good example before you.”22 Bumke defines the “Lehre vom Tugendadel” (“doctrine of the nobility through virtue”) as follows: Der Gedanke, daß ein adliger Herr in besonderer Weise zu tugendhaftem Handeln verpflichtet sei und daß dem Adel seiner Geburt ein ebenso hoher Adel der Gesinnung entsprechen müsse, hat in der Adelsethik der Antike eine große Rolle gespielt. In der höfischen Dichtung, die von Rittern erzählte, die ihrem sozialen Status nach Königs- und Fürstensöhne waren, hatten solche Gedanken ein besonderes Gewicht. Der vollkommene Ritter sollte beides besitzen, Adel der Geburt und Adel der Gesinnung. (The notion that a noble lord is obligated in a unique way to act virtuously and that an equally high nobility of disposition had to correspond to his nobility of birth played an important role in the ethics of nobility of the Antique. Such notions carried a particular weight in courtly poetry, which tells of knights, who according to their social status are sons of kings and princes. The perfect knight ought to possess both, nobility of birth and nobility of disposition.)23 22

Thomasin von Zirclaria, Der Welsche Gast (The Italian Guest), trans. Marion Gibbs and Winder McConnell (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009), 68. All translations from Der Welsche Gast cite this translation. The original quote can be found on lines 1041–46: Thomasin von Zerklaere, Der Welsche Gast, ed. and trans. Eva Willms (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2004). All Middle High German references to Der Welsche Gast are from this edition and cited directly in the text. 23 Bumke, Höfische Kultur, 421.

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The higher people or figures are located on this social ladder, the greater their responsibility to those they serve, and the greater the expectations are for them to act as a model for others to emulate. Thomasin’s Der Welsche Gast is an important text for our understanding of proper courtly conduct. “It is a compendium of ethical, moral, social, and intellectual knowledge for an aristocratic lay audience at a feudal court” 24 as Kathryn Starkey describes the text. She describes Thomasin’s goal as wanting “to inspire the entire court to live an ethical life characterized by the four central courtly virtues: constancy (stete), justice (reht), moderation (maze), and generosity (milte).”25 Thomasin emphasizes the practical implementation of these virtues in the daily life of the courtier and in essence lays out what nobility of virtue is. Jaeger draws our attention to another important distinction in The Origins of Courtliness between courtier and chivalric narratives. He writes: We can distinguish two narrative structures in romance and epic that present us with two very different views of courtliness. The first we will call courtier narrative,26 the second chivalric narrative.27 In both the hero is a knight. The terms specify the social role within which the essential struggle of the hero with his destiny takes place.28

While the texts considered here are chivalric narratives, we nonetheless can apply Jaeger’s distinction between courtier/clerical and chivalric to our discussion of values and actions in these texts and our analysis of ethics. Courtiers are educated men who serve as advisors, tutors, servants, and chaplains to the king. Of the many secular offices, the four 24

Kathryn Starkey, A Courtier’s Mirror: Cultivating Elite Identity in Thomasin von Zerclaere’s Welscher Gast (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 1. 25 Ibid., 1–2. 26 Jaeger defines the courtier narrative as follows: “The common features of the form are: a stranger appears at court, dazzles the kind and his court with his charm and talents, rises swiftly to favor and power, inspires envy, and becomes entangled in romantic complications with a woman close to the ruler, and these lead to his eventual fall. This form operates in the mode of tragedy, and it is in the western tradition, a vehicle for court criticism. The prince is portrayed as weak and sensual, petty and arbitrary; the court consists of flatterers and detractors, ambitious and unscrupulous intrigues.” C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 237–38; for his full analysis of the courtier narrative, see Origins, 236–41. 27 Jaeger defines the chivalric narrative as follows: “Chivalric narrative represents courtliness as a sublime ethical code. This lofty vision of courtesy is closely connected with one purpose of chivalric romance, the civilizing of the knightly class” (242; for his full analysis of the chivalric narrative, see Origins, 242–54). 28 Ibid., 236.

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most important were the chamberlain, the seneschal, the steward, and the marshal or constable.29 While there is an overlap between clerical/courtier and chivalric virtues, it is the purpose of or the area in which a knight conducts his actions that matters, either in support of the functioning of the court or a matter of knightly deeds. The courtier is at the king’s side, always ready to serve him, and conducts himself with schoene site, that is, in a pleasing, affable, beautiful, refined appearance and conduct.30 The knight may pursue chivalric deeds for himself or in the service of others, for entertainment, or in defense or pursuit of his honor. While Arthur’s court provides the narrative frame for whichever knight’s adventures are told in a given romance, it is this courtly setting that functions as the “narrative model of feudal, courtly society, albeit one that is by no means beyond criticism,”31 as Ingrid Kasten writes. Arthur’s court – despite its reputation of perfection or idealization – displays its own share of ethically dubious behaviors by not following its own moral principles in either acting ze gah (too quickly) or not quickly enough. Hartmann’s Erec is the first known Arthurian romance to enter into the German literary landscape.32 Therefore, it is not surprising that Arthur and his court are portrayed with a higher level of idealism. The Arthurian court provides the frame for Erec’s journey and development, but only “play[s] a subsidiary role at best. Arthur undergoes no development in his character, does not engage in quests or other chivalric pursuits, and is, in general, not a very active king. He is the focal point of a static society in which no growth or progress is possible – or even desirable.”33 Throughout the narrative, Arthur is described as a courteous man, who listens to good counsel from others. Arthur and Guinevere receive Erec and Enite back at their court with greatest respect and honor and take care of their every need.34 Arthur insists on hosting their wedding “in sînem hûs / ze vreuden sînem land” (lines 1892–93; in his castle to the joy of his land; p. 103). Towards the end of the narrative, Arthur welcomes the eighty widows from the Brandigan court, after Erec freed and reunited 29

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 142. 31 Ingrid Kasten, “The Western Background,” in The Arthur of the Germans: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval German and Dutch Literature, ed. W. H. Jackson and S. A. Ranawake (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), 21–7: 26. 32 Silvia Ranawake, “The Emergence of German Arthurian Romance: Hartmann von Aue and Ulrich von Zatzikhoven,” in The Arthur of the Germans, 38–53: 44. 33 Francis G. Gentry, “Hartmann von Aue’s Erec: The Burden of Kingship,” in King Arthur Through the Ages, ed. Valerie M. Lagorio and Mildred Leake Day, vol. one (New York: Garland, 1990), 152–69: 158. 34 Hartmann von Aue, Erec, lines 1502–1838. 30

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them with Arthur’s court. Arthur generously outfits them with proper attire to restore their joy after their extended suffering.35 In Hartmann’s Erec, Arthur and his court primarily conduct themselves ethically and live according to courtly virtues; kind and generous, he is and lives like an ideal king, to whom the best flock. But Hartmann already begins to portray the Arthurian court as tarnished, for even though Arthur and his court know about the fate of the eighty widows at the Brandigan court and the aggression with which Mabonigran kills everyone who comes into his secret garden, they do nothing to stop Mabonigran or compensate the widows. They neither stop excessive use of violence, nor help to maintain proper social order, nor protect the widows who now find themselves and their lands without rulers. Here, the Arthurian court does not act quickly enough and in its inaction violates ethical expectations. In Hartmann’s Iwein, Arthur and his court travel to Laudine’s court ze gâh (“too quickly”) to “attack” an innocent country solely for sport or at best, to defend Kalogrenant who caused his own loss of honor when he tried the very same adventure years before. In Wolfram’s Parzival, Arthur lets himself be goaded on by Keye to “sacrifice” the noble child Parzival to settle the dispute between Arthur and Ither for them, when Parzival demands to be knighted and that he be given Ither’s red armor and none other. This is an example of a clerical matter, as Ither comes to claim his lands, spills wine on the queen and steals a goblet, thereby issuing a challenge to the Arthurian court to fight him over his claim. Here everyone acts ze gâh and in their rashness we encounter a variety of ethics violations as I lay out in what follows: Ither’s challenge to “Arthur’s right to the British throne”36 disturbs the court, disgraces the queen and disputes the legitimacy of Arthur’s kingship. Keye’s reckless treatment and unjustified harsh punishment of several members at court is another example of an ethics violation, for he abuses his power, acts as judge, passes judgment without a hearing, and enforces the judgment on their bodies. He does not protect a woman, and instead beats her with excessive violence. Furthermore, Arthur’s consent to Keye’s proposal to let Parzival fight Ither against his initial better judgment is another ethics violation, for it is clear, that Parzival is not a knight, nor trained in knightly combat, in addition to being a child. By agreeing with Keye, Arthur consents to the murder of Parzival, 35 36

Ibid., lines 9929–10026. Nathan Gross, “Parzival and Ither’s Highest Fame: An Hypothesis,” The German Quarterly 39:3 (1966), 299–302: 300.

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while protecting his knights from having to do combat with Ither over the challenge issued to the court. This theme of questionable ethics at the highest level of the court runs through each of these texts and was caused either by the court’s rashness or slowness to act, or by the knights’ complicity when the unethical behavior of one of their own goes unchallenged or unpunished, for fear of Keye’s anger and rash issuing of punishments.

Seneschal Keye – Bully Enfant Terrible of the Arthurian Court Keye is known as the troublemaker and provocateur37 at King Arthur’s court, as being “rash, belligerent, insulting,”38 hasty, and excessive in disciplining others. His tongue-lashings and derision are memorable and feared at court, and he is the bully among the knights of the Round Table. There is much in his behavior that makes him, and by extension the Arthurian court, an obvious candidate for being judged unethical, for Keye holds such a high place as Arthur’s seneschal and his rude and highly problematic conduct goes without negative consequences for him, even though he: für seine Bosheit aber meist auf der Stelle büßen muss: Insbesondere im Kampf mit dem jeweiligen Protagonisten unterliegt er auf schändliche banale Art und Weise und ist so der Lächerlichkeit preisgegeben – die Parodie eines Ritters, den nun seinerseits der Spott der Gesellschaft trifft. (must atone for his malice almost immediately: in particular when fighting the respective protagonist, he succumbs in a disgraceful, trite manner and thereby is subjected to ridicule – he is turned into the parody of a knight, who now becomes the laughingstock of society himself.)39

In each of such instances in the texts discussed here, Keye is held accountable in the moment by the protagonist but not by the court per se and this leads neither to a transformation of nor improvement in his 37

This is a generally agreed upon scholarly assessment of Keye; see Andreas Hammer, “Motiviertes Handeln oder fixe Rollenzuteilung. Die Figur Keie in der kontinentalen und der inselkeltischen Artustradition,” in Emotion und Handlung im Artusroman, ed. Cora Dietl et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 271–95: 271; Albrecht Classen, “Keie in Wolframs von Eschenbach Parzival: ‘Agent Provocateur’ oder Angeber?,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 87:3 (1988), 382–405: 382. 38 Roger Sherman Loomis, Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 202. 39 Hammer, “Motiviertes Handeln,” 271.

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behavior as it does with other characters. Even Thomasin, who urges his readers to follow Gawein’s example, warns them not to follow Keye’s (“irn sult hern Key volgen niht,” Thomasin, Welscher Gast, line 1059), for his disgraceful behavior causes others much dishonor and despair. Thomasin continues to lament that Keye has too great a following: sîniu kint heizent alsam er. ê was ein Key, nur ist ir mêr. ez schînt, daz Parzivâl nien lebet, wan der her Key nâch êren strebet mit lüge und mit unstaetekeit, mit spotte und mit schalkeit. (lines 1065–70) (His children have the same name as he does: once upon a time there was one Kay, now there are more of them. It seems that Parzival is not alive at all: only Sir Kay is striving for honor with lies and inconstancy, with mockery and mischief; p. 69.)

For Thomasin, Keye’s influence has outlived himself and impacted many like him, who also spread lies and mock others and do not abide by courtly virtues. Keye has nobility of birth but clearly not nobility of disposition. Hartmann gives us a detailed introduction to Keye’s character. He describes him consistently with variants of the word “valsch” (“false”), for example as acting “in sin valscheit” (“in his falsity,” line 4670/p. 247) and from a place of falsity (“von sînem valsche,” line 4723/p. 251), and even calls him “der valsche Keîîn” (“the false Keye,” line 4738/p. 251) leaving no doubt that this is an essential characteristic of his. But Keye is more complex than primarily being false or deceitful, which is another way to translate these references, as we can see in his encounter with the wounded Erec. Keye intended to take Erec to court, to claim there that he had dealt Erec the wound, and that he was his prisoner. His attempted deception reveals that Sîn herze was gevieret: etswenne gezieret mit vil grôzen triuwen, und daz in begunde riuwen alles, daz er unz her ie ze unrehte begie, also daz er vor valsche was lûter same in spiegelglas, und daz er sich huote mit werken und mit muote, daz er immer missetæte. (lines 4695–705)

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(His heart was divided into four parts: sometimes adorned with the greatest of loyalty so that he started to regret all the wrongs he had done before, so that he was free of falsity, clear as a mirror, and was on his guard in deeds and in mind against any wrongdoing; p. 249.)

Hartmann portrays the seneschal Keye “als zerrissen zwischen triuwe und untriuwe, küenecheit und zageheit … – als Opfer einer moralischen Bewusstseinsspaltung” (“as torn between loyalty and disloyalty, courage and cowardliness – as a victim of a moral divided consciousness”)40 which contributes to his bluntly being called Keîîn der quâtspreche (l. 4724) which literally says: “Keye, who speaks shit,” a much stronger and more colorful expression than Edward’s translation “Kay of the Forked Tongue” (p. 251). It is this inconstancy of character which leads Keye to conduct himself unethically more so than ethically. When Keye encounters the wounded Erec on the road, whose identity he does not know, he informs Erec that he will lead him to Arthur’s court as a sign of honor. This is a chivalric matter. While verbally conducting himself in a courtly manner, his intentions are not, for he fully plans to lead Erec to Arthur’s court to increase his own honor, pretending he fought, wounded and captured Erec and thus returns to court as victor. There is nothing ethical or virtuous in his conduct and Erec sees right through Keye’s deception. Even though he reacts in anger to Keye’s insulting conduct, Erec always treats him with proper chivalry and in the end deescalates the situation by returning Gawein’s horse to Keye and letting him return to court, though not without making him confess his humiliation there.41 Erec displays nobility of virtue combined with proper chivalric virtues; Keye does not, thereby violating chivalric virtues and principles. In Iwein, Hartmann brings Keye’s unethical conduct more strongly to the audience’s awareness and we also begin to see a shift away from the primarily positive portrayal of Arthur and his court in Erec, because the court tolerates the uncourtly and arrogant behavior of “der zuhtlôse Keiî” (Iwein line 90, the “ill-bred Keye,” p. 238; “zuhtlôs” literally means without manners or education) and merely mocks, and occasionally scolds him for his non-virtuous conduct. During the celebration at Arthur’s court at the beginning of Iwein, while Guinevere and Arthur had withdrawn from 40

Matthias Däumer, “Truchsess Keie – Vom Mythos eines Lästermauls,” in Artusroman und Mythos, ed. and foreword Friedrich Wolfzettel, Cora Dietl, Matthias Däumer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 69–108: 70. 41 Hartmann von Aue, Erec, lines 4650–4875.

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the festivities in the middle of the day to enjoy each other’s company in the privacy of their bedroom, Kalogrenant tells several knights about his failure at the fountain. Keye is among them, sleeping.42 When the queen joins this group to hear the story, only Kalogrenant stands and bows to greet her43 and Keye viciously attacks and insults Kalogrenant for the proper behavior he showed the queen because “im was des mannes êre leit” (line 110; “he was distressed that Kalogrenant had the honor,” p. 238). He accuses Kalogrenant of thinking himself above all the others, as being so perfect that he fails to acknowledge the other listeners would have treated the queen with the same respect, had they seen her arrive. The queen immediately reproaches Keye for his jealousy when another is honored, and especially that “dû erlâst dîns nîdes niht / daz gesinde noch die geste” (lines 142–43; “from your malice you exempt neither household nor guest,” p. 239), which Keye immediately proves by bursting out in anger against the queen. When Keye also lashes out against Iwein, who is eager to avenge his relative Kalogrenant’s shame, the queen reprimands Keye even more forcefully and aptly pinpoints the source of his maliciousness: ‘Her Keiî,’ sprach diu künegîn, ‘iuwer zunge müez gunêret sîn, diu allez guot gar verdaget und niuwan das allerbœste saget des iuwer herze erdenken kan. (lines 837–41) (“Sir Kei,” said the queen, “Shame on your tongue, which is silent about everything good and says only the very worst things you can think up, p. 246.)

The queen continues, that it is his heart, the essence of his being, that leads his tongue to speak so maliciously, always quick (gâh) to attack others for their successes, always quick to find fault in their good behavior. This conduct is what Thomasin urges his readers not to follow for “boeser schimph macht haz, zorn, nôt / zorn vîntschaft, vîntschaft tôt. / boeser schimpf macht undr gesellen / groezern nît dan under gellen.” (lines 667–70; “malevolent tricks lead to hostility, anger, suffering; anger to animosity, animosity to death. Bad joking creates more aggression among friends than among rivals,” p. 64). In Wolfram’s Parzival, Keye’s abuse of his position is heightened as he recklessly plays with the lives of others early on in the narrative. When 42 43

Hartmann von Aue, Iwein, line 75. Ibid., lines 105–07.

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the boy Parzival comes to Arthur’s court demanding to be made a knight and given Ither’s red armor, Arthur is willing to make him a knight and outfit him generously, for he recognizes him as a noble child, but he denies him Ither’s armor, as he cannot grant that wish. Since Parzival also delivered Ither’s message to the court, Keye seizes the opportunity to have the clerical matter solved without sacrificing the life of a knight of the Round Table, but merely that of a rude and impetuous boy or that of the aggressor Ither. Keye mocks Arthur for being stingy, were he not to grant the request of the red armor to the boy. Since someone must go joust with Ither, it might as well be this boy, especially as the court itself is paralyzed into inaction. Having either Parzival or Ither killed is no real loss to Keye but might just solve this political crisis.44 Parzival is a convenient and utterly expendable commodity to Keye, since as he says at the end of his rant here: “Ine sorge umb ir deweders lebn: / man sol hunde umb ebers houbet gebn.” (lines 150.21–2; “I care nothing about either of their lives – hounds have to be sacrificed for the boar’s head,” p. 48). Arthur replies that he does not want to deny the boy’s request, but fears that Parzival will be killed. While Arthur’s concern is likely genuine, he does nothing to stop Keye, nor does he prevent Parzival from jousting against Ither, thereby becoming complicit in Keye’s unethical conduct in sacrificing the life of someone clearly ill-equipped for jousting. It is a knight’s responsibility to protect women and children and defend those who cannot defend themselves, something the child Parzival cannot nor wants to do. Arthur, Keye, and the entire court know what Parzival wants; namely, in true childlike determination, he wants Ither’s shiny red armor. He does not want to settle a legal dispute for the court and participate in chivalric responsibilities. By failing to intervene in this matter, Arthur effectively issues a death sentence for Parzival in a situation that clearly required one of his knights to take up Ither’s challenge and settle the dispute on his behalf. This is an ethical failure across the board – for Arthur, Keye, and the overall court culture. Keye’s unethical conduct continues when he beats Cunneware of Lalant in uncontrolled anger and with excessive brutality for laughing when she sees Parzival ride out to joust with Ither, for she would under no circumstances laugh unless she were to see the man who had or would win the highest prize, that is, the Grail kingship. The narrator makes it clear that no one at court would have permitted him to beat a woman as he did there, least of all a royal lady.45 And Antanor faces the same 44 45

Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, lines 150.11–22. Ibid., lines 151.13–19.

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brutality when he speaks for the first time chastising Keye for his brutal treatment of Cunneware, for he too would not speak until Cunneware laughed.46 This is a clear violation of and break with courtly etiquette, and not just an appearance of a break with courtly etiquette as Albrecht Classen argues. Classen justifies Keye’s angry behavior as a response to Parzival’s gruffness and uncourtly manner at court, and with the fact that Ither’s attack had shocked the court into immobility, and furthermore that Cunneware broke her promise by laughing and thereby acknowledges the rash Parzival in what Keye deems an inappropriate manner. While Keye’s conduct may be excessive, Classen argues that Keye’s conduct is motivated by not letting the court be dishonored, so while his harsh and excessive use of force seems like a break with courtly ethics, we cannot charge him with it.47 Keye clearly feels threatened in his authority, but that does not justify his lack of ethical behavior, his abuse of power, and his use of excessive force against two members of the court. Keye is misguided when he decides “to mete out punishment where none was due – a decision that can be explained in terms of his inability to distinguish between an objective wrong and a source of personal irritation.”48 Volfing continues that, Keye is convinced “that he acted justly, properly and within the boundaries of his authority.”49 From Keye’s perspective, this is a clerical matter of restoring order at court, both in the area of the real external threats posed by Ither and the imagined threat by the foolish Parzival, and the internal threat to the court’s order posed by Cunneware and Antanor who broke their oaths and display an “unangebrachte Würdigung des jungen Helden” (“inappropriate appraisal of the young hero”)50 and thereby proved themselves dishonorable, and to him that justifies his actions regardless of whether or not others deem them ethical. It is unthinkable to Keye that Parzival is qualified to win the highest prize and therefore he punishes those who proved themselves liars and agents 46

Ibid., lines 152.23–153.13. Classen, “Keie,” 388. 48 Annette Volfing, “‘und wolt iuch hân gebezzert mite’: Keie, Cunneware and the Dynamics of Punishment,” in Punishment & Penitential Practices in Medieval German Writing, ed. Sarah Bowden and Annette Volfing (London: King’s College Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies, 2018), 43–63: 45. Volfing reads Keye’s behavior from a psychological perspective, framing his actions as the result of being evermore socially isolated within the Arthurian court, as his “spiteful outbursts enable the others to unite in cohesive disapproval of Keie, who is metaphorically driven out for the wrongs of the whole community” (45). While she mentions that Keye’s behavior presents a social and ethical challenge (see 46), Volfing does not define or develop this point in an otherwise interesting analysis. 49 Ibid., 45. 50 Ibid., 388. 47

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of dishonor at Arthur’s court.51 The negative and unethical portrayal of Keye in this scene is stronger than it is in Erec and Iwein, because of his utter disrespect for the wellbeing and ultimately the life of others. He acts as a “rigide[r] Vertreter der Ordnung” (“rigid representative of order”),52 a role he is entitled to perform as seneschal, and therefore any means to restore the order at his court, he deems just and justified. But he lacks mâze, the virtue of good measure and proper balance of all his responsibilities and chivalric virtues. As seneschal, it is Keye’s responsibility to watch over the court’s virtues and see that order and virtues are maintained.53 Yet, Keye is more likely to “disrupt the order in the hall instead of enforcing it.”54 He is rude, condescending, and without good measure; he is full of bitter venom, as the queen tells him in Iwein.55 Der größte Widerspruch ergibt sich aber in der Diskrepanz zwischen seiner Stellung und seinem Verhalten am Hof: als Truchsess obliegt Keie eigentlich die Aufsicht über die Einhaltung des Hofprotokolls, zugleich ist er aber derjenige, der selbst immer wieder schwer gegen dieses verstößt. Zumindest scheint es geradezu ein Charakterzug zu sein, höfliches und höfisches Verhalten hintanzustellen. (The biggest contradiction however arises from the discrepancy between Keye’s position and his conduct at court; as seneschal, it is for Keye to oversee the compliance with court protocol, yet at the same time it is always he who gravely and repeatedly infringes upon court protocol. It even seems to be a character trait that he puts polite and courtly conduct last.)56

This raises the question why someone so obviously temperamentally unqualified holds such an important and powerful position at court, and why Keye belongs to Arthur’s inner circle when he rarely abides by courtly virtues, the very same central courtly virtues he is tasked to uphold: constancy, justice, moderation, and generosity. Instead, he mocks, he insults, he incites, and he has no control over his emotions. He 51

Ibid., 388. Däumer, “Truchsess Keie,” 107. 53 E.g. Hammer, “Motiviertes Handeln,” 279. 54 William Sayers, “Kay the Seneschal, Tester of Men: The Evolution from Archaic Function to Medieval Character,” Bibliographic Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society 59 (2007), 375–401: 390. For more on Kay/Cei in other vernacular traditions, see Linda M. Gowans, Cei and the Arthurian Legend (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988) or William Sayers “Cei, Unferth, and Access to the Throne,” English Studies 90.2 (2009), 127–41. 55 Hartmann von Aue, Iwein, line 156. 56 Hammer, “Motiviertes Handeln,” 281. 52

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shows no proper courtly virtues, no balance, no moderation, no kindness in his actions, only harsh judgment and punishment of others for their imagined transgressions. In his rage and angry outbursts, he who is to uphold virtues and conduct himself ethically utterly lacks them. Keye’s unethical conduct goes unchallenged at court, with the exception of Antanor, who speaks up in defense of Cunneware after her beating, and Arthur, who defends himself against Keye’s accusation of stinginess when he fears for Parzival’s life if he were to grant the latter’s wish. This shows just how great a “erstaunliche politische Machtposition” (“remarkable political position of power”)57 Keye has at Arthur’s court. By not speaking up against Keye, everyone at court tacitly accepts or tolerates his course of action. Mit anderen Worten, sie beugen sich der mächtigsten Gestalt des gesamten Staates, der sich durch weitgehende Einsicht in die politischen Verhältnisse, sein strenges Regiment am Hof und damit durch allgemeine Autorität auszeichnet. (In other words, they bow to the most powerful figure of the entire state who distinguishes himself by means of extensive insights into political affairs, by means of his strict regiment at court and thereby by means of general authority).58

He who functions as “eine Art Sittenwächter” (“a type of guardian of public morals”) in his role as seneschal also becomes a “Sittenspiegel des Artushofes” (“a mirror/reflection of morals of the Arthurian court”)59 and thereby his lack of ethics reflects the lack of ethics of the court, or at least raises questions about the level of their ethics. The moral stakes are higher for Arthur and his court in their search for Parzival as they find themselves near the Grail realm. Arthur wisely forbids his knights to engage in fighting without his explicit permission because they might encounter a Grail knight, but when the court notices a knight in full armor with his lance raised, they mistake this as a threat. First Segramors and then Keye blindside Arthur to grant him permission to fight against the “offending” knight, even though he could very well be a Grail knight, the very conflict Arthur tries to prevent in wise foresight. They do not know the knight is Parzival, for whom they are searching, and who is no threat to the court as he is in a deep trance over the three drops of blood in the snow that remind him of his wife. This situation shows how quickly (ze gâh) members of court sway Arthur’s decisions, even against his better judgment and insight, and lead him to throw 57

Classen, “Keie,” 388. Ibid., 389. 59 Hammer, “Motiviertes Handeln,” 279. 58

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caution to the wind. This lack of control exposes him as a weak king and reveals the fissures in his ethics. However, Wolfram offers a very different, largely positive view of Keye in the Drops-of-Blood episode and even asks the audience not to judge Keye too harshly, as his words, though often unduly sharp, serve to maintain courtly order. Keye is described as “der küene man” (line 290.4; “the bold man,” p. 92) and Wolfram presents a rational reason for why he needs to be granted permission to fight against the unknown knight after Segeramors failed in his attempt: this is about protecting the court and maintaining its honor, that is, he wants to do his job as seneschal, the guardian of the court’s reputation. Segramors simply wants to fight against the foreign knight in youthful exuberance and imprudence and needs the support of the queen to obtain permission from Arthur to fight. Keye, in contrast, is immediately granted permission by the king to joust against the intruder,60 for he presents himself as an earnest Arthurian knight for whom the court’s honor is an absolute priority. Theirs is a conversation between two rational adults who know the risks posed by their geographic proximity to the Grail realm. Keye’s chivalry is emphasized throughout his jousting with Parzival: he follows proper chivalric protocols, and he does not use excessive force.61 But he is unhorsed, his arm and leg are broken, and his horse killed. Thus, Parzival avenges Cunneware’s beating.62 There is nothing in this scene that allows us to question Keye’s ethics. This is a rare example where Keye conducts himself as an excellent seneschal should, focusing on the honor of the court and on keeping it safe and in order, without using excessive force, verbal abuse and rage to bully others to do his will. We do however also see a glimpse of his rashness and quick temper, when he angrily scolds Gawein for showing sympathy for his injuries instead of avenging him.63 Keye’s mockery of others does have one positive “side effect” that allows him to fulfill his duties as seneschal: others so fear the tonguelashing with which he so quickly attacks their honor that it spurs them to work towards (re)establishing their honor and righting their wrongdoing. It is his fear of having his honor denied by Keye which spurs Iwein on to pursue the mortally wounded Ascalon “âne zuht” (line 1056; “without proper conduct / discipline / display of knightly training, i.e. in an unknightly manner”; my translation).64 Iwein fears 60

Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, lines 290.8–22. Ibid., lines 293.19–295.16. 62 Ibid., lines 295.17–30. 63 Ibid., lines 298.1–299.30. 64 See my discussion of the translation of this phrase in its narrative context, in Evelyn Meyer, “Disrupting the Discourse of Perfect Knightliness: Gender Expectations 61

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that without evidence of his victory, Keye will discredit him and declare him to be without honor. In that sense, it can be said that Keye upholds his duties as seneschal by motivating Iwein to maintain his honor in the chivalric context,65 but the fact that it leads Iwein to conduct himself unethically immediately undermines this positive assessment. A similar observation can be made in Parzival’s case, who makes amends for all his youthful errors, especially the wrongs he committed against Jeschute and Cunneware. Each time he sends the beaten knight to Arthur’s court he thereby sends a message to Keye that his awareness of the courtly code of honor is growing.66 Wolfram develops Keye into a more multifaceted character who can be rash, insolent, and violent, thus conducting himself in a most unethical manner, but who can also be considerate, courtly, chivalric, and rational, and in that way does not get himself into conflict with ethics.67 While it seems Keye is always firmly focused on maintaining proper order at court, his ways of achieving that order for the most part are highly controversial and unethical. When it is a clerical matter, Keye abandons ethical conduct as we have seen in the examples from Erec, Iwein, and the early encounter in Parzival. When it is a chivalric matter and he has time to think about his actions first, as is the case with Parzival in the Drops-of-Blood episode, he is capable of conducting himself appropriately and ethically, although not always. Because of the inconstancy of his nature as described by Hartmann in Erec, Keye is unable to balance his responsibility as guardian of virtues and order at court with reining in his angry temperament, which causes him to lose control over himself and abandon ethical and virtuous conduct. Generally, Keye acts ze gâh and in this rashness he abandons virtues and ethical conduct.

Ze gâh or Not gâh Enough: King Arthur’s Problem with Ethics As a high ranking and powerful member of the Arthurian court, Keye’s conduct not only reflects negatively on him in terms of ethics, but also raises several questions about the conduct of King Arthur. We need to ask, for example, why Arthur tolerates Keye’s aggressive bullying of and Constructions of Masculinity in Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein,” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 82.4 (2008), 519–51, especially 524–27; and Evelyn Meyer, “The Slippery Concept of Evil in Hartmann von Aue’s Erec and Iwein,” in The End-Times, 204–06. 65 Similarly Hammer, “Motiviertes Handeln,” 290–91; Classen, “Keie,” 385. 66 Classen, “Keie,” 392. 67 Ibid., 398 on this more complex characterization of Keye.

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other members and does not punish him for it by holding him to the high ethical standards that his court is known for, which others are to emulate, and which the seneschal in particular oversees to ensure compliance. The fact that Keye does not conduct himself properly and Arthur does nothing about it subverts the image and reputation of the ideal king and court. Hartmann repeatedly raises questions about the ethics of the Arthurian court throughout Erec and Iwein, for example, about the lack of intervention to stop Mabonigran’s aggression at the Brandigan court, an example when Arthur is not gâh (“quick”) enough.68 Hartmann also raises questions about Arthur’s “need” in Iwein to travel with his court to the spring, to avenge Kalogrenant’s self-inflicted loss of honor, thereby authorizing an unprovoked attack on Laudine’s country.69 Here Arthur acts ze gâh (“too quickly”) without considering all the implications of his rash decision. Just like Keye, Iwein does not respect Arthur’s position of authority, when he quickly (gâh) steals away from Arthur’s court to beat it to this adventure under the pretense of avenging a kinsman.70 When the Arthurian court arrives at the spring a fortnight later and finds that Iwein disobeyed Arthur’s orders and successfully completed the challenge, Arthur does not reprimand Iwein for disobeying his order, but instead they quickly rejoice at his good fortune of having become ruler of Laudine’s lands even if that meant Iwein had to kill her husband Ascalon in the process.71 When Iwein proves himself an oath-breaker and a dishonorable man, having failed to return to his wife Laudine within a year, and subsequently is dismissed publicly by Lunete from her court in front of the entire Arthurian court, Arthur does not dismiss Iwein from his court.72 Arthur risks being defamed in keeping the publicly shamed and dishonored Iwein at court. While he shows compassion towards Iwein’s plight here, he also ignores other equally important courtly values, such as maintaining the honor and virtue of his court, and punishing wrongs and injustices that have ethical ramifications, and this behavior is not unique to Iwein, but runs broadly through the corpus of Arthurian literature.73 In Parzival, when Keye willingly advocates for sacrificing the young Parzival to solve their political conflict with Ither, Arthur does nothing to prevent this confrontation beyond expressing mere words of concern, as 68

Hartmann von Aue, Erec, lines 8523–74. Ibid., lines 880–906. 70 Ibid., lines 907–45. 71 Hartmann von Aue, Iwein, lines 2447–2623. 72 Ibid., lines 3037–3248. For a more in-depth analysis of this point, see Jonathan S. Martin’s chapter in this volume. 73 Cf. Melissa Ridley Elmes’s chapter in this volume. 69

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Otto Neudeck notes: Indem er sich unfähig zeigt, das Problem angemessen – das heißt im Sinne des höfischen Wertesystems – zu lösen, pervertiert er zugleich seinen Status als Friedensstifter bzw. Versöhner und korrumpiert das von ihm repräsentierte Normensystem. (By proving himself incompetent to solve the problem in an adequate manner – i.e. according to the courtly value system – Arthur simultaneously corrupts his status as peacemaker or the one who brings about reconciliation, and he corrupts the very system of norms which he represents.)74

Arthur lacks assertiveness and control over his knights, especially over the unethical Keye, and this undercuts his reputation as the peacemaker who brings about reconciliation; more importantly, it exposes him as not being a moral and ethical king.75 The ethical concerns raised here are clear: Arthur willingly lets a noble child walk into a death trap because he gives in ze gâh (“too quickly”) to Keye’s bad advice, even though there are plenty of suitable knights at court who could have fought Ither and settled this dispute legally. Both Hartmann and Wolfram chip away at Arthur’s perfect or idealized reputation, and the image of a less ethical king and court emerges. Precisely because Arthur sees himself more as friend than lord to his knights – “wander was in weizgot verre / baz geselle dan herre” (lines 887–88; “God knows, he was much more a comrade than their master,” p. 247) – he has insufficient control over them when they do not comply with expectations of proper courtly conduct and undermine him in his role as their king, precisely because he, himself, does not choose to act as their king. In his weakened control over his court Arthur conducts himself unethically, putting the life of a noble child unnecessarily into extreme danger and risking the reputation of his court becoming one of ill repute. Reputation matters in the Arthurian world, and, as Siegfried Christoph writes, “No one, not even King Arthur… is exempt from the need to maintain reputation. The claim to fame, in turn, rests largely upon the issue of legitimacy.”76 While members of his court maintain 74

Otto Neudeck, “Das Stigma des Anfortas. Zum Paradoxon der Gewalt in Wolframs Parzival,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 19 (1994), 52–75: 61. 75 Similarly, Konstantin Pratelidis, Tafelrunde und Gral: Die Artuswelt und ihr Verhältnis zur Gralswelt im Parzival Wolframs von Eschenbach (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994), 65–66. 76 Siegfried Christoph, “Guenevere’s Abduction and Arthur’s Fame in Hartmann’s Iwein,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 118:1 (1989), 17–33: 18.

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their reputation by means of chivalric deeds, Arthur, as king, does not. “Arthur’s fame did not rest upon martial prowess… but rather upon his famed largesse and word of honor.”77 Neither Arthur nor his court fully meet the expectations of their respective roles, and this failure is the basis of their flawed or absent ethics. They lack mâze, moderation, which is one of the courtly virtues. Thomasin includes a long passage on the effects of immoderation in Der Welsche Gast:78 unmâze, diu ist âne zil, si heizet, ,ze lützel’ und ,ze vil’. der is vervluochet und verwâzen der sîn dinc niht kan gemâzen. diu maze sol sîn an allen dingen, von der maze mac nicht misselingen. der ist gar ein unsaelec man, der sîn gevert niht messen kan. (lines 9926–34) (Immoderation has no limits: it is too little and too much. The man who cannot exercise moderation is cursed and damned. There should be moderation in all things: nothing can go wrong if there is moderation. The man who cannot moderate his behavior is a wretched man indeed, p. 171)

We encounter the theme of “ze gâh” in what Thomasin says here, for it, too, is a sign of immoderation, one we encounter repeatedly in Arthur’s conduct, but specifically in these two scenes: Guinevere’s abduction, and the inheritance dispute of the two daughters of Count Blackthorn in Iwein. A knight had come to Arthur’s court to ask a favor of him, for Arthur is known for his generosity and for being a man of his word. Early on in Iwein, Hartmann makes clear the extent “to which Arthur’s word is related to his reputation: Nû hete der künec die gewonheit / daz er nimmer deheinen eit / bî sînes vater sêle swuor / wan des er benamen volvuor” (lines 893–98).79 Once Arthur gives his word, he must keep it, and this the unknown knight knows. Arthur willingly grants this wish to him on one condition, if he asks for something appropriate, which the knight should state in advance prior to Arthur’s granting it.80 The knight refuses to do 77

Ibid., 20. See Welscher Gast, lines 9885–9992; the translation of the entire passage is available in Gibbs/McConnell, 171–72. 79 Christoph, “Guenevere,” 21; translation not provided in original: “The king’s habit was never to swear an oath by his father’s soul… without fully and literally carrying it out,” 247. 80 Hartmann von Aue, Iwein, lines 4544–46. 78

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so, and questions Arthur’s generosity.81 In response, the knights of the Round Table urge Arthur to grant the request as a matter of honor,82 which is why Arthur changes his mind quickly (gâh) and follows their advice, only to regret it when Meljaganz requests permission to lead Guinevere away from court. “Now Arthur realises that the advice of his knights has led him into a trap (line 4591f.: “die disen rât tâten, / die hânt mich verrâten”), but he keeps his word and allows the queen to leave.”83 The main critical light falls on the knights of the Round Table, “who seem too ready to trust a fellow knight, whilst Arthur first shows sound, skeptical judgment, then is caught, through no fault of his own, in a position of conflicting loyalties, his agreement to Guinevere’s departure being prompted by two qualities which are more positive than negative: listening to advice and keeping one’s word.”84 Arthur’s knights, too, are ze gâh in their appraisal of the foreign knight and they only focus on external impressions and assumptions based on his conduct without ever investigating his intentions. They do not follow Thomasin’s good counsel for advisors, namely that “man sol mit dem rât îlen niht” (line 13149; “one should not be hasty with one’s advice,” p. 207)85 and think about it carefully first, unless there is a “grôz durft” (line 13150; “a pressing need,” p. 207). However, Arthur cannot walk away without some criticism here either, even though in this instance, he conducts himself correctly from an ethical perspective. First, he asks about the nature of the request before deciding; second, he listens to advice; and finally, he fulfills the request which he granted in a legally binding agreement, even if that means that he has to hand over his wife and subject her to possible rape and death. He also should have heeded Thomasin’s advice: “vor dem râte so ein herre behuot / sîn, den man ân vrâge tuot, / ern habe des mannes triuwe / ê erkant.” (lines 13177–180; “a lord should be wary about unsolicited advice, unless he has already recognized the loyalty of the man,” p. 208). Arthur was given unsolicited advice here and should have been wary of it, even though it is his inner circle of advisors who give it; but it is Keye foremost who does so, as we see later in the text, and that alone should have made Arthur more cautious. It is his “voreiliges 81

Ibid., lines 4558–65. Ibid., lines 4569–78. 83 W. H. Jackson, Chivalry in Twelfth Century Germany: The Works of Hartmann von Aue (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 22; Translation not provided in the original: “I’ve been tricked! Those who advised me have betrayed me,” 285. 84 Ibid., 22. 85 For the full extent of Thomasin’s thoughts on advising one’s lord, see Welscher Gast, lines 13149–192, trans. pp. 207–08. 82

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Einlenken” (“premature willingness to give in”, i.e., he acts ze gâh) and “voreiliges Verhalten” (“premature/hasty conduct”)86 which get the king repeatedly into trouble, as it does here. It is not just his personal or family honor and reputation at stake, but that of the entire kingdom, and he relies on his knights to rescue his wife, which ironically the (supposedly) best of the best fail to do, although they try. Conducting oneself ethically, therefore, comes with difficult decisions, which do not always bring about the desired result. To maintain his reputation as a man of his word, thereby protecting his public role as king, what Christoph refers to as his “institutional character,”87 Arthur has to break faith privately with his wife, by allowing her to be abducted, acting in the role of “personal character.”88 Arthur should know that “courtliness requires not only that men respect women but that they avoid specific behaviors that would violate that respect. Men are urged not to deceive women.”89 One set of ethics, which applies to the institution, that is, a clerical matter, clashes here with another, private set of ethics, which cannot be reconciled with the other. Arthur’s dilemma here is that no matter his decision, he will violate courtly principles, those very same rules and virtues on which his fame is built. Arthur is more than an individual or even a king, however, for he is the standard against which the relevance of the chivalric ethos is measured. He, above all, must maintain on odor of sanctity if the chivalric ethos, its derivation of ‘nobilitas morum’ from ‘nobillitas carnis’, is to be in any real sense normative. The advice to comply with the stranger’s request may have been wrong in effect, but it was right in principle.90

When Arthur’s knights advise him not to let Meljaganz depart in anger and spread false rumors about Arthur’s generosity and honor, they “act to protect not only Arthur, but also the Arthurian court.… The knights counsel Arthur quite properly with respect to the real threat, namely the danger to the court’s legitimacy as embodiment of the chivalric ethos.”91 In spite of their ethical conduct in this clerical matter, that is, in the public, institutional realm, a stranger outwits them by counting on their ethical conduct to best them. What the knights fail to see is that Meljaganz has the nobility of birth, but in this instance lacks nobility of 86

Kugler, “Fenster,” 121. Christoph, “Guenevere,” 31. 88 Ibid., 31. 89 Schulz, Courtly Love, 178. 90 Christoph, “Guenevere,” 26. 91 Ibid., 30. 87

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virtue by audaciously demanding to abduct the queen.92 Arthur faces a profound ethical dilemma because he was swayed by his knight’s advice ze gâh against his better judgment, and thought “ze lützel” (“too little”) as Thomasin describes one of the signs of immoderation: to save face and retain his own reputation and that of his court, he has to let the queen go, thereby violating virtues concerning Guinevere both in the private realm, namely to protect his wife, and in the public realm, because she is the queen. In the end, Arthur chooses his reputation at the expense of the queen’s safety, upholding ethics in the political, public realm of men, at the expense of those in the more personal realm of his marriage. The inheritance dispute between the daughters of Count Blackthorn in Iwein continues the theme of decisions made too quickly by Arthur and his court landing them in ethical hot water. Gawein immediately agrees to defend the older sister who arrived at the Arthurian court first. When the younger sister arrives and asks for Gawein’s help, he cannot do so, having already committed to take up the older sister’s cause. No one else at court is willing to defend the younger sister. While it is not stated explicitly in the text that Arthur knows about the details of the will of Count Blackthorn, namely that both daughters inherit equally, it leaves no doubt that the younger sister clearly states why she needs a champion from his court to defend her in this suit against her older sister, who has claimed the entire inheritance for herself. Arthur, who has the right and the duty to act as judge at his court, as he later tells us,93 does nothing to settle the dispute, other than forcing the older sister to grant the younger one forty days to find a knight to defend her. This response makes him look like a good and just king, but also exposes flaws in his behavior and forces us to question his ethics: Why does he not settle the case right then and there, as he could have done? Instead, he is willing to risk the lives of knights over an unjust claim by the elder sister for the entire inheritance. And since Arthur “decides” by means of his non-action to settle the dispute by means of a joust, why then does Arthur not appoint one of his knights to defend the younger sister? At the appointed time for the fight, Gawein arrives incognito. Arthur’s entire court gathers, eager to watch this chivalric spectacle,94 when the Knight with the Lion and the younger daughter arrive. The 92

Christoph made the same observation when he writes, that “the knights rationalize their counsel by deriving Meljaganz’ ‘nobilitas morum’ from his presumed ‘nobilitas carnis’, i.e. on the assumption that nobly acts who is, or at least appears to be noble,” “Guinevere,” 30. 93 Hartmann von Aue, Iwein, lines 7648–53. 94 Ibid., lines 6898–99.

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opponents are not known to anyone, but it is clear to everyone present that these two are the very best of knights and the court begins to fear for their lives, begging Arthur to ask the older sister to let the younger share the inheritance. The older sister refuses this request, for she is absolutely certain the better knight is fighting on her behalf and she is sure of his victory. She declines Arthur’s request so vehemently that he does not pursue the matter further and allows the fight to continue.95 A very lengthy and detailed description of this fight of the best of the best follows, a fight that lasts for hours and is interrupted by brief breaks resulting from the knights’ fatigue. The court grows increasingly worried, and Arthur again attempts to sway the older sister, who arrogantly denies his request in such a manner that he no longer wishes to ask her.96 It is the younger sister’s compassion and inner nobility that changes things. She does not wish to be the cause for the death of such a valiant knight, nor the loss of reputation of the other. She agrees to let her older sister have the entire inheritance. She would rather be poor than have either knight die because of her.97 The court implores Arthur to ask the older sister to grant the younger one at least a third or less of the inheritance and thereby save the lives of these valiant knights,98 but he is so angry about the hardheartedness of the older sister that he rejects the court’s pleas and denies the younger sister’s request only because she brought her case before his court.99 In his anger, Arthur suddenly remembers that he is the judge at his court, but he nonetheless does not perform his duties of settling the dispute, and instead continues to risk the lives of two excellent knights, letting the dispute be settled unjustly. He shows no sign of the nobility of virtue he is known for, and he is not gâh at all to act ethically. Thus, it becomes clear that heightened emotion serves as the catalyst for unethical behavior in both Arthur and Keye. The battle comes to an end only because darkness sets in, forcing them to stop, and the two knights talk to each other, each wondering who his valiant opponent is. Once they reveal their identity to one another, they embrace and kiss in their happiness to have found their best friend. The Arthurian court marvels at such display of friendliness after such fierce fighting and goes out to investigate. Gawein and Iwein argue about who should submit to whom and when Arthur asks what is going on, Gawein tells him who he is and whom he fought, then publicly states: 95

Ibid., lines 6922–31. Ibid., lines 7289–90. 97 Ibid., lines 7304–19. 98 Ibid., lines 7323–32. 99 Ibid., lines 7335–41. 96

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und geloubet mir daz ich iu sage: het erz gehabet an dem tage, mich hete brâht in arbeit mîn unreht und sîn vrümekheit. Die juncvrouwe hât rehtes niht vür die man mich hie vehten siht: ir swester ist mit rehte hie. (lines 7621–27) (Believe me when I tell you that if he had had more daylight at his disposal, his valor and my unjust cause would have put me at risk. The girl people see me fighting for here is in the wrong, and her sister is in the right, p. 315.)

He publicly declares Iwein the winner and the younger sister to be in the right. This should settle the legal dispute, except that Iwein declares Gawein the winner, a matter of honoring his friend that has nothing to do with the court case their jousting was to decide. It is then that Arthur demands Iwein and Gawein allow him to decide the case in such a way that they will not be shamed, and he will also receive honor from it.100 Arthur then settles the case by tricking the older sister into admitting her false claim in front of the entire court. She tries to dismiss this as “female prattle”, declaring it a non-legally binding statement, but he does not accept this. It could be argued, as Kugler does, that “vorschnelles Reden entschied schließlich den Erbstreit der Grafentöchter. Denn auf Artus’ Fangfrage, wo das Fräulein sei, das aus purer Überheblichkeit [niuwan durch ir übermuot, V. 7657] seiner Schwester ihr Erbteil verweigere, meldete sie sich gâhes [V. 7600].” (“Hasty speech determined the inheritance dispute of the Count’s daughters in the end. For she responded gâhes [quickly] to Arthur’s trick question where the young lady was, who out of sheer arrogance [this translates: “niuwan durch ir übermuot,” line 7657] denied her sister her part of the inheritance.”)101 For Arthur, settling the sisters’ inheritance dispute is a matter of restoring honor to his valiant knights. He tells the older sister to count her blessings and accept his judgment, for Gawein had declared himself the loser in this fight, so technically she lost the entire inheritance to her younger sister, but Arthur rules that the father’s will is to be followed and both daughters inherit equally. The older sister accepts the terms of Arthur’s judgment because he forces her to do so, not because she wants to act justly towards her younger sister.102 100

Ibid., lines 7648–52. Kugler, “Fenster,” 122. 102 Hartmann von Aue, Iwein, lines 7653–721. 101

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Had Arthur conducted himself in an ethical manner in this clerical matter from the beginning, he would have acted as the judge he is reputed to be at his court and settled the inheritance dispute immediately instead of risking the lives of two of his best knights for what seems almost solely to be for the entertainment of his court and letting this clerical matter be settled through chivalric means. It is only the nobility of the younger sister, who understands what is at stake with this fight, namely that this has turned into a fight to the death, that causes the change of heart in Arthur to settle this dispute judicially and justly. Arthur chooses to act ethically in the public setting of the court at the prompting of others, but not on his own. When left to his own devices, Arthur ignored the matter, remained passive and saw the joust as a convenient alternative to having to adjudicate this case. These flaws in his character and judgment make him less ideal(ized) though certainly more human; they also create a space to question his ethics. Here, we encounter an Arthur who refuses to act as judge, refuses to protect a woman in need of legal arbitration against her greedy older sister, and acts too slowly. Just as Arthur has no control over an angry Keye, he has no control over the arrogant older sister and instead gives in to her repeated rude refusals to give up her false claim. We see a repeated pattern in the portrayal of Arthur here, who shies away from his responsibilities; only when he finds himself backed against the figurative wall in public, does he choose to conduct himself ethically. Whereas Arthur acted too slowly, Gawein acted ze gâh when he accepted to take up the older sister’s case. We are not told that he asks about the case; he simply acts quickly, without critical reflection, when a woman comes seeking his help. It is interesting that Gawein is available immediately when a woman approaches him with an unjust cause, whereas throughout Iwein he is never there when people seek his help in just cases. While helping those in need, especially women, falls under proper chivalric, virtuous conduct, Hartmann undermines this assessment here as problematic, as having made it ze gâh, because Gawein did not take the time to make sure he is fighting for a just cause. His ethics are tarnished, because he risks the life of another valiant knight, his best friend, by having taken on an unjust cause, something he admits at the end when darkness prevents him from killing his friend or being killed himself and made to suffer the consequences of his rash decision. What we encounter here are three sets of tarnished ethics: Arthur, in terms of passive inaction unless spurred on by public visibility; Keye, in terms of his certainty that he is always right and his tendency to take his emotions out on others; and Gawein, in terms of his desire to be of service without regard for the ethical consideration of the given situation. All three

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become examples for how not to act and showcase the consequences of lack of ethics for those being on the receiving end of this conduct. In these medieval German texts, Arthur undisputedly has the reputation of being a wise, just and caring king who supports those in need, is generous to a fault, and is surrounded by the best knights. He often says the right and expected things, but his actions more often than not do not follow his words. His lack of control over his knights and his inability to make and assert his own decisions lands him in ethical difficulties. The German authors try to portray Arthur as a just king, one worthy of everyone’s loyalty and praise, but they undercut this perfect, ideal(ized) image constantly, be that because it makes for better storytelling, or for other reasons, such as humanizing Arthur103 or to criticize excessive baronial power at the expense of royal independence104 – but, they could have achieved that end without the unethical decisions of members of the Arthurian court. Their portrayals of the Arthurian court raise questions about the link between reputation and actual conduct and inner virtues, and as Jaeger puts it: One of the ethical problems raised in the mind of the modern reader by the phenomenon of courtliness is the connection between this pattern of behavior and inner virtue. Ideally the gentleman is considerate because he is compassionate, because he loves and respects his fellow men; he is modest and restrained because he possesses greatness of soul; he is witty, affable, and of good humor because he has an honest mind at peace with itself; he is on sovereign good terms with all the world because he is the master of himself.105

When members of the Arthurian court are not at peace with themselves or on sovereign good terms with all the world, their questionable ethics emerge and they become examples for how not to conduct themselves, in sharp contrast to their reputations and the purpose of chivalric literature; namely, to set forth the gold standard the aristocracy is to emulate. The texts expose what is endorsed, condemned, obscured or omitted in terms of expected ethical conduct. Even despite their seriously unethical conduct, their lack of mâze, their acting ze gâh or not gâh enough, and their inability to apply nobility of virtue in their actions in a consistent manner, Arthur and his knights manage to maintain their ideal(ized) reputations, but these reputations are now tarnished, their ethics questioned. 103

See Corinna Virchow, “König Artus zwischen Pergament und Phantasie, Wider die Mythisierung?” in Artusroman und Mythos, ed. Friedrich Wolfzettel, Cora Dietl, Matthias Däumer (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2011), 373–90: 374–75. 104 Jackson, Chivalry, 22. 105 Jaeger, Origins, 240.

3

The Ethics of Arthurian Marriage: Husband vs Wife in Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein

JONATHAN SEELYE MARTIN

A

t the end of Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein (c. 1200), a German adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain (c. 1180), the formerly haughty and powerful lady Laudine is forced to reconcile with her estranged husband Iwein. Her recognition of defeat in her attempts to banish Iwein from her life is accompanied in the oldest surviving manuscript with a dramatic gesture.1 Laudine falls to her knees and begs for forgiveness: her Îwein, lieber herre mîn, tuot genædeclîche an mir. grôzen kumber habt ir von mînen schulden erliten: des wil ich iuch durch got biten daz ir ruochet mir vergeben, wander mich, unz ich hân daz leben, von herzen iemer riuwen muoz. (Iwein 8121–29) (Sir Iwein, my dear lord, treat me with mercy. You have suffered greatly because of me; for that reason, I ask you by God to vouchsafe to forgive me, for I shall regret it in my heart for as long as I shall live.)2

1



The edition I am using, Hartmann von Aue, Gregorius, Der arme Heinrich, Iwein, ed. and trans. Volker Mertens (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 2008), follows the so-called “B manuscript” (Gießener Universitätsbibliothek Nr. 97) in its entirety as the oldest surviving manuscript. In addition to Laudine’s prostration, it includes a number of lines excluded from the nineteenth-century critical edition, and relegates others found in the critical edition but not in the B manuscript to the commentary. See Volker Mertens, “Kommentar,” in Gregorius, Der arme Heinrich, Iwein, ed. and trans. Mertens, 796–1051: 966. 2 All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

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Laudine’s prostration at Iwein’s feet echoes and reverses Iwein’s own prostration before Laudine only a few lines earlier. It represents a dramatic reversal of their relationship as it has been portrayed in the romance up until this point. Whereas Iwein had earlier appeared to be the subordinate partner in the marriage, now Laudine admits that he is in fact the superior partner, with the right to punish her. Whereas previously, Laudine’s role resembled that of the lady in the poetry of the troubadours or minnesinger,3 now she admits that her actions are punishable in her role as wife. Iwein, however, bids her to rise, saying: irn habt deheine schulde: wan ich het iuwer hulde niuwan durch mînen muot verlorn. (Iwein 8133–35) (It isn’t your fault, for I lost your good grace through my own pride [muot].)

Iwein has the power to punish Laudine, but he chooses not to do so. This chapter examines the ethical and legal aspects of Iwein’s refusal to punish Laudine, as well as those surrounding the whole of their marriage. Hartmann’s romance advocates for a more equal concept of marriage that stresses the husband’s ethical obligations to his wife, while at the same time holding him to be legally the superior of the two spouses. Iwein’s reasoning for not punishing Laudine is telling: she was right to try to get rid of him! This seems to be an admission on Iwein’s part that he has been a singularly bad husband to Laudine. Having only been married for a week or so, Iwein had requested permission to leave Laudine to go enjoy himself fighting in tournaments with his friend Gawein, promising to come back within a year. Iwein’s failure to remember to do this until after the deadline had passed causes Laudine to banish him. She had warned him of this outcome when she set the time limit: “sô kumt benamen ode ê, / ode ich warte iu niht mê” (Iwein 2943–44: come by then 3

See Kurt Ruh, “Zur Interpretation von Hartmanns ‘Iwein,’” in Hartmann von Aue, ed. Hugo Kuhn and Christoph Cormeau (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), 408–25. See also Dorothea Klein “Liebe und Gesellschaft,” in Hartmann von Aue: eine literaturwissenschaftliche Einführung, ed. Cordula Kropik (Tübingen: Narr Attempto Verlag, 2021), 243–69: 262–65. Cf. Christoph Cormeau and Wilhelm Störmer, Hartmann von Aue: Epoche – Werk – Wirkung, third edn (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2007), 210. A recent summary of scholarly interpretations of Laudine’s character and her marriage or love for Iwein is provided by Amina Šahinović, “‘ez was guot leben wænlîch hie: ‘Iwein’ und Laudine im Widerspruch,” in Widersprüchliche Figuren in vormoderner Literatur, ed. Elisabeth Lienert, Beiträge zur mediävistischen Erzählforschung Themenheft 6 (Oldenburg: BIS-Verlag, 2020), 297–322, especially 299–302.

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or earlier, or I won’t wait for you anymore). In granting her a pardon, Iwein seems to admit her behavior was justified. Yet in a technical sense, Laudine was nevertheless wrong to try to throw Iwein out: Laudine had usurped the position of power that the romance shows Iwein to possess by right. In other words, the romance contrasts a right that turns out to be wrong, namely Laudine’s decision to dispose of Iwein, and a wrong that turns out to be right, namely Iwein’s negligent treatment of his spouse. This contrast can be characterized as a clash between ethics and the law: while Iwein is ethically in the wrong when he neglects Laudine, legally he cannot be held responsible. Similarly, when he chooses to pardon Laudine, he does so because it is ethical, not because the law requires it. In this chapter, I take the standpoint that medieval romance is a genre not merely meant for entertainment, but also for education: prodesse et delectare in the Horatian phrase.4 Medieval German epic, and Hartmann von Aue in particular, have long been noted to idealize their characters in comparison to their French sources.5 The most famous description of Arthurian romance as educational in medieval German is in Der welsche Gast by Thomasin von Zerclaere (c. 1216). Thomasin explains that noble youths should take what is useful (nütze; line 1025) from the stories of Arthur’s knights:6 Junchherren ſuln von Gâwein hœren, Clîes, Êrec, Îwein, und ſuln rihten sîn jugent gar nâch Gâweins reiner tugent. volgt Artûs dem künege hêr, der treit iu vor vil guote lêr. (lines 1041–46) (Young noblemen should hear of Gawein, Clies, Erec, Iwein, and should model their youth according to Gawein’s pure virtue. Follow Arthur, the glorious king; he will present many good lessons to you.)

Thomasin presents figures of Arthurian literature as role models for young noblemen to follow, singling out Keie (Kay) as a negative role 4





See C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), especially 127–75; 211–54. 5 See Volker Mertens, Der deutsche Artusroman (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998), 52–53; 84–85; Wolfgang Achnitz, Deutschsprachige Artusdichtung des Mittelalters: Eine Einführung (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2012), 52–53; Britta Bußmann, “Vorlagenbindung und Übertragungspraxis,” in Hartmann von Aue, ed. Kropik, 123–48, especially 141–42. 6 Thomasin von Zirclaere, Der wälsche Gast, ed. Heinrich Rückert (Quedlinburg and Leipzig: Basse, 1852).

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model: “irn ſult hern Key volgen niht” (line 1059: you shouldn’t follow Sir Keie). Similarly, Gottfried von Strassburg in his Tristan (c. 1210) suggests that all art conveys something he calls morâliteit (roughly, morality),7 and that: si ist edelen herzen allen z’einer ammen gegeben, daz si ir lîpnar unde ir leben suochen in ir lêre; wan si’n hânt guot noch êre, ez’n lêre si morâliteit. (lines 8014–19) (It is given to all noble hearts as a nourishing mother, so that they seek their nourishment and life in her teaching. For they do not have any property or honor unless morâliteit has taught them.)

Extrapolating from passages such as these, we can deduce that courtly romance conveys what is useful by displaying positive and negative exempla of proper courtly behavior for its audience. This courtly behavior often has an ethical and/or legal component, as when courtly romances encourage their noble audiences to be more circumspect in their use of violence.8 Therefore, we can read the behavior of figures such as Iwein and Laudine as providing readers with positive and negative exempla for imitation or avoidance, providing their marriage with a similar function.

Marriage Law and Ethics around 1200 Although ethics and law were more closely associated in Hartmann’s time than we perhaps think of them today, a difference was still recognized. The dominant form of marriage law at the time, canon law, regulated areas of private life that we would today generally consider beyond the reach of the law, as it claimed “authority over virtually every aspect of human belief and actions.”9 Canon law thus incorporated ethical norms into its regulations, even though these ethical norms were not enforceable 7





See Sandra Linden, “Die Amme der edelen herzen: Zum Konzept der moraliteit in Gottfrieds ‘Tristan,’” in Dichtung und Didaxe: Lehrhaftes Sprechen in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, ed. Henrike Lähnemann and Sandra Linden (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2009), 117–33. 8 See Udo Friedrich, “Die Zähmung des Heros: Der Diskurs der Gewalt und Gewaltregulierung im 12. Jahrhundert,” in Mittelalter: Neue Wege durch einen alten Kontinent, ed. Jan-Dirk Müller and Horst Wenzel (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1999), 149–79; Jonathan Seelye Martin, “Monopolizing Violence: Gewalt, Self-Control, and the Law in Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneasroman,” The German Quarterly 91.1 (2018), 18–33. 9 James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London: Routledge, 1995), 70. A recent and exhaustive introduction to the medieval canon law in its various facets can

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in any meaningful way.10 By ethical, I mean standards of proper behavior that are based primarily on a moral outlook rather than the letter of the law. An example of ethical norms that have made their way into canon marriage law includes stipulations about when it is sinful to have sex and how much sex a couple should have, among other concerns.11 The most important area, and the one that I will discuss at length here, is the proper treatment of husband by wife and wife by husband, something difficult to regulate and for which regulations are even more difficult to enforce. A look at marriage law and ethics contemporary to courtly romance is well justified. Marriage, like violence, is an essential aspect of almost all courtly romances. While scholarship has historically tended to focus on the role of adultery in courtly romance, in fact the majority of the genre’s love relationships take the societally accepted form of marriage, or else lead to marriage.12 Marriage’s importance as a generic convention of romance means that we can read romances such as Iwein as conveying proper ethical and legal behavior for noble marriage as well. This is a notion that scholars have thoroughly explored in Hartmann’s other Arthurian romance, Erec.13 be found in the chapters of Anders Winroth and John C Wei, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Canon Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). 10 See Brundage, Medieval Canon Law, 44–69. For the Church’s mix of theological, moral, and ethical approaches to marriage, see James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), especially 176–416; David L. d’Avray, Papal Jurisprudence, 385–1234: Social Origins and Medieval Reception of Canon Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), especially 189–203; Philip L. Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The Sacramental Theology of Marriage from its Medieval Origins to the Council of Trent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For overviews of the canon law of marriage, see Sara McDougall, “Marriage: Law and Practice,” in The Cambridge History, ed. Winroth and Wei, 453–74; Charles Donahue, Jr, Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 14–45. 11 See Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 285–87; 364–69; 447–53. 12 For the preponderance of married over adulterous love in romance, see James A. Schultz, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 135–38. I discuss the scholarly bias toward adulterous “courtly love” in romance in greater depth in my article “The Marriage of Tristan and Isolde: Love, Marriage, and Adultery in Eilhart von Oberg’s Tristrant (before 1190),” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 57.1 (2021), 1–21. 13 See, among others, Kurt Ruh, Höfische Epik des deutschen Mittelalters, vol. one: Von den Anfängen bis zu Hartmann von Aue, second edn (Berlin: Schmidt, 1977), especially 123–37; Kathryn Smits, “Enite als christliche Ehefrau,” in Interpretation und Edition deutscher Texte des Mittelalters: Festschrift für John Asher zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Kathryn Smits, Werner Besch and Victor Lange (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1981), 13–25; Ursula Schulze, “âmîs unde man: Die zentrale Problematik in Hartmanns ‘Erec,’” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 105 (1983), 14–47; Bruno Quast, “getriuwe wandelunge: Ehe und Minne in Hartmanns

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Iwein’s portrayal of marriage, however, has attracted far less attention. This lack of attention is undeserved: Iwein’s marriage to Laudine is both the unintended reward for Iwein’s adventure at the beginning of the romance, when Iwein acquires land and lady,14 and the intended goal at the end, when Iwein forces Laudine to accept him back as her husband. Given the importance the romance accords this relationship, its portrayal of marriage must be at least as important as that in Erec. The central difference between the two marriages, namely that Erec and his wife Enite travel together, whereas Iwein is separated and estranged from Laudine, points to the different aspects of marriage these two romances explore. Erec deals with a marriage with perhaps too much intimacy, while Iwein shows a marriage with very little. Leaving aside questions of whether Laudine’s prostration is original to the poem or not,15 this interaction between husband and wife ‘Erec,’” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 122 (1993), 162–80; Bernard Willson, “The Heroine’s Loyalty in Hartmann’s and Chrétien’s Erec,” in Chrétien de Troyes and the German Middle Ages: Papers from an International Symposium, ed. Martin H. Jones and Roy Wisbey (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), 57–65; Elisabeth Schmid, “Spekulationen über das Band der Ehe in Chrétiens und Hartmanns Erec-Roman,” in Vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit: Festschrift für Horst Brunner, ed. Dorothea Klein (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000), 109–27; Joachim Bumke, Der “Erec” Hartmanns von Aue: Eine Einführung (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2006), especially 104–11; Dennis H. Green, Women and Marriage in German Medieval Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), especially 84–127; Nina Spangenberger, Liebe und Ehe in den erzählenden Werken Hartmanns von Aue (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2012), especially 11–65. 14 See Armin Schulz, “Der Schoß der Königin: Metonymische Verhandlungen über Macht und Herrschaft im Artusroman,” in Artushof und Artusliteratur, ed. Matthias Däumer, Cora Dietl, and Friedrich Wolfzettel (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2010), 119–35; and Florian Kragl, “Land-Liebe: Von der Simultaneität mythischer Wirkung und logischen Verstehens am Beispiel des Erzählens von arthurischer Idoneität in Iwein und Lanzelet,” in Artusroman und Mythos, ed. Friedrich Wolfzettel, Cora Dietl and Matthias Däumer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 3–39, especially 19–23. 15 For a recent summary of scholarship on this question, see Chloé Vondenhoff, “The Performative Function of the Socialized Body: Falling to One’s Knees in Hartmann’s Iwein and Erec,” Arthuriana 29.4 (2019), 8–27, here 12–14. Strongly against this scene being original is Werner Schröder, Laudines Kniefall und der Schluß von Hartmanns Iwein (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997), primarily because of the manner of this scene’s transmission, but also for plot reasons. Most scholars instead follow Joachim Bumke’s study, which points to the prostration ending as a second version also produced by Hartmann. See Joachim Bumke, Die vier Fassungen der “Nibelungenklage:” Untersuchungen zur Überlieferungsgeschichte und Textkritik der höfischen Epik im 13. Jahrhundert (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1996), 5–11; 30– 60. For a discussion of Bumke’s concept, see Albrecht Hausmann, “Mittelalterliche Überlieferung als Interpretationsaufgabe: ‘Laudines Kniefall’ und das Problem des ‘ganzen Textes,’” in Text und Kultur: Mittelalterliche Literatur 1150–1450, ed. Ursula Peters (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 72–95. On the different endings of Iwein more

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encapsulates the essential ethical and legal tension at the heart of Iwein’s depiction of marriage. The ending establishes Iwein to be the “head of his wife” (caput mulieris) and dominant spouse, a legal concept anchored in both canon and secular law.16 For Iwein’s physical control over his realm, secular law is more relevant. German secular law stressed that the husband was the Vormund (also: Vogt or Muntwalt) or legal guardian of his wife, exercising a legal power called Munt over her.17 The Freiburg Schwabenspiegel explained a husband’s ability to dispose of his wife’s property as he wished with specific reference to this role: “das ist da von geseczt das der man sines wibes vogt und maister ist” (this is law because the man is his wife’s lord and master).18 Yet the ending of Iwein also shows Iwein failing to exercise his right to punish. Both secular and canon law were explicit in granting the husband the right to punish his wife, including corporally, though they also set limits. The highly influential canonist Johannes Teutonicus, writing in the Glossia Ordinaria to the Decretum Gratiani around 1217, stated: “Iudicare potest maritus uxorem corrigendo eam… sed non uerberando eam… quia illa aliena sunt ab ingenuis… sed temperate potest eam castigare, quia est de familia sua” (the husband may punish his wife by correcting her, but not by beating her, because such things are foreign to the free-born. But he may chastise her mildly, because she is of his own family).19 The thirteenth-century broadly and their implications for interpretation, see Evelyn Meyer, “Manuscript versus Edition: The Multiple Endings of Yvain/Iwein/Iven/Ywayne and their Gender Implications,” Amsterdamer Beiträger zur älteren Germanistik 68 (2011), 97–141, on Iwein specifically, 112–21. 16 See Charles R. Reid, Power over the Body, Equality in the Family: Rights and Domestic Relations in Medieval Canon Law (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 78–80; Daniela Müller, “Vir caput mulieris,” Vom mittelalterlichen Recht zur neuzeitlichen Rechtswissenschaft, ed. Norbert Brieskorn et al. (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1994), 223–45; Georg Adenauer, “Das Ehe– und Familienrecht im Mühlhäuser Reichsrechtsbuch” (PhD Dissertation, University of Bonn, 1962). 17 See Reiner Schulze, “Eherecht,” Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, second edn, ed. Herbert Jankuhn et al., 35 vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968–2008), vol. 6: 480–99: 483–84; Gerhard Köbler, “Munt,” in Lexikon des Mittelalters, ed. Robert Auty et al., 9 vols (Munich: Artemis Verlag, 1977–1999), vol. 6: 918–19, and “Vormund, –schaft II,” in Lexikon des Mitterlalters, vol. 8: 1854–1855; Stefan Saar, “Vormundschaft,” Reallexikon des Germanischen Altertumskunde 32: 615–20; Werner Ogris, “Munt, Muntwalt,” in Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, ed. Adalbert Erler and Ekkehard Kaufmann. 6 vols (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1971–1997), vol. 3: 750–61. 18 Freiburg Schwabenspiegel, Landrecht 9: Urschwabenspiegel, ed. Karl August Eckhardt. (Aalen: Scientia, 1975). 19 Glos. Ord. ad C. 7 q. 1 c. 29 v. iudicari: Decretum Gratiani emendatum et notationibus illustratum unà cum glossis, 4 vols (Venice 1604). Citations to the canon law use the standard citation format. For the Decretum Gratiani and texts commenting on it, this

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City Law of Hamburg, however, took a different position: “Tuchtiget een man syn wiff, ofte sleit he se, vnde se des vorschuldet heuet, dat mot he wol don” (if a man disciplines his wife or hits her, and she has deserved it, then he may well do this).20 As long as the beating is justified, the Hamburg law states that it is licit, a view which is rarely spelled out but is hinted out in other laws.21 Just such a beating is referred to in the Nibelungenlied, where Kriemhilt mentions the punishment meted out to her by Siegfried for her insults against Brünhilt: “ouch hât er dar umbe zerblouwen mînen lîp” (Nibelungenlied 894.2; he has also greatly bruised my body for it).22 Such beatings are rarely seen in courtly literature – even the Nibelungenlied mentions it only after the fact – but such views make it clear that Iwein is abstaining from his rights by declining to punish Laudine in any way. Nevertheless, the canon law not only stressed that husband and wife were in a hierarchical relationship, it also called for proper treatment of each by the other, a standard grounded more in the ethical than the legal. Proper treatment was embodied in the concept of marital affection (maritalis affectio), an elastic term that could include love but for legal purposes focused on the external signs of a good relationship between husband and wife.23 Pope Alexander III (reigned 1159–81), for instance, ordered that a certain Andreas, who had abandoned his wife, “ad uxorem suam redeat, et eam maritali affectione pertractet” (X 4.1.9: return to his wife and treat her with marital affection). Alexander seems to clarify what he means in another case, where a man and a woman are cohabitating without a formal marriage: “si fama loci habet, quod vir ipsam in lecto et in mensa sicut uxorem tenuerit… cogenda est mulier, ut eidem viro affectu serviat coniugali” (X 2.23.11: if it is the common knowledge of the place that the man keeps her in his bed and at his table like a wife… then means that C. stands for “causa,” D. for “distinctio,” q. for “quaestio,” and d. for “dictum”. See Brundage, Medieval Canon Law, 195–96. 20 Hamburger Stadtrecht IX 29: Die ältesten Stadt– Schiff– und Landrechte Hamburgs, ed. J. M. Lappenberg (Meissner: Hamburg, 1845). 21 See Hans Fehr, Die Rechtsstellung der Frau und der Kinder in den Weistümern (Jena: Fischer, 1909), 58–60; Hermann Conrad, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte: Ein Lehrbuch (Karlsruhe: Müller, 1954), 541; Michael Schröter, “Wo zwei zusammen kommen in rechter Ehe,” in Sozio– und psychogenetische Studien über Eheschließungsvorgänge vom 12. bis 15. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 128–42. 22 Das Nibelungenlied und die Klage: Nach der Handschrift 857 der Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen, ed. and trans. Joachim Heinzle, second edn (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2014). 23 See Brundage, Love, Sex, and Marriage, 273–74; John T. Noonan, Jr, “Marriage in the Middle Ages: 1. Power to Choose,” Viator 4 (1973), 419–34: 426; John T. Noonan, Jr., “Marital Affection in the Canonists,” Studia Gratiana 12 (1967), 479–509: 497–98.

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the woman must be forced to serve the man with conjugal affection).24 These references make clear that, legally, marital affection has something to do with cohabitation and the sharing of bed and table. The frequent use of the term to order one spouse who has abandoned the other to resume cohabitation is no doubt of significance for Iwein, where over half the romance centers around the estrangement of the married couple. Iwein’s decision not to punish Laudine also shows a conflicting concept of spousal relations, geselleschaft or æqualitas societatis, meaning the equality between husband and wife. Hartmann worked extensively with this concept of marital equality in Erec, deriving it from the marriage theology of Hugh of St Victor († 1141).25 In De beatae Mariae virginitate,26 Hugh speaks of a marriage held together “affectu cordis et vinculo socialis dilectionis” (by the affection of the heart and the bond of loving companionship).27 While Hugh was something of a theological outlier in his emphasis on a loving partnership in marriage, he was nevertheless influential, particularly through the use of his concepts by the legally and theologically important Peter Lombard († 1160).28 Both the deficiencies and ideal aspects of Iwein’s marriage to Laudine are highly influenced by Hugh’s concept, as shown below.

Iwein’s Marriage to Laudine Iwein and Laudine’s marriage is problematic from its very inception. After killing Ascalon, the guardian of a magic fountain, Iwein falls in love with and marries Laudine, the wife of the man he has just killed.29 24

The Liber Extra (cited as X) is cited to: Corpus juris canonici, vol. 2: Decretalium collectiones, ed. Emil Friedberg, second edn (Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1887; repr. Graz: Akademische Druck– u. Verlagsanstalt, 1959). Citations follow the standard modern format; see Brundage, Medieval Canon Law, 197. 25 See Quast, “getriuwe wandelunge,” 169–70. On Hugh’s theology more generally, see Reynolds, How Marriage, 362–404. 26 PL 176: 857–76. 27 Ibid., 863. 28 See Reynolds, How Marriage, 23, 240; Hans Zeimentz, Ehe nach der Lehre der Frühscholastik: Eine moralgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Anthropologie und Theologie der Ehe in der Schule Anselms von Laon und Wilhelms von Champeaux, bei Hugo von St. Victor, Walter von Mortagne und Petrus Lombardus (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1973), 21; 118–19. 29 See Elisabeth Schmid, “Chrétiens ‘Yvain’ und Hartmanns ‘Iwein,’” in Höfischer Roman in Vers und Prosa, ed. René Pérennec and Elisabeth Schmid (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 159–60. For examples of such marriages being condemned, including from French law, see Silvia Ranawake, “Zu Form und Funktion der Ironie bei Hartmann von Aue,” Wolfram–Studien 7 (1982); 75–116: 86–87; AnnaSusanne Mathias, “Yvains Rechtsbrüche,” in Beiträge zum romanischen Mittelalter, ed. Kurt Baldinger (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1977), 156–92: 185.

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Laudine, meanwhile, chooses to marry her husband’s killer specifically because he was able to defeat and kill her husband. She decides he must be a vrum man (line 2323: an upright, honorable, or doughty man)30 for precisely that reason, on the advice of her handmaiden Lunete. Indeed, Hartmann emphasizes the problematic nature of the match in comparison with Chrétien.31 This emphasis is surely significant, foreshadowing many of the problems that will plague the marriage; it is difficult to read this decision positively. Wolfram von Eschenbach, in his Parzival (c. 1205) criticizes Lunete’s advice and contrasts it to the loyalty shown by his own figure Sigune to her slain lover: “diu riet ir frouwen ‘lat genesen / disen man, der den iwern sluoc: / er mag ergetzen iuch genuoc’” (lines 253.12–13: [Lunete] advised her lady: “Let this man live who slew yours: he can compensate you enough”).32 Wolfram makes Lunete into a sort of negative Arthurian exemplum, a concept also discussed by Thomasin von Zerclaere with reference to Keie. Ethically, we might say, it is wrong for Laudine to marry Iwein, in that Laudine fails to stay faithful to her slain husband. Furthermore, Laudine remarries within days of her first husband’s death, something on which the narrator sarcastically comments: “des tôten ist vergezzen: / der lebende hât besezzen / beidiu sîn êre unde sîn lant. / daz was vil wol zim bewant” (lines 2435–38: the dead man is forgotten. The living man has taken possession of both his honor and his land. It has come into his possession very well). Although Volker Mertens has shown that many widows did remarry quickly after the deaths of their husbands,33 such quick remarriages invited moral opprobrium from both ecclesiastical and secular sources.34 For instance, Thomasin demands legal consequences for widows who remarry quickly: ſwelich wîp niht iſt beliben ein jâr ân man, daz ir lîp ân guoten namen dan belîp. 30

See Matthias Lexer, Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch, 3 vols (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1872–1878), III:549. 31 See Ranawake, “Zu Form und Funktion,” 96–97. 32 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival: Nach der Ausgabe Karl Lachmanns, ed. Eberhard Nellmann, trans. Dieter Kühn, fourth edn, 2 vols (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 2015). On this passage, see Eberhard Nellmann, “Commentary,” in Parzival II: 413–790: 593. 33 Volker Mertens, “Laudine: Soziale Problematik im Iwein Hartmanns von Aue,” Beihefte zu Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 3 (1978), 22–23. See also Elisabeth van Houts, Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900–1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 143–48. 34 See Brundage, Law, Sex, and Marriage, 477–78; van Houts, Married Life, 142–43.

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ſi ſol ir mannes guotes haben niht, ob ir diu unzuht geſchiht. (lines 5615–20) (Whatever [widow] has not remained without a man for a year should not keep her good name. She should not have her [dead] husband’s property if she commits such unchastity.)

While it allowed widows to remarry, the Church had long questioned the propriety of widows remarrying. The Council of Braga (572) required all who married more than once to perform a penance.35 Gratian wrote that men who had married widows were not allowed to become clerics, placing them alongside the husbands of prostitutes and slaves (D. 34 d.p.c. 14),36 and Alexander III forbade priests to bless second marriages, including those of widows, and ordered that priests be removed from office for doing so (X 4.21.1, X 4.21.3).37 All these sources make it clear that, while perhaps common, there was a strong current of disapproval attached to remarriage per se, let alone to remarriage to the killer of one’s own husband. Yet despite such strongly voiced disapproval, Laudine’s marriage to Iwein is in fact blessed by a whole horde of priests: “dâ wâren pfaffen gnuoge: / die tâten in die ê zehant / unde gâben im vrouwen unde lant” (lines 2418–20: there were enough priests there: they joined them together in marriage and gave [Iwein] lady and land). It is possible the mention of many priests rather than the one normal for such ceremonies is meant to highlight the priests’ general disregard for the standards of canon law they are meant to uphold. This crowd of clerics is absent from Hartmann’s source, where Yvain and Laudine are instead married “Par la main d’un sien chapelain” (line 2152: by the hand of one of her chaplains).38 Hartmann produces a similar horde of clerics to bless the nonconsensual, and therefore canonically invalid, marriage of Enite to Oringles in his Erec:39 bischove und ebbete kâmen dar und diu pfafheit vil gar, swaz man der mohte berîten 35

van Houts, Married Life, 142. Corpus juris canonici, vol. 1: Decretum magistri Gratiani, ed. Emil Friedberg, second edn (Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1887; repr. Graz: Akademische Druck– u. Verlagsanstalt, 1959). 37 See Joseph Freisen, Geschichte des canonischen Eherechts, bis zum Verfall der Glossenliteratur (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1893), 672–76. 38 Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier au lion, ou: Le roman d’Yvain: Édition critique d’après le manuscrit B.N. fr. 1433, ed. and trans. David F. Hult (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1994). 39 See Green, Women and Marriage, 65. 36

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in des tages zîten. swie’z der vrouwen wære widermuot und swære, si wart im sunder danc gegeben. ez enhalf ouch niht ir widerstreben. (lines 6342–49) (Bishops and abbots came to [the court] and many priests, whoever could ride to the court that day. However unwilling she was and however unpleasant it was for the lady, she was married to him without her consent. Even her struggling did not help her.)

This parallel suggests that Hartmann is in fact directly comparing a marriage that would be invalid because of a lack of consent by the bride to the blessing of the marriage of a widow. In both cases the priests show themselves unconcerned with the marriage they are blessing, and their doing so in great numbers serves to alert the audience to their misbehavior. In short: the fact that Laudine married her husband’s killer, and that she did it within days of his death, no doubt foreshadows many of the difficulties that the marriage will face. Laudine and Iwein’s marriage is also deficient in other ways. The first and most important of these is the power dynamic between husband and wife. Whereas the law demanded the husband be the “head of his wife,” and the theory of marriage adopted by Hartmann in Erec demands that husband and wife be in some sense equals, Laudine is shown to be the head of her husband.40 Laudine’s superiority is heavily marked at the moment when she proposes to Iwein. Iwein is brought in as a supplicant and falls to his knees when he sees Laudine, promising to do whatever she wishes. Instead of punishing Iwein for killing her husband as he expects, Laudine asks him to marry her, saying: ê ich iuwer enbære, ich bræche ê der wîbe site: swie selten wîp mannes bite, ich bæte iuwer ê. ichn nœtlîche iu niht mê, wan ich wil iuch gerne: welt ir mich? (lines 2328–33) (Before I would abstain from having you, I would break the custom of women. However seldom it occurs that a woman woos a man, I 40

See also Volker Mertens, “Recht und Abenteuer – Das Recht auf Abenteuer: Poetik des Rechts im ‘Iwein’ Hartmanns von Aue,” in Juristen werdent herren ûf erden: Recht, Geschichte, Philologie. FS Friedrich Ebel, ed. Andreas Fijal, Hans-Jörg Leuchte and Hans-Jochen Schiewer (Göttingen: V&R, 2006), 189–210: 208. Van Houts describes Laudine as in the tradition of the widow-seductress in Chrétien’s version, Married Life, 157.

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would woo you. I will not torture you any longer: I certainly want to have you. Do you want me?)

The text marks Laudine’s breach of standard gender roles very heavily, stressing that she is not behaving as a woman ought in proposing marriage. Iwein’s response reinforces his own subordinate role in this interaction: “spræche ich nû, vrouwe, nein ich, / sô wære ich ein unsælec man” (lines 2334–35: If I were to say no, lady, I would be a cursed man). Iwein’s response, taken on its own and in a situation where he is on his knees as a supplicant before Laudine, suggests coercion. There is no other response he could conceivably make. Of course, we know Iwein has fallen madly in love with Laudine and wants to marry her, but that does not change the implications of the power dynamics found in this scene. These power dynamics are later implicitly criticized by the narrator. When Iwein has defeated Keie’s challenge at the fountain and confirmed his new role as defender of the fountain and Laudine’s husband, the narrator remarks: an swen got hât geleit triuwe unde andern guoten sin, volle tugent, als an in, unde den eins wîbes wert, diu niuwan sîns willen gert, sul diu mit liebe lange leben, den hât er vreuden vil gegeben, daz was allez wænlich dâ. (lines 2426–33) (To whom God has granted fidelity (triuwe) and other virtues, as [He] has to [Iwein], and granted a wife who desires nothing but his will, He has given to that man many joys, if they should live together with affection for a long time. That was all there, I think.)

At this point in the romance, this description may appear to praise Iwein and Laudine’s marriage, but with hindsight it appears highly ironic.41 The hollowness of the narrator’s praise is revealed by his uncertainty about the marriage’s quality, encapsulated in the word wænlich (probably, believably, conjecturally).42 His description of a worthy wife as a woman who only desires her husband’s will does not match his portrayal of Iwein’s marriage to Laudine at all. This discrepancy is driven home when Iwein asks Laudine permission to leave with Gawein for tournaments. It 41 42

Cormeau and Störmer, Hartmann von Aue, 206–07. On the definition of wænlich, see Lexer, III: 681. On the reading of these scenes as ironic, see Ranawake, “Zu Form und Funktion,” 109. On its use to indicate the instability of the marriage, see Šahinović, “‘Iwein’ und Laudine,” 316–18.

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is notable enough that Iwein must ask her permission. As her conditions will show, this is not a mere courtesy request; Iwein truly does need Laudine’s permission to leave. Yet far more notable is that Iwein must trick her into granting him permission, using the tactic of the rash boon. She agrees wan dô sîn bet was getân, dône hete si des deheinen wân daz er si ihtes bæte wan daz si gerne tæte. daz gewern gerou si dâ ze stat, dô er si urloubes bat daz er turnieren müese varn si sprach: ‘diz sold ich ê bewarn.’ dône mohte sis niht wider komen. (lines 2915–23) (Because when he made his request, she still had no inkling (wân) that he could ask her for something that she wouldn’t gladly do. She immediately regretted her assent when he asked for permission to go to tournaments. She said: “I should have excluded this before.” But she could not take it back now.)

Laudine is clueless that Iwein might desire something she does not, and the narrator describes her cluelessness with a word related to his ironic wænlich earlier: wân. In fact, Iwein had declared in the proposal scene that “swie ir welt alsô wil ich” (line 2290; I want whatever you want), a phrase common in the depiction of marriages in medieval German literature, but usually ascribed to the woman.43 Both this statement and Laudine’s inability to believe that Iwein could ask for something she does not herself want directly contradict the narrator’s earlier praise of the marriage. Laudine wants her husband to desire her will, rather than for her to desire his will. Iwein acquires conditional permission to go to the tournaments with the explicit warning that Laudine will repudiate their marriage should he not return within the promised year – repudiation once again typically being an action taken by a man.44 Iwein’s status as a subordinate to his wife, clearly contrary to his role as “vogt und maister,” is thus made dramatically clear, as is Laudine’s usurpation of actions usually reserved for a man. 43

Specifically, of a woman agreeing to marry a man chosen by her father. See Schröter, “Wo zwei zusammen kommen in rechter Ehe,” 68–74. 44 All examples of repudiations (including annulments, etc.) mentioned in the historical record for the period place the initiative with the man. See, for example, the cases collected by Tobias Weller, Die Heiratspolitik des deutschen Hochadels im 12. Jahrhundert (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2004).

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In the medieval imagination of the proper relationship between husband and wife, Laudine’s decision to repudiate her marriage to Iwein represents an enormous overstepping of her role and the ultimate confirmation that she views herself as more powerful and more important than Iwein. It is notable that Laudine does this entirely by her own authority, passing a sort of legal judgment on Iwein. Yet contrary to the position of Mertens, who sees Laudine as actually possessing such authority,45 the romance had earlier called attention to the fact that women cannot sit in judgment. This occurred when Lunete had asked Laudine to judge whether Ascalon or Iwein was the better man: “nu müezet ir mîn rihtære sîn: / erteilt mir (ir sît ein wîp)” (Iwein 1954–55: now you must be a judge: judge for me, although you are a woman). This strongly suggests that even Lunete, the person announcing the repudiation on behalf of Laudine, does not acknowledge Laudine’s authority to do so. Laudine’s very status as the ruler of her own kingdom may have seemed odd or transgressive to the poem’s German audience. Although in France it was generally possible for women to inherit a fief, this was only the case under exceptional circumstances in the Holy Roman Empire.46 Laudine’s authority receives no support from any other figure in the romance, either. Although she calls for Arthur to exclude Iwein from the fellowship of knights, Arthur shows no sign of planning to carry out this order. Indeed, he shows the opposite response: nû was dem künge starke leit des hern Îweins swære, unde vrâgte wâ er wære unde wolde in getrœstet hân. (Iwein 3240–43) (Now the king felt very sorrowful about Sir Iwein’s plight and asked where he was in order to console him.)

Arthur thus fails to lend his authority to Laudine’s demand. Instead, it is Iwein who excludes himself from the fellowship of knights; it is he, not Arthur or anyone else, who keeps himself away from Laudine’s kingdom.47 45

Mertens, “Laudine,” 43. Moreover, examples of reigning women in German-speaking Europe postdate Iwein’s composition by some years and, with one exception, involve widows acting as regents for their sons. See Joachim Bumke, Höfische Kultur: Literatur und Gesellschaft im hohen Mittelalter, twelfth edn (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), 485–86. 47 See William Henry Jackson, “Aspects of Knighthood in Hartmann’s Adaptations of Chrétien’s Romances and in the Social Context,” in Chrétien de Troyes and the German Middle Ages, eds Martin H. Jones and Roy Wisbey (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), 37–55: 41–42. 46

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During Iwein’s incognito return to the kingdom of the fountain in the middle of the romance, he reveals he still does not truly understand his role in the marriage. Iwein continues to insist on his own subordination to Laudine. When it is suggested his lady may have some grievance against him that has caused her to banish him, he replies: “nimmer werde mîn rât, / ir wille enwære ie mîn gebot” (lines 5480–81: “May I never be well if her will were not always my command”). This is not true and reverses the normative conventions for the relationship between husband and wife that the narrator laid out earlier in the romance. It corresponds much more closely to the love ideal (“courtly love”) of troubadour lyric or Minnesang. Iwein’s breakthrough at the end of the romance is to realize that his proper role as husband and head of his wife includes the power to force Laudine to comply with his will, including by physical violence and punishment. Such punishment is alluded to when Iwein devises his plan to force Laudine to take him back: he will activate the storm-causing fountain again and again “daz ich noch ir minne / mit gewalt gewinne” (lines 7803–04: so that I will yet acquire her love with force).48 It is only through the skillful trickery of Lunete that such a scenario does not come to pass. Yet while Laudine might not have the right to repudiate her marriage to Iwein, she appears to have good reason to. This is because Iwein has not done a good job as Laudine’s husband, violating maritalis affectus.49 As was mentioned above, the outward signs of marital affection were cohabitation and the sharing of bed and table. Yet Iwein does not cohabitate with Laudine longer than a few weeks, and he is never shown to share a meal with her or to sleep with her, even in a nonsexual manner. He is, however, shown to eat and share a bed with other characters, drawing attention to this lack regarding Laudine.50 Iwein is shown to eat while sitting on a bed in Lunete’s presence (lines 1223–32), he eats and sleeps in the presence of the lion (lines 3905–13), and he sleeps in the same bed as the messenger of the younger countess of Schwarzer Dorn (lines 6569–86). Prior to leaving with Gawein, Iwein has performed only one duty in his marriage: he has defended the fountain once against Arthur’s challenge. This action is said to have alleviated any residual doubts that Laudine had had about choosing to marry Iwein. The narrator expresses this by stating that 48

See William Hasty, Art of Arms: Studies of Aggression and Dominance in Medieval German Court Poetry (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2002), 37; idem. The Medieval RiskReward Society: Courts, Adventure, and Love in the European Middle Ages (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2016), 124–25. 49 See Mertens, “Laudine,” 62. 50 See Waltraud Fritsch-Rößler, Finis amoris: Ende, Gefährdung und Wandel von Liebe im hochmittelalterlichen deutschen Roman (Tübingen: Günter Narr, 1999), 142.

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si was unz an die zît niuwan nâch wâne wol gehît. alrêst liebet ir der man. (lines 2671–73) (she was only married well according to assumption (wân) until that time. For the first time she was pleased with her husband.)

The irony of this statement comes from two aspects. Once again, we see the word wân and its derivatives brought into play. Just as the narrator merely suspected that Iwein and Laudine had a perfect marriage until this point, Laudine too had until now only suspected she had made the right decision. Yet the narrator does not confirm that Laudine is in fact “well married,” he only says that Laudine was pleased with Iwein for the first time. With these words the narrator sets up a simple relationship between Iwein and Laudine: if Iwein does what he is supposed to, namely stay with Laudine and defend the fountain, then she is pleased. Laudine’s happiness about this is reflective of Iwein fulfilling his role as husband, treating Laudine with maritalis affectus. But Iwein does not fulfill these obligations for long. Gawein’s misbegotten advice that Iwein is in danger of repeating the mistake of Erec, namely being too intimate with his wife and thereby losing his honor, causes Iwein to leave and become negligent of his husbandly duties.51 Laudine’s attempted repudiation once Iwein has failed to return in time can be connected directly to the issue of whether Iwein is treating her as he ought to treat a spouse. One of the more striking accusations against Iwein comes near the end of Lunete’s speech announcing the dissolution of Iwein and Laudine’s relationship: si ist iu ze edel unde ze rîch daz ir si kebsen soldet, ob ir erkennen woldet waz rîters triuwe wære. (lines 3170–73) (She is too noble and powerful for you to treat her as a Kebse, if you understood what the fidelity/duty of a knight was.)

A Kebse was a term of abuse for a woman in a sexual relationship of any sort or duration with a man without being married to him.52 To treat a wife as a Kebse is, in effect, to not treat her with marital affection, or, as another 51 52

See Spangenberger, Liebe und Ehe, 110–11. For a basic definition of kebese, see Georg Friedrich Benecke, Wilhelm Müller, and Friedrich Zarncke, Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch, 3 vols (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854–66), 1: s.v. “kebes, kebese;” Matthias Lexer, Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch, 3 vols (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1872–78), 1: s.v. “kebes, kebese, kebse;” and Richard Schröder et al., Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch (DRW): Wörterbuch der älteren deutschen Rechtssprache, 13 vols (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1914–present), 7: s.v. “Kebse.”

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source, the Thuringian continuation to the Saxon World Chronicle, puts it, not to treat her “also her billichen solde, unde recht were” (“as he justly ought to, and as would be right”).53 Lunete’s accusation that Iwein does not know what the fidelity of a knight (rîters triuwe) is further bolsters this interpretation. Mertens in his modern German version translates this concept as referring to the duties (“Verpflichtungen”) of a knight:54 in Iwein’s case, the duty is to care for his wife and her fountain. That would be to treat her with maritalis affectus. Iwein’s failure to treat his wife with marital affection contrasts with her failure to obey him, indeed, her insistence that he obey her. We are therefore left with the situation epitomized by the prostration scene at the end of the romance: Laudine is ethically justified in her repudiation of Iwein but does not have the legal right to do it. Iwein has treated Laudine in an ethically reprehensible way but is legally able to do so. It is only by trickery that the two can be reconciled: Lunete fools Laudine into reconciling the incognito Iwein with his lady. Once she realizes she has been duped, Laudine angrily repeats her grievances: sol ich dem hinne vürder leben der ûf mich dehein ahte hât? deiswâr des het ich gerne rât. mirne getet daz weter nie sô wê dazn woldich iemer lîden ê danne ich zelanger stunde mîns lîbes gunde deheinem sô gemuoten man der nie dehein ahte ûf mich gewan. (lines 8080–88) (Shall I spend the rest of my life with a man who has never paid me any attention? Truly, I would rather not. The storms [from the fountain] could never harm me so much that I wouldn’t rather suffer that than to spend my life forever with a man with such a mind (muot) that he never paid me any attention.)

Laudine’s complaint underlines Iwein’s role as a negligent husband, repeating the term ahte, attention, twice. The term is clearly connected to the legal marital affection that Laudine is owed by her husband.55 Iwein will now agree that this interpretation is essentially correct, stating: “vrouwe, ich hân missetân” (line 8103: lady, I have done wrong). This part 53

Ludwig Weiland, ed., “Sächsische Weltchronik: Thüringische Fortsetzung,” in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Deutsche Chroniken II (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1877), 287–319: 316. 54 Hartmann von Aue, Iwein, ed. and trans. Volker Mertens, 489. 55 See Mertens, “Laudine,” 62; Šahinović, “‘Iwein’ und Laudine,” 315.

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of the dilemma ends with Iwein acknowledging his fault and declining to punish Laudine, something we can connect to the relative equality advocated by Hartmann’s concept of married geselleschaft. This is not the end of the conclusion, however. Laudine adds another remark that appears to synthesize the two problems of ethical and legal marriage, namely the problem of the husband and wife treating each other equally (ethics) and the problem of the husband as his wife’s “vogt und maister” (law): gedienen müeze ich noch umb in daz er mich lieber welle hân danner noch habe getân. (lines 8094–96) (I will have to serve him in such a way that he will want to hold me dearer than he has done before.)

In these three lines, Laudine recognizes that she is responsible for Iwein’s behavior toward her, and connects this with her failure to serve him.56 That is, Laudine recognizes that for Iwein to treat her well, she must be subordinate to him. Here, even before Laudine’s prostration, we find the essential dilemma of the romance’s depiction of marriage presented and resolved. Laudine’s words provide a framework for overcoming the contradiction between the legal and ethical duties in marriage in that they make marital affection incumbent on the submission of the wife. Laudine’s falling to her knees, whether it is original to the romance or not, is the culmination of Laudine’s submission to Iwein: it is not, as Horst Brunner and Nina Spangenberger have argued, a sign of mutual love and equality.57 Rather, it shows that Laudine recognizes Iwein as her husband and superior. Laudine’s request to Iwein “tuot genædeclîche an mir” (be merciful to me) and her calling Iwein “lord” (lines 8121–22: herre) put Laudine in a place of submission and potential punishment: she acknowledges Iwein’s right to discipline her. Iwein’s journey of redemption once Laudine has banished him is often read as Iwein learning how to be a good ruler. One of the things he learns to rule is his wife. In the end, the romance reinforces and reaffirms 56

The A manuscript reads “verdienen” rather than “gedienen,” see Meyer, “Manuscript versus Edition,” 114. However, I translate the A manuscript’s text not to mean “I have yet to benefit from him,” but rather as “I have yet to earn it from him,” although Meyer’s translation is certainly possible. “Gedienen” and “verdienen” can also be used synonymously, see Lexer, I: col. 769 and III: col. 95. 57 Horst Brunner, “Hartmann von Aue: Erec und Iwein,” in Mittelhochdeutsche Romane und Heldenepen, ed. Horst Brunner (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1993), 97–128: 124–25; Spangenberger, Liebe und Ehe, 101–02 and 299. Also Klein, “Liebe und Gesellschaft,” 264.

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the legal position that Iwein is the head of his wife and that she, whatever power she may have wielded before, is in fact his subordinate. Yet the body of the romance, and Laudine’s protestation at the end, also serve to affirm the legal and ethical proposition that a good marriage ought to contain marital affection: husband and wife ought to treat each other with the respect they deserve. Iwein, as a negligent husband, is punished for this in the middle part of the romance. He chooses not to punish his wife at the end, though he has the legal right to do so, because his own failing led to the situation. The romance’s ending thus seems to affirm both a legal and an ethical idea of marriage as a sort of benevolent dictatorship under the husband: the husband enjoys immense power, but uses it ethically and sparingly. Yet the narrator is nevertheless cagey as to what fate awaits his protagonists: ez was guot leben wænlîch hie ichn weiz aber waz ode wie in sit geschæhe beiden. (lines 8159–61) (They had a good life now, I think (wænlîch). But I don’t know what happened to them afterwards.)

The narrator’s uncertainty, once again expressed with wænlîch, perhaps reflects the incomplete nature of the romance’s synthesis of these two ideas: while Iwein now claims to be willing to treat Laudine better, his word has proven hollow before. Similarly, Laudine says she will work to deserve better treatment, but we have no way of knowing whether she actually will.58 Hartmann’s Iwein thus closes having displayed negative and positive ethical and legal behavior in marriage: it encourages marital affection, geselleschaft, and the husband as head of the wife. Yet it remains uncertain whether its own characters can live up to these ideals.

58

See Šahinović, “‘Iwein’ und Laudine,” 316–18; Ranawake, “Zur Form und Funktion,” 110; Mertens, “Recht und Abenteuer,” 208.

4

Arthurian Ethics and Ethical Reading in the Perlesvaus

JOSEPH DEROSIER

I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In Englands green & pleasant Land.1

T

he thirteenth-century prose romance and Grail Quest, the Perlesvaus, also known as the Li hauz livres du Graal (High Book of the Grail), offers a version of Arthurian chivalry wherein the Quest is for more than the Grail. Romance becomes a vehicle for imagining the Arthurian conquest of Britain, a crusade-like mission to conquer and to convert. In this chapter, I aim to clarify the ethical position that we, as readers, ought to take, as well as to examine the ethics proper to the Perlesvaus. The ethical practice of engaging with a romance as violent, bloodthirsty, and heavyhanded as this one involves understanding this romance as part of a broader arc in the development of the genre. Rather than positioning the Perlesvaus as an outlier or anomaly, we must read it as a response to its contemporaries, both romance and chronicle. If we can shed the generic norms and assumptions developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which linger in our definitions and framing of romance, we can read romance for what it says and does instead of what we want it to say and do. And thus we can examine the ethics of this romance, which makes claims for its content to be on par with Holy Scripture while asserting itself as the full account of Perlesvaus, a holier Perceval. The conquest of territory that we know from Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal is paired 1

William Blake, “Milton: A Poem in 2 Books” [1804], in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 95–96.

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with a holy crusade to convert or slaughter all “pagans,” signaling a triumph of the New Law (Christianity) over the Old Law (an ambiguous blend of paganism and Judaism).2 In engaging with this text seriously, we must acknowledge that the use of Arthurian figures to justify religious violence and fanaticism is less of an anomaly than we might like it to be. This romance has long been maligned, and thus I argue that we read it for what it can tell us about the Grail quest rather than dismiss it for its ethical framing of the Quest as a crusade. As Jane Gilbert notes in her work on Arthurian ethics, “Arthurian chivalry always lies in a past discontinuous from the present or in some fantastical otherwhere, and is contemplated at a distance by a consciously ‘modern’ commentator.” And thus “‘Arthurtime’ exists in constant tension with the present, pressing upon it and on what it may imminently become: neither now nor never.”3 That is, the “historical Arthur” imagined in medieval romance was always in the past, and will always be encountered with difficulty as Arthurian chivalry both responds to and resists historicization. The Perlesvaus looks to the past for its context and source material, but it also articulates an ethics of conquest, forced conversion, and ethnic cleansing. Thus this chapter seeks to address how romance can be used for political means, responding to its contemporary geopolitical climate, using an imagined past to theorize the future of sovereignty, borders, and nation. In tandem with that reading, it is critical that we take the ethical imperatives, and consequences, of romance seriously. Rather than reading a text such as the Perlesvaus as an anomaly, we ought to take its claims seriously to better understand the political project of romance in the early thirteenth century. As J. Hillis Miller famously wrote in “The Ethics of 2



As Christine Ferlampin-Acher notes, “Perlesvaus reprend l’opposition traditionnelle entre la Viez Loi et la Nouvele Loi, mais lui donne, comme souvent au Moyen Âge, une large extension, regroupant sous la dénomination Viez Loi des traits qui renvoient au judaïsme, conformément au sens premier de l’expression, mais aussi à la religion musulmane des sarrasins et au paganisme de l’Antiquité, cette dernière assimilation étant favorisée par l’ambiguïté médiévale du terme païen qui désigne aussi bien le musulman que le polythéiste des temps anciens, confondus dans une méconnaissance volontaire de l’islam” (294; The Perlesvaus takes up the traditional opposition between the Old Law and the New Law, but gives it, as often in the Middle Ages, a large extension, grouping under the name Old Law characteristics that refer to Judaism, in accordance with the primary meaning of the expression, but also to the Muslim religion of the Saracens and to the paganism of Antiquity, the latter assimilation being favored by the medieval ambiguity of the term pagan which designates both the Muslim and the polytheist of ancient times, confused in a voluntary ignorance of Islam; in “Fausse créance, mauvaise loi et conversion dans Perlesvaus,” Moyen Âge, 111:2 (2005), 293–312). 3 Jane Gilbert, “Arthurian Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 154–70: 155.

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Reading,” the “obligation of the reader to respond to the demand made by the text remains the primary imperative in the ethics of reading.”4 And thus the generic demands (e.g., is this truly a romance?), the disciplinary demands (is this part of a canon?), and the aesthetic demands (does this feel like a romance? – cf. Miller, “If it is ‘appalling,’ should the poem be taught? On what grounds could we decide whether or not it is appalling?”),5 come second to what the text offers us, as reader. An ethics of reading in this case is not using allegory or metaphor to negate violent and colonializing rhetoric; rather, it is our ethical imperative as readers to see what the text does and says rather than trying to see how it fits in our postmedieval taxonomies of genre, taste, and value.

The Ethics of Romance: Defining the Genre This section aims to situate the Perlesvaus in a larger generic framework as defined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I return to these early editions to show how the genre is defined as neither ethical nor didactic, and with such a courtly focus as to exclude a text such as the Perlesvaus, despite its themes, characters, and form clearly making it part of the genre. In 1887, Gaston Paris cited Jean Bodel’s famous claim that “li conte de Bretaigne sont si vain et plaisant” (the tales of Britain were so vain and pleasant).6 He uses Jean’s claim to assert “cette ‘vanité,’ cette absence complète de sérieux et de suite, cet enfilement incohérent d’aventures entreprises sans motifs, dont l’extravagance va souvent jusqu’à la plus complète absurdité, étaient ce qui plaisait alors” (that “vanity,” that complete absence of seriousness and then following, that incoherent thread of adventures undertaken without reason, in which the extravagance often ends up in the most complete absurdity, is that which was pleasing at that time).7 Paris, along with countless other translators, editors, and critics, asserted a monolithic notion of the genre: wandering adventures, stale characters, little-to-no plot development, and a genre set to please rather than to engage with contemporary political issues. And yet, in an 1891 critique of an essay by Wolfgang Golter from the previous year, Paris laments that neither Golter nor his critics have paid any 4



J. Hillis Miller, “The Ethics of Reading,” Style 21:2, “Deconstruction” (1987), 181–91: 191. 5 Ibid., 182. 6 Gaston Paris, Les Romans en vers du cycle de la Table ronde (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1887), 16; cf. Jehan Bodel, La Chanson des Saisnes. 2 vols, ed. Annette Brasseur (Geneva: Droz, 1989), version L, l. 9. 7 Ibid., 16.

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attention to the Perlesvaus: “mais tant que ces deux savants continueront à négliger de parti pris le Perlesvaus leurs discussions nous paraissent devoir rester stériles” (but as long as these two scholars [Wolfgang Golter and M. Alfred Nutt] continue to neglect in bias the Perlesvaus, their discussions seem to us will remain fruitless).8 Erich Auerbach once ascribed chivalric wandering to romance and its need to be interpreted, in contrast to the chanson de geste’s focus on the deed (geste).9 If the courtly world of Chrétien “contains nothing but the requisites of adventure,” it is an idealization of courtly life, which “takes us very far from the imitation of reality,” as he writes.10 These distinctions have long been challenged, in particular by Sarah Kay in The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance, where Kay challenges the idea that the chanson de geste (that is, the Chanson de Roland) precedes romance (namely Chrétien), and romance is thus a more developed or “literary” form.11 As she writes, “chansons de geste and romance are ‘political fictions’ in that their narratives are bounded by assumptions about the nature of the personal and the social, the licit and the illicit, the ethical and the unethical, the representable and unrepresentable.”12 And more recently, Karen Sullivan argues that “skeptically as we may be nowadays of anything that exceeds the empirical world, romance is that which promises, counterculturally, a realm beyond this one,”13 highlighting the escapism of romance but downplaying its very political nature. In this chapter, I hope to articulate how the Perlesvaus imagines different possibilities that, rather than offer a pure escape from its (a)historical moment, responds to that moment and offers us a way to understand how romance creates worlds in order to critique its own, how romance can be read to understand the ethics of romance as a political genre that espouses certain fantasies of empire, conquest, and conversion. All of this brings us to the broad framing, from translations aiming to make Chrétien’s work accessible to a broad audience to literary critics defining genre, of romance as psychological drama at best – and light fantasy at worst. Within these generic frames, it seems hard to situate texts such as the Perlesvaus. Roger Loomis famously called the Perlesvaus 8

Gaston Paris, “Périodiques,” Romania 20:79 (1891), 504. Auerbach, Mimesis [1946] (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953/2003), 136. 10 Ibid., 136. 11 Sarah Kay, The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 4–5. 12 Ibid., 5. 13 Karen Sullivan, The Danger of Romance: Truth, Fantasy, and Arthurian Fictions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 280. 9

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the product of a “deranged” author14 whereas J. Neale Carman argued that the Perlesvaus was a “symbolical New Testament,” reducing the text’s violence, brutality, and anti-Semitism to allegorical gestures.15 Jessie Weston’s monograph on the Perlesvaus was unpublished at the time of her death (1928) and would not be published until sixty years later. She describes the Perlesvaus as: discursive and somewhat crowded with incident, but when we come to study it carefully we find that the author keeps all the threads of his closely woven tapestry well in hand; adventures widely separated in point of time and place are shown to have an underlying connection.16

As Thomas Kelly writes in his introduction to that volume, “in many ways it remains a maverick text, still misunderstood in its apparent deviations from the main direction taken by the Arthurian cyclical romances.”17 His 1974 Le Haut Livre du Graal: A Structural Study rightly positions the romance as a turning point in Arthurian romance as “Christian doctrine fuses with the matière de Bretagne in a glorification of crusading chivalry.” 18 Charles Méla, in 1984, praised the roman as “archaïque et prophétique, barbare et saint, anonyme à force d’orgueil, poétique par la grâce de sa prose” (archaic and prophetic, barbarous and holy, anonymously vain-glory, [and] poetic by the grace of its prose), and encourages us as readers, to take it at its word.19 Taking the Perlesvaus at its word is engaging in its ethics, in interrogating how the text functions beyond allegorical and aesthetic evaluation. “Ethics,” as a term (éthique), had not been attested before Brunetto Latini’s Li livres dou tresor (c. 1265) and its adjectival form (éthique) would not appear until the mid-sixteenth century.20 The Perlesvaus may not have used the term éthique, but in its focus on “good” as a construct, from “les buens chevaliers” (line 60; the good knights) to “li buens rois Artuz” (line 61; the good king Arthur), 14

Roger Sherman Loomis, The Grail, from Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol (1963; repr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 15 J. Neale Carman, “The Symbolism of the Perlesvaus,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 61 (1946), 42–83. 16 Jessie Weston, The Romance of Perlesvaus, ed. Janet Grayson (Holland, MI: Hope College, 1988), 143–44. 17 Thomas E. Kelly, “Foreword,” in Weston, The Romance of Perlesvaus, xiv. 18 Thomas E. Kelly, Le Haut livre du Graal: Perlesvaus, A Structural Study (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1974), 180. 19 Charles Méla, La reine et le Graal: La conjointure dans les romans du Graal, de Chrétien de Troyes au Livre de Lancelot (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 176. 20 Cf. Takeshi Matsumura, Dictionnaire du français medieval (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2018), s.v. “etique” and Alain Rey, Le Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (Paris: Robert, 2006), s.v. “éthique.”

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the moral framework is evident. And a text as violent, as bloodthirsty, and as conversion-focused as the Perlesvaus is ought to be taken at its word. In swearing to be divinely inspired, it challenges us to explore its internal mechanisms. The Revue des langues romanes published two special issues on the Perlesvaus in 2014 and 2015. It shows renewed interest in the text, asking us to “repenser le Perlesvaus” (rethink the Perlesvaus) and asks us to embrace the romance with its faults, quirkiness, and incoherency, to explore the oversaturation of meaning.21 In the second issue, Alain Corbellari cites the rhizomatic structure of the text, following this trend of embracing the complexity of the romance rather than dismissing it as aberrant or abhorrent.22 I here add considering the ethical stance of the text: rather than see its wandering adventures as part of an incoherent and messy series of unrelated events, we ought to examine it on its terms, following its positioning of Arthurian ethics as a violent, Christian, and crusadelike force. As Jean-René Valette notes, epic and romance developed alongside and with each other, not in mutual exclusivity, and while the warlike tendencies of the text seem to align with chansons de geste while its quest for the grail aligns it with romance, the two dovetail in the text’s “poétique du génocide joyeux” (poetics of joyful genocide), borrowing from Jean-Charles Payen’s characterization of La Chanson de Roland.23 Thus in comparing the genocidal tendencies of the Perlesvaus to Roland, Valette writes “c’est à ce déchaînement de violence, qui concerne aussi bien le plan de la représentation que celui de l’écriture, que le Perlesvaus doit le qualificatif d’épique” (it is due to this frenzy of violence, which concerns both the framework of representation and that of writing, that the Perlesvaus is bound to the descriptive of epic).24 And thus, he argues, the Perlesvaus is a roman épique, going so far as to align the text with the opening lines of Virgil: “arma virumque cano” (I sing of arms and of the man…).25 The danger here of mapping classicist terminology onto a medieval text assumes that the Perlesvaus either transcends the medieval 21

Armand Strubel. “Introduction. Repenser le Perlesvaus,” Revue des langues romanes 118:1 (2014), 1–26. 22 Alain Corbellari, “Onirisme et pulsion de mort dans le Perlesvaus,” Revue des langues romanes 119:1 (2015), 115. 23 Jean-René Valette, “Qu’est-ce qu’un roman épique? Le cas du Perlesvaus,” Chanter de geste. L’art épique et son rayonnement. Hommage à Jean-Claude Vallecalle, ed. Marylène Possamaï-Pérez and Jean-René Valette (Paris: Champion, 2013), 457–72: 458; cf. Jean-Charles Payen, Le motif du repentir dans la littérature française médiévale (des origines à 1230) (Geneva: Droz, 1967, 423. 24 Ibid., 459. 25 Virgil, ed. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), vol. 1, 240, l.1.

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(being close to Virgil) or figures entirely outside of medieval genre (which is, let us recall, a nineteenth-century lexicon). Rather, to follow up with Kelly’s comment above, the Perlesvaus aims to shift romance and makes claims for romance as a form as serious as Scripture.26 It is important to note that the anonymous author of the Perlesvvaus refers to the text as estoires (line 1; history or story) and livres (line 8; book). The author uses the term romanz27 only to refer to the language in which the text was composed. “Quant à roman,” as Paul Zumthor writes, “il signifie proprement toute composition de langue vulgaire opposable à un modèle latin, même si lointain” (As for roman, it properly signifies any composition in a vernacular tongue opposable to a Latin model, even far-removed).28 And the opposition between roman and épique as noted above ignores that the development of the roman as a form emerged in the twelfth century, during the rise of the roman courtois, which saw classical matière in the Roman de Thèbes, the Roman d’Énéas, and the Roman de Troie and Arthurian matière in the works of Béroul and Chrétien de Troyes. Chrétien’s Cligès, which bridges Arthurian and Byzantine themes, stands out as reimagining what the matières can be. As Zumthor writes, “le ‘roman,’ dans ses premières manifestations, semble bien provenir de la convergence de deux traditions : celles des chansons de geste et celle, plus ancienne, d’origine scolaire mais revigorée grâce à la ‘Renaissance du xiie siècle,’ des historiographes” (the novel [roman], in its first manifestations, seems to arise from the convergence of two traditions: those of the chansons de geste and that older tradition of scholastic origin reinvigorated thanks to the ‘Renaissance of the twelfth century,’ of historiographers).29 Despite these origins, Zumthor argues that the chanson de geste emerges from collective memory whereas the roman is pure fiction, reinforcing the binary that the roman is individualistic and not concerned with the historical or collective.30 This echoes Édouard Roehrich’s claim in his 1885 edition of the Chanson de Roland that it is “le poëme français par excellence, car elle n’est pas l’œuvre d’un homme mais celle de tout un peuple” (the French poem par excellence, because it is not the work of a man, but of a whole people).31 Nevertheless, for Roehrich such a text is 26

Thomas E. Kelly, “Foreword,” in Weston, The Romance of Perlesvaus, xiv. Le Haut Livre du Graal: Perlesvaus, ed. William A. Nitze and T. Atkinson Jenkins, 2 vols (1932–1937; repr. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1972), l.10189. 28 Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médievale (1972; Paris: Seuil, 2000), 195. 29 Ibid., 410. 30 Ibid., 410–11. 31 Édouard Roehrich, La Chanson de Roland: traduction nouvelle à l’usage des écoles, précédée d’une introduction sur l’importance de la Chanson de Roland pour l’éducation de la jeunesse, et suivie de notes explicatives (Paris: Fischbacher, 1885), 1. 27

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ideal for children as they, like medieval persons, are not fully grown (mûr) and “pensent et se sentent exactement comme pensaient nos ancêtres à l’époque où la culture moderne n’existait pas” (think and feel exactly as our ancestors who lived at the time when modern culture did not exist).32 As M. Martin Guiney writes, “the claim that medieval literature is more accessible to children because they are so much more like people in the Middle Ages than modern adults supports an enterprise in which the child, in the process of acquiring chronological knowledge, gradually loses his alien status.” 33 Further, Zumthor’s contemporary, Hans Robert Jauss, for all of his resistance to static generic frameworks, argues that through “fictionalization” inherent in the matière de Bretagne “the Arthurian romance distinguishes itself most sharply from the chanson de geste which arises from the saga and the martyr legends.”34 Romance is thus part of literary fiction – and chanson de geste remained collective and rooted in history (that is, saga and legend). That the matière de Bretagne be read as individualistic and the matière de France as collective and the source of identity suggests that Britain offered a space of abstraction and France a space of construction. While the Perlesvaus may be an extreme version of using Britain as the frame for imagining, constructing, and theorizing the world, it is hardly the first or only Arthurian text to do so. Further, as Geraldine Heng notes, what we think of as “romance” originates with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (Historia Regum Britanniae), the Latin sourcebook for Arthurian romance, outside of the roman as it is not in a romance vernacular, and yet, as Heng notes, “the pattern we now recognize as medieval romance” comes from Geoffrey’s work, despite the Historia being in Latin.35 And, as Heng writes, “Arthur’s empire is a virile and modern competitor to the exhausted empire of the Romans,” and responds to the trauma of the First Crusade.36 The Perlesvaus, I argue, in turn responds to the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, impetus for the Third Crusade, and is also influenced by the Fourth Crusade. In Leila K. Norako’s terms, we can think of the Perlesvaus as part of what she calls “recovery romance,” a subcategory of romance “whose texts revolve around desires to reclaim the Holy Land 32

Ibid., 5. M. Martin Guiney, Teaching of the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 124. 34 Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, introduction by Paul de Man (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 107. 35 Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 2. 36 Ibid., 2. 33

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and recover from historic trauma.”37 As Linda Patterson has shown, the fall of Jerusalem, the failure of the Third Crusade, and Richard Lionheart’s capture and imprisonment on his return were central to much of Occitan poetry in the following decades, although are oddly absent in Old French texts.38 The Perlesvaus offers a less direct response that is nevertheless rooted in mourning the loss of Jerusalem and in thinking about the fate of England after the losses of the Angevin Empire under Henry II’s reign. In this romance, Arthur, Perlesvaus, Lancelot, and Gauvain meander around England and Scotland, pursuing the Grail and – perhaps more importantly – assuring the conversion or death of the “pagan” inhabitants of the country. As Marisa Galvez argues, “treating crusades in terms of ontology might serve to remind us that modern examples exist in some relation to those of the medieval period. Poetry articulates the fantasies, beliefs, and sense of community among believers inside and outside of modern nation-states.”39 Galvez’s articulation of an “idiom” that emerges after the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 in lyric poetry is echoed and developed in romance, illuminations, textiles, feasts, and drama or misters.40 The Perlesvaus turns inward, imagining an isolated Britain that is free from pagans, Jews, and Saracens. If Alexander de Paris’s Roman d’Alexandre “fait écho aux sièges de Tyr par les Occidentaux du xiie siècle et transforme Alexandre en précurseur des Croisés et donc implicitement un héros pré-chrétien” (echoes the sieges of Tyre by the Westerners of the twelfth century and transforms Alexander into a precursor to the Crusaders and therefore, an implicitly pre-Christian hero),41 then the Perlesvaus, in failing to find hope in that dream of Empire, turns to Arthur. To return to Jane Gilbert, the ethics espoused in the Perlesvaus are in many ways aligned with the didactic nature that she cites in other contemporary texts: In the thirteenth century, Arthurian romances distanced themselves from the intellectual playfulness and ethical experimentation of the early works. The Arthurian moral space becomes didactic, a place of

37

Leila K. Norako, “Sir Isumbras and the Fantasy of Crusade,” The Chaucer Review 48:2 (2013), 166–89: 167. 38 Linda Patterson, Singing the Crusades: French and Occitan Lyric Responses to the Crusading Movements, 1137–1336 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), 74–96. 39 Marisa Galvez, The Subject of Crusade: Lyric, Romance, and Materials, 1150 to 1500 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 26. 40 Ibid., 3–11. 41 Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas, Les Romans d’Alexandre. Aux frontières de l’épique et du romanesque (Paris: Champion, 1998), 293.

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lessons directed to the text’s own present. Paradox and irony now signal a tragic mystery weighing on the human race.42

The Perlesvaus may not immediately seem didactic; its revisioning of the Conte du Graal opens up a space for the Perceval legend to be re-written as scripture and chronicle. It tries to teach us that the Grail narrative has, as Robert de Boron asserted, links to scripture and romance. Further, my focus on the deeds of Perlesvaus and Gauvain aims to complement and further develop how the Perlesvaus engages with and deploys crusade as an idiom, motif, and mechanism for imagining political pasts and futures. I first frame the romance in its historical context and then focus on three episodes in this text where Arthurian ethics is framed in terms of gaining territory (which we have already seen in Chrétien’s Conte), forced conversion and mass slaughter, and the triumph of the New Law (Christianity) over the Old (coded as Judaism and/or paganism).

Making Sense of the Perlesvaus: The Ethics of a Grail Crusade Whereas the previous section positioned the Perlesvaus within its literary milieu, this section looks at how it brings the crusade within the kingdom, folding crusade narrative and chronicle into Arthurian romance. The Perlesvaus opens with a reminder that the Grail is the holy vessel and recipient of Christ’s blood, who, we are told, was crucified in order to redeem the people from hell (lines 1–7). The author then reminds us how the Trinity works and asserts that those listening to these tales who will “oblier totes les vilenies qu’il ont en leur cuers” (forget all baseness in their hearts) will gain most from hearing the deeds of “preudomes” and “buens chevaliers” (noble men and good knights; lines 10–15). The Perlesvaus explicitly links itself to holy scripture and thus, as Francis Gingras notes, precariously places the text as a “fifth gospel.”43 Unlike Chrétien de Troyes’s prologue, where the author promises to compose the best story ever heard,44 the Perlesvaus, a revisionist re-telling of Chrétien’s Conte, asserts a Latin source. Much like the Alexander romances, the Perlesvaus 42

Gilbert, “Arthurian Ethics,” 159. “Cette « autorité » attribuée à plusieurs reprises au texte de Josèphe, dangereusement rapproché d’un cinquième évangile, donne au Perlesvaus un statut particulier dans l’univers des livres du Graal” (34; This “authority” attributed multiple times to Josèphe’s text, dangerously placed as a fifth gospel, gives the Perslesvaus a peculiar place in the universe of the books of the Grail; Francis Gingras, “Perlesvaus et le livre à venir,” Revue des langues romanes 118:1 (2014), 27–52). 44 “A arimer lo meillor conte | Qui soit contez en cort reial,” lines 62–63 [to compose the best tale/ that be told in a royal court]. Chrétien de Troyes, Le Conte du Graal, ou le roman de Perceval, ed. Charles Méla (Paris: Lettres Gothiques, 1990). 43

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uses Latin to make claim to a certain auctoritas lacking in the vernacular.45 This also creates a genealogy linking our text to the Crucifixion via Joseph of Arimathea’s descendants, and sets Perceval-cum-Perlesvaus as a direct descendant of Joseph. As the Fisher King’s nephew, Perlesvaus perfectly embodies the best of bloodlines linked to great men in biblical and Arthurian history. The Perlesvaus, it should be noted, did not invent the idea of the Grail text as tied to biblical narratives. As Michel Zink notes, “Robert de Boron ne fait pas seulement du Graal une relique chrétienne. Il l’introduit dans la tradition scripturaire” (Robert de Boron not only renders the Grail a Christian relic [with Joseph d’Arimathie]. He introduces it into the scriptural tradition).46 In Joseph d’Arimathie, the link between the Grail and the Last Supper is made explicit, rendering the Grail a relic and not simply a magical or sacred object. The Perlesvaus takes Robert’s genealogy and folds that back into Perceval’s quest, using the Grail as a symbol for conquering and Christianizing the British Isles – just decades after Christendom saw the loss of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187.47 The geopolitical space of the Perlesvaus, an imagined Britain, emerges as a map for imagining a space conquered, cleared of “pagans,” and united under a Christian King. The Perlesvaus’s direct literary ancestors may be Chrétien’s Conte du Graal and Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie, but its links with the rhetoric of crusade and its catalogue of relics that recall the treasures looted from Constantinople help us date Perlesvaus to after the Fourth Crusade. As Nitze demonstrates in his edition, we can tie the Perlesvaus to Jean de Nesle, crusader and descendant of Richard I of Normandy (Richard Sans-Peur). The Perlesvaus would have been written after Jean de Nesle’s return from the Fourth Crusade (1206), and is dedicated to him by a Seigneur de Cambrin.48 As Marisa Galvez argues of Lancelot’s role in the romance, “Lancelot’s unwavering refusal to repent his love for Guenievre in the Perlesvaus constitutes an idiomatic moment that illuminates the compelling ambiguity of his status as an unrepentant crusader, exemplary Arthurian knight, and courtly lover, especially for someone such as Lord Jean de Nesle.”49 The Perlesvaus’s choice to set a crusade-like romance within the British Isles, on the other hand, is a 45

Cf. Gaullier-Bougassas, Les Romans d’Alexandre, 16–22. Michel Zink, Poésie et conversion au Moyen Âge (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003), 268. 47 Bernard Hamilton, The Leper King and His Heirs: Baldwin IV and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 48 Perlesvaus, II:74–81. 49 Galvez, The Subject of Crusade, 152. 46

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novel approach to imagining territory and holy war, but the felling of Constantinople was likewise a seemingly unlikely location for a crusade. While D. A. Trotter was reluctant to give the Perlesvaus the label of a “crusading romance” because it inscribes the crusades within Arthurian Britain, Barbara Newman rightly asserts that its “crusading mentality” is clear.50 Further, that “crusading mentality” articulated by Newman is very much an ethical imperative: the mechanics of this romance rest on the perpetual crusade. And thus, rather than define “crusading romance” as depicting a romance or deploying crusade rhetoric, we can think of crusade romance as “a coherent subgenre engaged with topical concerns and changes in crusading,” to cite Lee Manion.51 Meanwhile, Christine Ferlampin-Acher asserts the possibility with the text’s focus on the alterity of pagans and their false belief.52 As she argues, Jews, pagans and Saracens are “confondus dans la même altérité diabolique” (conflated in the same diabolical alterity)53 in order to unify the threat to Christianity and unify the imperative to convert all non-believers. The Perlesvaus rises out of the flourishing romance tradition, which is already tied to crusading patrons and their ideology,54 but it also engages with topoi from the emerging tradition of vernacular records of the crusades. The Fourth Crusade, in which Constantinople was sacked rather than the Holy Land being recaptured, took place in 1204. Geoffroy de Villehardouin and Robert de Clari both documented this crusade, and in doing so, inaugurated French historical prose. Villehardouin probably began his Conquête de Constantinople around 1207, and must have finished it by his death (in 1212 or 1218), making his chronicle one of the earliest surviving historical works in French.55 He was born around 1150 in eastern Champagne, and thus raised in proximity to the literary culture 50

D. A. Trotter, Medieval French Literature and the Crusades (Geneva: Droz, 1987), 155; Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 73–74. 51 Lee Manion, Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 213. 52 Ferlampin-Acher, “Fausse créance, mauvaise loi et conversion dans Perlesvaus,” 301–02. 53 Ibid., 293. 54 See Antonio L. Furtado, “The Crusader’s Grail,” in The Grail, The Quest, and the World of Arthur, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), 28–47, and Lori Walters, “Holy Adultery: The Charrette, Crusader Queens, and the Guiot Manuscript (Paris, BNF fr. 794),” in Dame Philology’s Charrette, ed. Gina L. Greco and Ellen M. Thorington (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012), 37–75. 55 See Julian Eugene White’s “Introduction,” in La Conqueste de Constantinople (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968), 15–16.

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and milieu of Chrétien.56 His family was little known before his time and was first recorded in 1172 as vassals of Henry I, Count of Champagne (spouse of Chrétien’s patron Marie). Villehardouin gained prominence throughout his lifetime, becoming maréchal de Champagne in 1185, possibly going on the Third Crusade, and making a name for himself in the Fourth Crusade (1204), after which he was appointed maréchal de Roumanie and was awarded lands in Bulgaria.57 Clari’s account ends later, in 1216, with the death of Henry I, Emperor of Constantinople.58 Clari was a vassal of Pierre d’Amiens and possessed a small fief in Cléry-les-Pernois (whence his name), in Picardy.59 His low social standing is attested in his complete absence from Villehardouin’s account, while Clari records Villehardouin first in his list of crusaders from Champagne.60 The perceived crudeness of his text is only partially inspired by his biography. His account provides a comparison to the Perlesvaus’s deviations, messy theology, and unorthodox storytelling, which also have been seen as signs of its author’s low rank – or even mental illness. As Sharon Kinoshita notes, “the elements of Robert’s text that commentators find most ‘literary’ – most naive, exotic, and maladroit – are, I will argue, sites of intense historical work.”61 In Clari’s Conquête and in the Perlesvaus, we encounter rare perspectives that are less concerned with courtly and proper themes, choosing instead to assert marvelous and affective tropes. Villehardouin’s first-hand account suggests already porous boundaries between history, romance, and hagiography. While Clari’s style may be less erudite, both chronicles have long been recognized as influenced by the rhetoric of romance and contes.62 The Perlesvaus likewise deploys certain crusade narrative tropes, but it is equally important to recall how chronicles themselves deploy these literary devices. Chroniclers such as Villehardouin and Clari probably had few, if any, examples of French historical prose. The verse Pseudo-Turpin was translated around this time, but Villehardouin and Clari provide the earliest extant accounts of historical writing composed directly in 56

Jean Dufournet, Les Écrivains de la ive Croisade (Paris: SEDES, 1973), 3–4. Ibid., 6–11. 58 See introduction to, and text of, Clari’s La Conquête de Constantinople, ed. Jean Dufournet (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004). This is the edition I cite hereafter. 59 Dufournet, Les Écrivains de la ive Croisade, 341. 60 “Et de Champaigne y fu li mareschiax,” §1.42. 61 Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 139. 62 See Edgar H. McNeal, “Chronicle and conte; a Note on Narrative Style in Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Robert of Clari,” Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht 37:4/5 (1945), 110–13, and Gérard Jacquin, Le style historique dans les récits français et latins de la quatrième croisade (Geneva: Slatkine, 1986). 57

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French.63 Thus, their sources and points of reference would have been prose and verse romances as well as verse chronicles such as Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie and his Chronique des ducs de Normandie. Both authors were contemporaries of the Perlesvaus, and all three offer early examples of French prose, coming out of traditions that had hitherto been in verse. Just as the Perlesvaus’s generic boundaries are not always clear, these two accounts of the Fourth Crusade demonstrate the fluidity between literary and historical genres.

Arthurian Territory: Defining the Borders of Christendom As noted above, there are three defining moments in the Perlesvaus that inform the romance’s crusade-like ethics most clearly. These include an episode with Gugaran, king of Albanie,64 custodian of the sword that beheaded Saint John the Baptist, which ends in Gurgaran feeding his son to his subjects in a macabre Communion, promising redemption to converts and death to those who refuse to convert (coded as followers of the Old Law, or Jews). We also have Jandrée, an evil queen who refuses to see Christians or the New Law – thus coded as a “blind Jew”65 – whose plot to get Arthur to apostatize is foiled by a dream vision. And finally we will examine the fall of the Chastel de la Tor de Cuevre (Castle of the Copper Tower or Bull66), where a sect of pagans worship a massive copper sculpture protected by two copper automata. By the end of the episode, thirteen of the pagans have converted and committed to a life of penance while the rest are bashed to pieces by the automata of their own making and tossed into a river. 63

On the Pseudo-Turpin, see Gabrielle Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993). 64 Albanie is Scotland; from ML Albania, cf. Scottish Gaelic Alba. Gurgaran is from the Welsh “gurguol,” or werewolf (Perlesvaus II: 201–02 and 249–50). 65 On the tradition of the blind Jew, see Edward Wheatley, “‘Blind’ Jews and Blind Christians: Metaphorics of Marginalization in Medieval Europe,” Exemplaria 14 (2002), 351–82. 66 Within ms. O, basis for Nitze’s edition, there is confusion as to whether we have a bull (le tor) or a tower (la tor, le tor in Picard). Ms. O prefers la, although le appears at line 5922, and the contraction el at line 5959 (Nitze argues that el here is a feminine Picard contraction, although ms. P elsewhere uses el for en + le). Ms. P is more consistent in its use of the masculine le, which might make more sense contextually as the tor is soon seen roaring. Ms. Br offers yet another possibility, le cor, a horn. Neither Tobler-Lommatzsch, Hindley, nor Matsumura suggest any confusion concerning the gender of these words, meaning le tor and la tor are distinct, despite being homonyms. Scribal error aside, each manuscript leans in a different direction.

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These episodes, steeped in symbolism from anti-Semitic tropes to biblical numerology, articulate an Arthurian ethics rooted in defining morality, territory, and community in relation to the other: pagan or Jew. In borrowing from the Robert de Boron tradition of romance as a continuation of scripture and from the Geoffrey of Monmouth tradition of Arthurian legend as witnessing the colonization of the British Isles, the Perlesvasus reimagines the Conte du Graal as an account of the past as well as a call-to-arms, fusing the fervor of crusade with the passion for adventure. What emerges is thus an ethical imperative for Arthurian knights to convert – or slaughter – anyone following the Old Law, confusingly coded at times as a pre-Christian paganism and at other times as the more expected Old Testament, or Judaism. The Arthurian space becomes an explicitly Christian space, with borders re-drawn with each quest or adventure. As Nahir I. Otaño Gracia writes, “Medieval genres such as romance – in which knights, in many occasions Arthurian knights, go on chivalric adventures throughout their realms and beyond them – helped imagine the European borders, and the ability to construct borders is also necessary for settler colonialism.”67 The Perlesvaus is an extreme example of this, but its explicitly Christian settler colonialism helps us reimagine and better understand the Arthurian mythology that Britain was named after its first European settler, Brutus. As Otaño Gracia argues, the obsession with territory in medieval romance betrays the anxiety of both writers and their patrons.68 The ethical project of this romance thus emerges as complicit with romance leading up to and following in its wake. The Gurgaran episode begins with Gauvain being prevented from entering a chapel, for he does not possess the sword that beheaded Saint John the Baptist (lines 1717–18). He discovers that a “pagan” king, Gurgaran, is in its possession (lines 1740–45). As Henry Robinson has noted, the Perlesvaus’s investment in this relic, which is absent in other romances, comes on the heels of a frenzied quest for John the Baptist’s relics after the translation of his head to Notre Dame d’Amiens in 1206, a result of looting in the Fourth Crusade.69 Further, Gurgaran is so desperate to save his son – recently kidnapped by a giant – that he will allow Christians in his kingdom (lines 1990–97). This scene parodies 67

Nahir I. Otaño Gracia, “Borders and the Global North Atlantic: Chaucer, Pilgrimage, and Crusade,” in Indigenous Futures, Medieval Pasts, ed. Tarren Andrews and Tiffany Beechy, English Language Notes 58:2 (Oct. 2020), 35–49: 36. 68 Ibid., 36–7. 69 Henry L. Robinson, “The Sword of St John the Baptist in the Perlesvaus,” Modern Language Notes 51:1 (1936), 25–27.

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Gauvain’s quest for “l’espee aus estranges ranges” (the sword with the strange straps) in Chrétien’s Conte, where this sword is offered to Gauvain if he can save a demoiselle trapped on Mont Esclaire (lines 4629–44). It also cites the monstrous pre-human inhabitants of Earth in Genesis (6:4) and of Britain in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History.70 In the end, Gauvain fails to save the son but beheads the giant upon seeing the son murdered. Here Gurgaran thanks Gauvain, converts to Christianity, and feeds his son to his subjects in a grotesque parody Eucharist – thereby converting Scotland to Christianity (lines 2060–71). Baptized Archier, the former Gurgaran then instructs Gauvain to kill anyone who does not convert. Thus, in deploying motifs from Geoffrey and Chrétien, the author of the Perlesvaus has reimagined the matière to imagine an ethnic and religious cleansing when Arthur conquered Scotland through Gauvain’s actions. This passage often leaves scholars shocked, and the Perlesvaus makes explicit that Gauvain shares this confusion over the literal and figurative meanings of his experience. This scene’s gore even sparked an attempt to interpret the cannibalism as not cannibalistic because “omophagy was avoided,” which seems tenuous and an overly technical distinction.71 70

Brute, sub occasu solis trans Gallica regna insula in oceano est undique clausa mari; Insula in occeano est habitata gigantibus olim, nunc deserta quidem gentibus apta tuis. Hanc pete, namque tibi sedes erit illa perhennis. Hic erit et natis altera Troia tuis, Hic de prole tua reges nascentur, et ipsis totius terrae subditus orbis erit. (“Brutus, to the west, beyond the kingdoms of the Gauls, lies an island, surrounded by the sea; an island in the ocean, where giants once lived, but now it is deserted and waiting for your people. Sail to it; it will be your home forever. It will furnish your children with a new Troy. From your descendants will arise kings, who will be masters of the whole world.” Geoffrey of Monmouth, History, I§17 lines 305–13). 71 “Toutefois, Nitze va peut-être un peu trop loin en qualifiant cet épisode de ‘cannibalisme’. Il néglige un détail, où se lit précisément cette volonté de désamorcer la violence, ce détail est le passage par le cuit, lequel, du point de vue anthropologique, supprime la consommation directe de la chair et du sang. Dans le cuit les deux espèces ne se distinguent plus, l’homophagie est évitée.” (Regardless, Nitze takes it perhaps too far in qualifying this episode as “cannibalism.” He neglects one detail, that where precisely this desire to defuse violence can be read, this detail is the transformation in cooking, from an anthropological perspective, negates the direct consumption of flesh and blood. Once cooked, the two are no longer separate, and omophagy is avoided. Francis Dubost, “Le Perlesvaus, Livre de Haute Violence,” La Violence dans le monde médiévale (Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, 1994), n.p. While anthropophagy may make the modern reader uncomfortable, it also clearly made some medieval interpreters uncomfortable: Geoffrey of Monmouth recounts Brian giving Caduallo a piece of his thigh, which is more delicious than venison; Caduallo “ferinam carnem esse existimans, coepit ea uesci et sese reficere, admirans quod tantem dulcedinem in

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Ferlampin-Acher writes that the transition from mourning (regraite) to cannibalism “tempers” the violence as we shift from a chivalric/ romance register to a liturgical/exegetical one.72 While the text does shift from death to mourning, and from mourning to ritual, the aprés does not mark a clear break. As the Perlesvaus’s “most grotesque effort” (as Newman describes this scene73), the notion that we have left a chivalric register and switched to a liturgical one, as Ferlampin-Acher argues, seems improbable. It is not that we have shifted registers, rather that, as Newman argues, romance often deploys “double coding,” a “both/ and” system in which Christian sen can be extracted from pagan matiere.74 In other words, chivalric and liturgical registers are not as mutually exclusive as scholars from Northrop Frye to Ferlampin-Acher might like.75 Moreover, as much as even Bernard of Clairvaux posits courtly chivalry as anathema to Christian chivalry,76 the fusion of the two made Robert de Boron’s work, and the Vulgate that followed, possible. Grail romance, in its “lay” character, is able to theorize chivalry in novel ways, fusing Arthurian and Christian chivalry. Thus, I argue, this episode is grotesque and miraculous, a testament to both the customs of pagan Britain and the miraculous feats of faith and conversion. To attempt to dim or mute the violence and dismemberment would not do justice to the text, just as it would be to deny the clear Eucharistic allegory. The ethics of being a knight in romance is not at odds with being a crusader: they are one in the same. aliis carnibus non repperisset” [believing it to be the flesh of an animal, began to eat and refresh himself, full of wonder because he had never tasted meat so delicious], The History of the Kings of Britain, §193. In Wace’s version, Chadwalein (Caduallo) is refreshed but we are not sure how (“Ne sai li reis en gusta, | Mes il guari et trespassa,” [I do not know if the king tasted any, but he recovered and survived]), Roman de Brut: A History of the British, ed. Judith Weiss (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004), lines 14221–22, but sweetness (dulcedinem) is conspicuously lacking in the translation. 72 Ferlampin-Acher, “Fausse créance, mauvaise loi et conversion dans Perlesvaus,” 303–04. 73 Newman, Medieval Crossover, 77. 74 Ibid., 56. 75 Cf. Northrop Frye on “secular” vs “religious” romance in Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 34–35. 76 Bernard of Clairvaux defines the miles Christi as part of a meritocracy, in contrast to the foolish and aristocratic knights of court in his Liber ad milites templi de laude novae militiae (in Tractatus et Opuscula [Rome: Editiones Cistercienses], 1963, translated by M Conrad Greenia as In Praise of the New Knighthood: A Treatise on the Knights Templar and the Holy Places of Jerusalem (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2000), IV.7 p. 46; cf. Catalina Gîrbea, La couronne ou l’auréole : Royauté terrestre et chevalerie célestielle dans la légende arthurienne (xiie–xiiie siècles) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), especially 34–44.

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The Grail adventure thus ceases to be about Arthur’s sovereignty, and rewrites Arthurian romance as a crusade to explain how Britain became Christian, kingdom by kingdom. As Heather Blurton notes, medieval literature owes a “discourse of cannibalism in which the literary representation of cannibalism and the literary representations of barbarism, alterity, and colonization are inextricably linked.”77 And yet, as she notes, the “eucharist is, above all, a somatic image: eating the body of Christ incorporates bodies into that body and, by extension, incorporates them into Christian community” (my emphasis).78 Thus despite our horror as modern readers at the cannibalism of the scene, the eating of the prince’s flesh is the realization – the creation – of a Christian community. The Eucharist realized as a form of cannibalism stands in stark contrast to the anthropophagy and cannibalism of other romances, where it often functions as a means of showcasing the monstrosity of giants who go against the natural order and eat men or of depicting their sheer cruelty and abject qualities as they brag of acts of cannibalism, incest, infanticide, and the like.79 The Perlesvaus instead offers the beheaded giant as a sacrifice and trophy, the pagan son as a symbol of the sacrifice of Christ, and re-creates the Last Supper as Gurgaran feeds his son to his subjects for their salvation. Arthurian romance emerges not as simply a continuation of Scripture, but as reproducing its miracles. In the next episode I will address, we have a pagan queen, Jandrée, who first attempts to get Arthur to apostatize under penalty of further aggression on the part of her brother, Madaglan. She is introduced through a messenger, for she does not deign to be in the presence of Christians.80 The stereotype of the “blind Jew” is reinforced in Old French, for Jandrée does not deign to see (vooir) any Christian, but she also cannot see anything, including the truth (voir) of the New Law. The trope of Jews as blind goes back to Paul in Romans: “Nolo enim vos ignorare fratres mysterium hoc ut non sitis vobis ipsis sapientes quia caecitas ex parte contigit in Israhel donec plenitudo gentium intraret” (For I would not have you ignorant, brethren, of this mystery [lest you should be wise in 77

Heather Blurton, Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 4. 78 Ibid., 7. 79 Cf. Sylvia Huot, Outsiders: The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medieval French Prose Romance (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), especially the sections entitled “Cannibalism and the Category of the Human,” 52–58 and “Narrative Aggression: The Giant and his Riddles,” 177–85. 80 “Ele a en tel desdaig çax qui croient en la Novele Loi, qu’ele n’en daigne nul vooir” (She had such disdain for those who believed in the New Law that she refused to see them, lines 7940–41).

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your own conceits], that blindness in part has happened in Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles should come in; Romans 11:25).81 This tradition is embraced in the Perlesvaus, and while Jandrée is not introduced as a Jew, her narrative is in line with the anti-Jewish stereotypes of attacking Christians and refusing to see the truth. She also worships a plurality of gods, conflating Jews and the pre-Christian pagans of the British Isles. Conflating the Old Law of the Bible (the Old Testament) with the Old Law, or pagan tradition of pre-Christian Britain, maps Arthurian history onto biblical history, as if they run in parallel. Jandrée, we are told, had her eyes covered, “por ce qu’ele ne voloit mie vooir çaus qui en estoient” (lines 7942–43; because she did not want to see those who were part of [the New Law]), but then becomes actually blind, for which she joyfully thanks her own gods. She is simultaneous desirous of Arthur and seeking his demise – and yet it is the young Perlesvaus who changes her mind upon capturing her: Jandrée’s heart changes – “li est muëz ses corages” (line 9197; there was a muance [transformation] of her heart).82 A vision of the Crucifixion soon moves her to such lengths that she, upon witnessing the Virgin’s sadness, is moved to convert (lines 9231–44). Perlesvaus thus acts as a courtly vehicle, much like Gauvain above, to bring about the conversion of another population under Arthur and ultimately under God. While Gurgaran’s loss of his son forces him to convert, Jandrée witnesses the Crucifixion, opening her eyes, which returns her eyesight. Later Perlesvaus conquers another automaton-castle, the Chastel de la/le Tor de Cuevre. This will be Perlesvaus’s final great adventure, and, as Thomas Kelly notes, “the suggested ambiguities in the name of Perlesvaus’[s] last enemy” recall Saint Paul’s personification of death as a great enemy overcome by Christ.83 The Chastel de la/le Tor de Cuevre stands as a marvelous and terrifying edifice, created by a heathen people who worship the Copper Bull, or Tower, depending on the scribe’s choice of gender: 84 81

Cf. also Romans 11:7–11, 2 Corinthians 4:3–4: “quod si etiam opertum est evangelium nostrum in his qui pereunt est opertum in quibus deus huius saeculi excaecavit mentes infidelium ut non fulgeat inluminatio evangelii gloriae Christi qui est imago Dei” (And if our gospel be also hid, it is hid to them that are lost, In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of unbelievers, that the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not shine unto them), and see also Wheatley, “‘Blind’ Jews and Blind Christians.” 82 The use of the verb muer, often used for muances of the Grail, makes her transformation all the more marvelous. 83 Kelly, Le Haut Livre du Graal: Perlesvaus, 105–07. 84 See note 85.

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Il avoit la dedenz mout gent qui le [sic] Tor de Cuevre aoroient, e qui ne creoient en autre deu. La [sic] Tor de Cuevre estoit enmi le chastel, sor ·iiii· columbes de cuevre, e braoit si tres durement a totes les ores dou jour que ele estoit oïe ·i· louee environ, e avoit mauvais esperit dedenz qui lor donoit respons de canqu’il voloit oïr. A l’entree de la porte avoit ·ii· homes faiz par l’art de nigromance; si tenoient ·ii· grans maus de fer, si s’açouploient e feroient tres durement que nule rien en tot le mont ne peüst paser parmi leur cops que tot ne fust confundu. (lines 5922–30) (Inside were many people who worshipped the Copper Bull [sic], and who believed in no other god. The Copper Tower [sic, see previous note] was inside the castle, on four copper columns, and it roared so loud that it could be heard every hour of the day from a league away; it had an evil spirit inside which gave [these people] the response to whatever they wanted to hear. At the door’s entry there were two men, made by the art of sorcery, who held two great iron hammers, and they struck and crushed so hard that no one in the world could pass between their blows without being obliterated.)

Manuscripts confuse la tor (the tower) with le tor (the bull), and while the structure is often surrounded, like a tower, it also bellows like a bull (or, in ms Br., a horn, cor).85 The bull-tower is thus an automaton which conflates the Golden Calf or Brazen Bull with miraculous accounts of automata in the East. The castle’s structure and the pair of automata defenders are inspired by an episode in the Roman d’Alexandre,86 but it is also difficult not to recall the contemporary account of Clari, with grand copper women and great towers housing stylites in Constantinople. The material of the two men is not explained, but they will later be identified as being made of copper as well (vilain de coivre, line 5953). 85

Ms. O. favors la tor, ms. P favors le tor., and ms. Br favors le cor; as FerlampinArcher notes, “L’épisode de la Tor de Cuivre repose sur une hésitation entre le Tor et la Tor, et bien que les tours ne soient pas nécessairement rondes, il semble que l’homonymie entre tor (turris) et tor (torner) favorise dans l’épisode l’image d’un bâtiment rond, d’autant que la racine virer est très présente dans le passage” (“The episode of the Copper Tower based on a hesitation between le Tor and la Tor and that the towers are not necessarily round; it appears that the homonymous tor (turris) and tor (torner) promotes the image of a round building in this episode, especially as the root turn [virer] is very present in the passage.” “Fausse créance, mauvaise loi et conversion dans Perlesvaus,” 308), and “La distinction entre le tor et la tor n’est pas nette et cette ambiguïté nourrit le merveilleux” (“The distinction between le tor and la tor is not clear and that ambiguity nourishes the marvelous,” Fées, bestes et luitons. Croyances et merveilles dans les romans français en prose (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2002), 371). 86 Lambert le Tort and Alexandre de Paris, Li romans d’Alixandre, ed. Heinrich Michelant (Stuttgart: Literarischen Vereins, 1846), 444–45; cf. notes in Perlesvaus, II.314–16.

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No one can pass through these gates, and Perlesvaus gawks at the sight (lines 5932–33). It is hard for a reader not to be in awe of the vivid description of the copper bull crying out, or the copper automata guarding this ancient copper idol inside. While not explicitly an automaton, the tower/bull rests on a pedestal and its metallic vibrancy, perhaps even its animacy, is not far from its automata-protectors, the two copper men “faiz par l’art de nigromance” (made by the art of sorcery, lines 5927–28). God renders the automata guardians impotent with the advent of a knight as worthy (bon) as Perlesvaus, thus he enters unscathed (lines 5933–37). The pagans, so intent on their idol and assured by the security provided by the automata, take note of Perlesvaus’s entrance but quickly return to their prayers, so intently has this false religion focused them on prayer (lines 5944–47). He crosses a bridge to the castle, and follows instructions from a voice on high: God, it must be assumed, thus directs Perlesvaus to take the castle, which he does unharmed. As the pagans flee, their copper automata turn on them, killing all but thirteen of the 1,500 worshippers (lines 5952–59). Perlesvaus is marked as both savior and executioner, particularly with the use of “si les avironne toz” (then he surrounded them all, line 5954), a marked shift from earlier, when we encountered the bull surrounded by its worshippers (“qui estoit avironné de la gent,” line 5940). With most pagans crushed under the hammers of their automata protectors, the “mauvais esperit” (devil) occupying the bull/tower escapes “comme foudre” (like lightning) and its shell collapses in a heap (lines 5959–60). A hermit named Denis baptizes the surviving thirteen men, and they help dispose of the bodies of “mescranz” (misbelievers) into the “flun d’infer (lines 5961–67; River of Hell). Traces of the past are fleeting: with the mauvais esperit gone, the castle is renamed Chasteaux del Esai (Castle of the Trial, line 5967), and the thirteen retire to the forests to start hermitages and live out lives of penance for their sins, seeking the love of God (lines 5970–73). The Tor de Cuevre thus appears both as a figure of mythology and an object so miraculous that witnessing brings forth awe. The shock of such a massive, bellowing, copper automaton can be read as a pagan monstrosity so horrifying that it must be witnessed. It also could be better read as a lesson, showcasing the abject terror of the alternative to Christianity. It may not traffic in the anti-Semitic tropes of the previous two episodes discussed, but it does present an abject pagan (often romance code for “Saracen”), needing to be forcibly brought under the New Law – or executed. The renaming of the castle marks it as a holy site, a commemoration of Perlesvaus’s brave deeds to secure yet another victory for Arthur – and Christendom.

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All three of the above adventures set up a certain motif: a nonChristian actor, or actors, anathema and hostile to Christianity and to the Grail Quest, are marked as violent interlopers who put the kingdom, even Christendom, at risk. Violence thus emerges as a threat, and as a solution. There is this category of virtuous violence, linked to the virtuousness of crusader ethics, and nefarious violence that exists beyond the hands of Arthur’s knights. When Perlesvaus drowns the Sire des Mores in the blood of his own men, the Christian knight triumphantly offers the following insult (ranpogne): “vos ne peüstes onques estre saolez del sanc as chevaliers madame ma mere, mais ge vos saoleré del sanc as vos !” (lines 5396–98; You could never have your fill of the blood of my mother’s knights, but I’ll make sure you are sated with that of your men!). Perlesvaus’s revenge may be personal, but it is also coded as part of a divine project to reign in pagans, Saracens, Jews, and other others at the edges of the Christo-Arthurian realm. The realms of Gurgaran, Jandrée, and the Chastel de la/le Tor de Cuevre all offer perceived, existential threats to Christendom. Gurgaran had previously been hostile to Christians but sees the giant as a larger threat than that of conversion, and Jandrée does not repent and convert until her vision. The pagans of the Chastel de la/le Tor de Cuevre, on the other hand, are brought in through the direct action of God as automata turn on their makers. When Walter Benjamin wonders “whether violence, as a principle, could be a moral means to a just ends,” he is pondering this very question of categories of violence.87 The Perlesvaus clearly makes a distinction between divine justice/retribution and unholy violence. Benjamin points out that “violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law.”88 At first glance, a marauding band of knights who wander off onto their own quests seems to be this very kind of individual action. And yet, from the flawed Gauvain to the immature-but-divinelyinspired Perlesvaus, these knights all figure as actors under the New Law, and thus this violence is always justified. Thus emerges an apparatus of chivalric violence, an ethics of extermination, and a means of categorically dividing violence into just and unjust and life into worthy of salvation or worthy of a ditch. There is a deeply biopolitical frame that emerges in creating these distinctions, in marking which lives live and which must be exterminated. 87

Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Mariner, 2019), 291– 316: 291. 88 Ibid., 295.

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Michel Foucault defined medieval sovereign power in terms of “le droit de faire mourir ou de laisser vivre” (the right to make die or let live),89 in contrast to the more “modern” biopolitical frame of “le droit de faire vivre et de laisser mourir” (the right to let live and make die).90 The Perlesvaus offers a dark and at times necropolitical ethics in which making die is paired with making live: the forced conversions are a form of biopolitical control, of making-live but also facilitating conversion and thus redemption. Arthurian knights are not simply wandering about in search of adventures, they are sent to covert, to subject and to enforce compliance with the blurry legal framework that is both Arthur’s law and the New Law.91 This totalizing framework thus offers a model to reread all Arthurian romance as leading to this necropolitical teleology. In conclusion, a romance such as the Perlesvaus demands that we, as readers, engage in an ethical practice of reading that takes the romance’s own ethics seriously. In dismissing this romance as not conforming to what we think a romance should be, we dismiss the nation-building fantasy that runs deep in the idea of Arthur, the Round Table, and the Quest. The Perlesvaus amplifies the genre, and its commitment to romance as a genre of Christian fantasy is not isolated. The religiosity of the Queste del Saint Graal is clear although much more palatable. The manuscript tradition also shows that the Perlesvaus circulated in part, or in whole, in prose compilations including other Arthurian romances, the Roman de Renart, fabliaux, and some texts on Jerusalem (La complainte de Jerusalem, La devise del saint liu de Jherusalem).92 If the Perlesvaus was included in these compilations, and traces of the Perlesvaus are present in both chronicle and literature from the Prose Lancelot and Fouke le Fitz Waryn to John of Glastonbury’s Cronica and Malory’s “Most Noble Tale of Launcelot du Lake,” how aberrant is its content? It was paired with the Queste in its first

89

Michel Foucault, La volonté de savoir (Histoire de la sexualité I) (Paris: Gallimard [Tel], 1976), 178. 90 Michel Foucault, « Il faut défendre la société »: Cours au Collège de France. 1976 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil [Hautes Études], 1997), 214. 91 On the Perlesvaus as a biopolitical fantasy, see also Joseph Derosier, “The Forest and the Heath: Defining the Human in Medieval Romance,” Literature Compass 16, nos 9–10 (2019). 92 See, especially, the following manuscripts: Bern, Stadtbibliothek, ms. 113 s. xiii: This manuscript contains two small fragments, which are part of an anthology of vernacular texts; Chantilly, Bibliothèque et Archives du Château, ms. 472, s. xiiiin: Here Perlesvaus is included in a collection of prose and verse romance, perhaps framed as a Gauvain cycle; see Lori Walters, “The Formation of a Gauvain Cycle in Chantilly Manuscript 472,” Neophilologus 78:1 (1994), 29–43.

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printing (1516),93 as if the two texts were a natural pairing, flying against what we, as modern readers, would see as irreconcilable differences between the two. The Perlesvaus thus emerges as a politically engaged text in dialogue with romance and chronicle, fantasizing about the colonial conquest of Britain, fetishizing crusader violence, and mapping that ethic onto the history of Arthur. This romance asks us to realign our vision of romance and to see the Arthurian project as one of settler colonialism, to convert the imagined literary space of Britain as a new Jerusalem, a new Holy Land. With Jerusalem having fallen to Saladin in 1187, and with the Third Crusade ending the failure to recapture the city, the author of the Perlesvaus created a new space to imagine holy war and holy conquest. Britain emerges thus as a cipher for Jerusalem. Using the mythology of Arthur to imagine a pre-medieval crusade in the British Isles offers us a vision of romance and Christianity that is rooted in violence rather than imagining these forms of violence as temporary aberrations.

93

L’Hystoire du Sainct Greaal (Paris: Gal[l]iot du Pré, 1516); Reprinted with introduction by C.E. Pickford (London: Scolar Press, 1978).

5

Translation Praxis and the Ethical Value of Chivalry in the Caligula Brut

CHRISTOPHER JENSEN

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xtant in two quite different late thirteenth-century manuscripts, Laȝamon’s Brut is a lengthy Middle English alliterative verse chronicle probably composed nearer the beginning of that century and adapted, ultimately, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1138).1 In spite of being the earliest vernacular English account of the life of the Briton King Arthur, a warrior who famously drove Germanic invaders out of Britain, the poem has also been commonly regarded in critical literature as distinctly “Saxon” in its form and themes, a sort of last atavistic gasp of resistance against the encroaching Continental cultural shift already well underway in England by the early 1200s. Haruko Momma has demonstrated that this foundational strand of scholarship emerged from the poem’s earliest modern critics in the mid-1800s, many of whom studied the text primarily for its philological value. Frederic Madden, for example, influentially identified the poem as having been written in “Semi-Saxon,” a term, according to Momma, “first applied to the transitional vernacular of post-Conquest England by George

1

Paleographical and codicological evidence mounted by C. E. Wright and N. R. Ker, respectively, strongly suggests such a late date of composition for both manuscripts. Ker promotes a possible date after 1275. See C. E. Wright, English Vernacular Hands from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960) and N. R. Ker, The Owl and the Nightingale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963). The precise dating of the original text of Laȝamon’s poem has been a subject of much debate, many scholars arguing that the poem’s most basic meaning depends on when and under what conditions it was composed. A detailed critical bibliography on the subject is compiled in Francoise Le Saux, Laȝamon’s Brut: The Poem and its Sources (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), 1–13. I follow Le Saux’s proposed range of 1189–1216, although I favor a post-1204 date after the loss of England’s Continental holdings following the reading of Jonathan Davis-Secord, cited below.

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Hickes and adopted by subsequent generations of scholars until at least the 1870s when Henry Sweet introduced the three-part division of Old, Middle, and Modern English.”2 These nineteenth-century philologists thus conceptualized Laȝamon and his national epic of “Englene londe”3 (England) as belonging to an era before the emergence of what they strictly considered “English.” The Brut, therefore, constituted some kind of semi-articulate grasping at the still abstract idea of a postHastings English state and people. There amid the sprawling 16,000 lines of a thirteenth-century English priest’s national epic, scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries perceived a reflection of their own splintering empires: a defiant antiquarianism scaffolded by the language and social structures of an old world undergoing rapid and inexorable cultural change. But this reading was not strictly accurate. Laȝamon’s poem, for all its seeming originality, is at its core a translation and adaptation of the twelfth-century Old French Roman de Brut by the Jèrriais poet Wace. Madden acknowledges this fact, classifying the Brut as a “paraphrase,” but the tools of philology at the height of the British Empire were not perhaps as finely attuned to questions of cultural difference as their practitioners may have imagined. Writing c. 1155, ostensibly for the court of the new King Henry II and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Wace presents a version of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia in elegant French verse, updating the narrative to reflect the courtly culture of the Roman’s intended royal audience. Wace has been credited in large part with the meteoric rise of Arthurian romance in the Anglo-Norman-Angevin courts, and – as Charity Urbanski has pointed out – likely labored on his subject specifically in order for the new Continental regents of England to substantiate their own place at the dynastic table after the years of civil war now known as the Anarchy.4 The Britons of the Roman de Brut (as in Geoffrey’s Historia, Wace’s primary source), are rendered time and again as poor stewards of their God-given island, rhetorically suggesting that they do not deserve autonomous rule for want of moral character, but Wace’s courtly French narration introduces a distinct and palpable air of cultural superiority to this configuration, a historiographical intervention 2



Haruko Momma, “The Brut as Saxon Literature: The New Philologists Read Lawman,” in Reading Laȝamon’s Brut: Approaches and Explorations, ed. Carole Weinberg, Jane Roberts, and Rosamund Allen (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 56–57. 3 W. R. J. Barron and S. C. Weinberg, Laȝamon’s Brut (New York: Longman, 1995), l. 9. My translations follow throughout except where otherwise noted. 4 Charity Urbanski, Writing History for the King: Henry II and the Politics of Vernacular Historiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

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that would have important and far-ranging implications for Arthurian literature more generally and for Laȝamon’s succeeding English poem. It is Wace, for instance, who first introduces the celebrated Round Table and who first clearly presents Arthur in the style and manner of a French chevalier. His influential account of the history of Britain was sometimes even bound together with the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes, further blurring generic distinctions between history and romance and further elevating the rhetorical status of Arthur, his knights, and the perceived ethics of their culture of chivalry in the Francophone literary imagination.5 Any serious discussion of ethics in Arthurian literature requires a sure-footed entrée into the minefield of defining chivalry, that slipperiest of medieval European buzzwords. Maurice Keen’s oft-cited 1984 study is perhaps best remembered for its foundational assertion that chivalry is not simply the culture and actions of warriors mounted on horseback: “One can define within reasonably close limits what is meant by the word knight, the French chevalier… But chivalry, the abstraction from chevalier, is not so easily pinned down.”6 Unlike later coinages such as “feudalism” or “renaissance,” chivalry as a defined term saw a number of medieval usages beyond its common usage today. It could refer, for instance, as a collective noun to a literal group of knights or it could refer to particular deeds of prouesse to be personally accomplished – the thirteenth-century Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal includes a scene in which knights ride forth “por faire chevalerie,” literally to do chivalry.7 Although several clusters of meaning are extant in medieval documents from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, it is generally agreed among scholars that no matter the language or period, medieval writers most often “use the term chivalry [and its synonyms] to convey an accepted or desired set of ideas and practices,” i.e. ethics, especially for aristocratic men.8 Delineating what those ideas actually were, of course, is the tricky bit. For many modern readers, “chivalry” connotes a formal code of conduct, as in the Pentecostal Oath popularized by Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur and its various adaptations. However, although all historians of the Middle Ages are tempted at one time or another to read history backward, we 5

On BnF, fr. 1450, see Lori Walters, “Le Rôle du scribe dans l’organisation des manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes,” Romania 106 (1985), 303–25. 6 Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 1–2. 7 History of William Marshal, vol. one, ed. A. J. Holden (Oxford: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2002), l. 176. 8 Richard M. Kaeuper, Medieval Chivalry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 9.

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must – following Richard Kaeuper – “avoid the notion of a rigid and singular code or detailed list of inalterable practices, set forth once and always and everywhere agreed upon and enacted.”9 Chivalry must be approached, rather, as a significantly more nuanced ethical construct (or, more accurately, set of plural constructs) because “precisely how chivalric ideals applied to specific and complex situations in life inevitably varied by region, over time, and with pressing particular circumstances.”10 The historical fact of this variance opens Laȝamon’s text to fruitful comparative study against its primary source, Wace’s courtly French Roman de Brut. My aim in this article is not to attempt any sort of historical reconstruction of thirteenth-century English aristocratic military practice but rather to identify the ways in which Laȝamon alters the chivalric context and content of his narrative in order to articulate an ethical construct notably at odds with the courtly one he inherited from Wace. Through the process of translation, Laȝamon alters the skopos of the narrative in order to reinterpret the legendary figures and events of the Roman de Brut and filter them through a less aristocratic – perhaps even protopopulist – ideology. Skopos, first set forth by Katharina Reiß and Hans Vermeer,11 is a technical term by which to identify the aim or purpose of a translation. As Susan Bassnett explains, Reiß and Vermeer’s “hypothesis is that the aim of the translation justifies the strategies employed,”12 which is to say the translation itself and the reader’s interpretation of that translation must take into account the intended purpose of the target text, which may or may not have any clear connection with the purpose of the source text. Skopos provides a useful vocabulary to bridge, perhaps, the linguistic and affective turns in the study of historical literature, shifting emphasis from the lexicon of a given translation to the consequence of its composition for an intended audience. Since the medieval source and target texts in question for the present study have demonstrably different audiences, the critic must evaluate the English translation not solely from a perspective of formal equivalence or rarefied aesthetics, as was the trend previous to the twenty-first century, but from an understanding of the specific and complex needs and expectations of the target audience. Ultimately, the Brut appears intended to critique not only the ethical practice(s) of chivalry by an individual knight or knightly community, as 9

Ibid., 10. Ibid., 10. 11 Katharina Reiß and Hans J. Vermeer, Towards a General Theory of Translational Action: Skopos Theory Explained (New York: Routledge, 2014). 12 Susan Bassnett, Translation (New York: Routledge, 2014), 6. 10

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in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, but the pervasive ethical construct of chivalry as an ennobling grace available only to the ruling class – i.e., the construct popularized but Wace. By the time Laȝamon began his English translation of the Roman de Brut in the early thirteenth century, the ancient British King Arthur was a deeply ingrained cultural figure, in large part due to the influx of romance literature that came with the conquering Norman aristocrats. Continental Angevin monarchs had held the throne of England for half a century or more and, unlike the legendary Arthur, were not universally popular among the pre-existing peoples of the island. King John, in particular, likely the ruling monarch when Laȝamon composed his poem, was lambasted by contemporary chroniclers such as Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, and his name became a byword in later centuries for dynastic failure. Moreover, as Jonathan Davis-Secord has noted, before John’s loss of his holdings in continental France to Capetian conquest in 1204, the Norman-Angevin aristocracy “had maintained a sense of cultural and even racialized distance between themselves and the ‘native’ inhabitants of Britain, viewing, for example, the Welsh and the Scots as barbaric threats to the English nation.”13 Henry II himself held virulently anti-Celtic views, initiating the following millennium of the English Crown’s political and military involvement in Ireland, and Jean Blacker has argued that Wace’s poem was committed to the “draining of political import from the material associated with Arthur,” at least relative to Geoffrey of Monmouth, for this very reason.14 Thus, perhaps especially when considering Laȝamon in relation to his primary courtly French source, the notion of assigning nationalist or proto-nationalist sentiment has been a recurring critical problem in studies of the Brut for more than a century. As a British historical chronicle translated from courtly French couplets into alliterative Early Middle English near the Welsh border during the Angevin period of Norman rule in England, the Brut presents itself as a complicated puzzle box for scholars attempting to define the poem’s scope and intention. The Brut has been characterized, for various 13

Jonathan Davis-Secord, “Revising Race in Laȝamon’s Brut,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 116. 2 (2017), 157. 14 Jean Blacker, “Transformations of a Theme: The Depoliticization of the Arthurian World in the Roman de Brut,” in The Arthurian Tradition: Essays in Convergence, ed. Mary Flowers Braswell and John Bugge (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1988), 70. See also Martin Aurell, “Henry II and Arthurian Legend,” in Henry II: New Interpretations, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), 362–94 for an account of the uses of Arthurian pseudo-history as Angevin propaganda during the reigns of Richard and John.

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reasons and in a variety of contexts, as anti-Norman, anti-Saxon, antiBriton, and even politically unconcerned with the material world in the face of inscrutable divine providence.15 Beyond any hazy impression of “ambivalence,” however, it is clear to most readers of Laȝamon’s poem that its narrative is inherently political by virtue of belonging to the established genre of national chronicle. Although it was not nearly as influential on popular historiography as the later Middle English and Anglo-Norman Prose Brut chronicles (as detailed by Lister Matheson and Julia Marvin16), it has been shown through analysis of the Latin marginalia in the longer Caligula manuscript that Laȝamon’s poem was evidently received by medieval readers as a serious attempt at the historical chronicle, perhaps in spite of its vernacular register and alliterative verse form.17 Because of this, it is important to consider that when Laȝamon states in his prologue “þet he wolde of Engle þa æðelæn tellen, / wat heo ihoten weoren and wonene he comen / þa Englene londe ærest ahten” (that he would tell of the nobles of England, what they were called and from where they came that first possessed the land of England),18 he does not speak of England the same way that Frederic Madden did in the reign of Queen Victoria. Rather, “Englishness,” as it was understood in its earliest form in the ninth century and through to the historiographical tradition of Laȝamon 15

For a relatively succinct trek through the scholarly wilds, see first Ian Kirby, “Angles and Saxons in Laȝamon’s Brut,” Studia Neophilologica 36 (1964), 195–219, followed by Le Saux, 1989, and Neil Wright, “Angles and Saxons in Laȝamon’s Brut: A Reassessment,” in The Text and Tradition of Laȝamon’s Brut, ed. Françoise Le Saux (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 161–70. The most recent, and in my view most nuanced, entry into the debate is found in Margaret Lamont, “When are the Saxons ‘Ænglisc’?: Language and Readerly Identity in Laȝamon’s Brut,” in Reading Laȝamon’s Brut: Approaches and Explorations, ed. Carole Weinberg, Jane Roberts, and Rosamund Allen (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 295–319. Another influential branch of the argument holds that Laȝamon’s narratorial attitude toward the historical past is not charged in any particular institutional direction but is, rather, essentially ambivalent, simultaneously supporting the budding proto-nationalist sentiment of the thirteenth-century English and rejecting its ancestral terms in order to merge English national identity with British history as a form of resistance against the imposition of Norman language and culture. See Daniel Donoghue, “Laȝamon’s Ambivalence,” Speculum 65.3 (1990), 537–63, although more recent scholars do not accept the specific terms of Donoghue’s argument. 16 Lister M. Matheson, The Prose Brut: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle (Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University Press, 1998) and Julia Marvin, The Construction of Vernacular History in the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle (York: York Medieval Press, 2017). 17 Carole Weinberg, “The Latin Marginal Glosses in the Caligula Manuscript of Laȝamon’s Brut,” in The Text and Contexts of Laȝamon’s Brut, ed. Françoise Le Saux (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 103–21. 18 Barron and Weinberg, Laȝamon’s Brut, lines 7–9.

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and his contemporaries, was nearly always a semi-fluid, intentionally inclusive category of communal political identity: one that could easily be made to encompass ethnic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, in addition to Britons, Bretons, Danes, and perhaps even – by the early thirteenth century, some 150 years after the Conquest – those disparate Continental peoples previously called Normans. Davis-Secord notes that the Otho scribe, composing what many consider a diplomatic redaction of Laȝamon’s original poem, introduces several French loan words into the text while extensively reducing the use of compounds involving the English term leod, which, though it can simply mean “land,” more often connotes a racially defined people or community. He suggests that the Otho scribe’s revision expresses a particular late thirteenth-century attitude toward Englishness that saw Norman English literati, decades after the 1204 loss of Normandy, selfidentifying as English and thus downplaying anything in the Brut that would have drawn attention to their particular status as newcomers or outsiders.19 If Davis-Secord’s diagnosis of the Otho scribe’s revisionary praxis holds, then the Caligula scribe, by virtue of the numerous differences between their texts, must be doing something else entirely with regard to Insular vs Continental identity. Neil Wright has categorically shown that Laȝamon’s narration in the Caligula text does not distinguish between “good (Christian) Angles” and “evil (pagan) Saxons,”20 a reading that had previously been standard for decades, and although Françoise Le Saux’s 1989 monograph is iconic and foundationally important, its characterization of the Brut as emphatically anti-Norman is based largely on one difficult passage for which there are a dozen counter-examples. Rather, although Geraldine Heng argues that one of the key functions of foundation myths like the Brut is to form national identity through selfdefinition against a rival community,21 if we are also to reject the stridently nationalist readings of the poem in favor of a more culturally fluid politics of inclusion (as embraced by Rosamund Allen, Jacqueline Burek, and Kelley Wickham-Crowley, each based on different aspects of the poem’s audience, language, and narrative composition, respectively),22 then we 19

Davis-Secord, “Revising Race in Laȝamon’s Brut,” 156–81. Neil Wright, “Angles and Saxons in Laȝamon’s Brut: A Reassessment,” in The Text and Tradition of Laȝamon’s Brut, ed. Françoise Le Saux, (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 161–70. 21 Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 22 Rosamund Allen, “Did Lawman Nod, or is it We that Yawn?,” in Reading Laȝamon’s Brut: Approaches and Explorations, ed. Carole Weinberg, Jane Roberts, and Rosamund Allen (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 21–51; Jacqueline Burek, “‘Ure Bruttisce speche’: 20

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are left with a much more specific puzzle to work through. I argue this particular problem has its basis in Laȝamon’s presentation of the customs and behavior of Arthur and his court. What has often been taken as generally anti-Norman sentiment in the Brut might more usefully be seen as anti-chivalric, rejecting the burgeoning Continental ideology that had begun to restrict claims of moral goodness to the aristocratic class. On a level of pure narrative, Laȝamon produces, in Le Saux’s estimation, “a fairly faithful translation.”23 He does not significantly alter the overarching events or major characters, ostensibly because he is treating his subject as a narration of actual events, at least as he understood them. J. S. P. Tatlock notes that Laȝamon “almost never inserts wholly new episodes or incidents, except amplifications of what he has found in Wace,”24 but these amplifications, as many scholars have noted, increase the length of the English poem relative to its source by about 1,200 lines.25 Le Saux, building on the earlier work of Håkan Ringbom,26 provides an indispensable table comparing the lengths of the major episodes in Wace’s and Laȝamon’s respective poems, along with an objective measure of the difference between them.27 Although the table does not account for any translocations of narrative content, narratorial asides, or general differences in language and literary technique, it does show obvious trends in Laȝamon’s overall process of adaptation, such as compression of the initial Brutus episode before he arrives in Albion – a loss of 197 total lines – and a steady march toward expansion starting with the birth of Christ during the reign of Kimbelin. The passages bearing some of the most sustained amplification are found in what may generally be called the Saxon section, including those scenes involving Constantine, Vortigern, and Uther. Overwhelmingly, however, the biggest changes occur in the Arthurian section proper, a full 1021 lines added to the Language, Culture, and Conquest in Laȝamon’s Brut,” Arthuriana 26.1 (2016), 108–23; and Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley, “Laȝamon’s Narrative Innovations and Bakhtin’s Theories,” in The Text and Tradition of Laȝamon’s Brut,” ed. Francoise Le Saux (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 207–26. 23 Le Saux, Laȝamon’s Brut, 24. 24 J. S. P. Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1950), 489. 25 Following Brook and Leslie’s edition, and later Barron and Weinberg’s, which reckons each set of two half-lines as one long line, roughly corresponding, in terms of meaning, to one French couplet. Madden’s earlier edition numbered the poem by half-lines, resulting in a 32,341-line poem and thereby dramatically inflating the poem’s perceived length, which is, in fact, not substantially longer than the Roman de Brut when counted sense unit for sense unit. 26 Håkan Ringbom, Studies in the Narrative Technique of Beowulf and Lawman’s Brut (Turku, Finland: Åbo Akademi University Press, 1968). 27 Le Saux, Laȝamon’s Brut, 31.

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episode beginning with Arthur’s war of repatriation against the Saxon lord Childric through his conquest of France. A further 902 total lines are actually removed from the episode beginning with the Roman challenge through Arthur’s death, a sizable reduction in total, especially in light of the major addition of a striking and apparently original dream sequence beginning at line 13971. Le Saux’s table allows for a top-down look at the structure of Laȝamon’s poem in comparison to his French exemplar, and it is clear that his alterations emphasize particular moments in his “English” history, notably the beginning of Arthur’s reign and the events that led to it. Given that emphasis, each text’s handling of the figure of Arthur presents an enlightening case study for how the two poets each construct an explicit ethics of knighthood in radically different terms. Operating within the chronicle genre (broadly construed) and relatively early within the tradition of the Matter of Britain, both Wace and Laȝamon primarily retain their focus on Arthur himself – rather than any of his knights – as the locus of knightly ethics. He is established in parallel introductory passages, immediately after the death of his father Uther Pendragon, as the measure by which his followers may be judged, and he sets a high bar in both texts, even at just fifteen years old. Wace relates that he was “de sun eage fors e granz” (strong for his age and tall) and that “chevaliers fu mult vertuus, / mult fus preisanz, mult glorius” (he was a very strong knight, / he was very renowned, very famous).28 Although the passage lays out a clear description of Arthur’s martial power, what sets it apart from other similar descriptive portraits in the Roman de Brut is its conspicuous length and sustained focus on his courtly manners. A full half of Wace’s description of Arthur is devoted to his “cuntint” (behavior), which is recorded as “mult noblement” (very noble),29 a departure from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s text, in which Arthur is celebrated in just one sentence for his “magnae virtutis et audaciae atque largitatis” (great courage, boldness, and generosity).30 Among Arthur’s many non-military virtues in the Roman de Brut, Wace lists his compassion toward the humble (line 9020), his liberality (line 9022), and his willingness to offer aid to anyone who asked it of him (lines 9023–24). Above all other things, however, Arthur is said to have loved “preis” and “gloire” (renown and 28

Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British, revised edition, ed. Judith Weiss (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), lines 9014, 9017–18. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 29 Ibid., 9028. 30 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, ed. Jacob Hammer (New York: Medieval Academy, 1951), 226.

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glory),31 and while the reader is informed that Arthur greatly wished for his “faiz” (deeds) to be committed to memory,32 the passage closes with the declaration that “tant cum il vesqui e regna / tuz alters princes surmunta / de curteisie e de noblesce / e de vertu e de largesce” (for as long as he lived and reigned, / he surpassed all other rulers / in courtesy and in nobility / and in power and in generosity).33 Since this passage inaugurates the Arthurian section of Wace’s poem, its description of the legendary king primes the audience to understand Arthur for the rest of the narrative as not simply a mighty warrior but also a mannered lord, the son of a king and a de facto member of the ruling class. The deeds Arthur is to be remembered for in this influential French-language account – i.e., those which earn him lasting literary preis and gloire – are thus the ones he performs both nobly and courteously according to the fashion and expectation of Wace’s audience, the twelfth-century Norman courts. Wace very carefully weds curteisie, a decidedly Continental and elite set of social behaviors, to Geoffrey’s simple portrait of a generous insular military leader. Although chivalry and courtesy are not strictly synonymous, scholars of military history have traditionally seen the gradual merger of a warrior ethos with the noble and ennobling social grace of ruling-class “courtliness” in the tenth through twelfth centuries as the genesis of European chivalry itself. Kaeuper notes that by the time Wace was composing his poem in the twelfth century, the chevalier had become a potent symbol of social stratification among the Continental elite: “Almost without exception, great French lords from roughly the eleventh century (such as the counts of Anjou, Champagne, Flanders, Maine, and Nevers) significantly portrayed themselves [in their royal seals] as mounted and armored warriors… Such warrior self-presentations would become the proud image of many lords for centuries to come, emphasizing the continuity of a core military function and a link to status in emerging chivalry.”34 We may thus locate in Wace’s description of the young King Arthur – almost certainly composed for a noble Continental court, perhaps even that of Henry II, who after 1154 was the simultaneous king of England, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and count of Anjou and Maine – an early articulation of what Keen regarded as “the classic virtues of good knighthood: prouesse, loyauté, largesse (generosity), courtoisie, and franchise (the free and frank bearing that is visible testimony 31

Weiss, Wace’s Roman de Brut, line 9025. Ibid., line 9026. 33 Ibid., lines 9029–32. 34 Kaeuper, Medieval Chivalry, 98–99. See also Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, Form and Order in Medieval France (New York: Routledge, 1993), especially 1–31. 32

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to the combination of good birth with virtue).”35 Keen notes that these qualities are nearly universally associated with some literary notion of chivalry as early as the romances of Chrétien de Troyes (c. 1170–90), but Wace, writing a decade or two earlier, might be more accurately said to be their fons et origo. Arthur, in a descriptive passage more than twice as long as others like it in the Roman de Brut, is specifically praised for behaviors we may easily identify with his prouesse (line 9021), his loyauté (lines 9023–24), his largesse (line 9022), his courtoisie (line 9027), and his franchise (line 9028). Although Wace does not use Keen’s retrospective vocabulary exactly, these are explicitly the ethical qualities that distinguish Arthur as a chevalier (line 9017), a social role which by 1155 had already been established as a powerful signifier in Continental culture of elite status and exclusively aristocratic social values – viz., the continual semantic widening in the English language of noble to mean “ethically good.” Keen’s is just one formulation of chivalry, however, and a modern academic one at that. “It is important to acknowledge,” writes Kaeuper, that the actual practice of chivalry was neither singular nor static and “that medieval reformers sought changes in these formulations. Chrétien de Troyes, to take one eminent example, wanted a knighthood more concerned with service than vainglory,” a preoccupation which directly affected his presentation of the chivalric ideal in his romances.36 We might then consider Wace’s attention to Arthur’s courtesy as an early step toward Chrétien’s masterful deconstructions of chivalric habitus,37 but the ideology of Arthur’s presentation in Wace is not yet on its own particularly complex. As Julia Marvin keenly observes, “Arthur’s courtesy [in Wace] is invoked in relation to those who serve him,”38 by which we may understand that Arthur is primarily figured in the Roman de Brut – unsurprisingly – as a Continental lord deserving of the service he receives from his vassals by virtue of his social status and intrinsic aristocratic behavior, demonstrated through his cuntint mult noblement. Although his historic emergence in Wace’s poem as a mounted chevalier in the fashion of virtually every contemporary great lord in France was a watershed moment for Arthur’s characterization in medieval literature (and beyond), his descriptive portrait in the Roman de Brut serves less to 35

Keen, Chivalry, 2. Kaeuper, Medieval Chivalry, 40. 37 See Norris Lacy, The Craft of Chrétien de Troyes (Leiden: Brill, 1980) for a full and classic account of Chrétien’s foundational chivalric catechisms or, more recently, my own “The Role of the Lion in the Middle English Ywain and Gawain,” Arthuriana 30.1 (2020), 1–21. 38 Marvin, 98. 36

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say anything of substance about the material practice of chivalry than it does to rhetorically “claim” Arthur as an early and perhaps originary practitioner of the Continental aristocratic culture in vogue in the midtwelfth century when the poem was written. Laȝamon’s English version of Arthur’s introduction, by contrast, actively works against the prevailing formulations of chivalry practiced among the Continental courtly elite. Because the English poem was composed in the early thirteenth century, several decades after the influential Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes and contemporaneously with the earliest components of the French prose Lancelot-Grail cycle, it is important to understand that Laȝamon, unlike Wace, inherited an already culturally chivalric and courtly Arthur. Wace’s great innovation was to make the miles of Geoffrey’s Historia – composed during the Anarchy when England perhaps longed for a strong military leader to pull its factions together – into a French chevalier peddling a soft revolution in English culture, but Laȝamon wrote in a world already deeply informed by the ensuing chivalric tradition. Laȝamon’s presumed audience, receiving his narrative in English in an out-of-the way village on the River Severn, would have belonged to lower, perhaps more diverse strata of society, and one of his major projects throughout the course of his massive poem is to alter his presentation of Arthur and the ethical practices he embodies to make them attainable for everyday, noncourtly people. Beginning at line 9930 in the Barron and Weinberg edition, Laȝamon introduces Arthur as a young man of fifteen, as in his source, but this Arthur has been raised across the Channel in Brittany.39 Before his portrait begins in earnest, Laȝamon relates that Arthur prepared his army and sailed forth from Mont St Michel (in Normandy) to land in Silchester, where he was greeted by the Britons with great joy. This rearrangement of the scene to include fourteen lines of direct action and the collective reaction of the British people is characteristic of Laȝamon’s text, as many commentators have noted, shifting its emphasis away from the great deeds of great men toward the complex network of human exchange that makes up the tapestry of history.40 The remaining seventeen lines of personal description bear this reading out in further detail. 39

It is perhaps surprising that this detail is first solidified in Laȝamon rather than in Wace given Wace’s tendency to portray Arthur in explicitly Continental terms, but Laȝamon’s purpose has more to do with representing England as a pluralistic society than it does with representing Arthur as culturally French. 40 See especially F. L. Gillespy, Laȝamon’s Brut: A Comparative Study in Narrative Art (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1916), along with Wickham-Crowley and Allen (see note 22).

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The very first thing that Laȝamon tells his audience about Arthur is that when he was king, “he wes mete-custi ælche quike monne” (he was generous with food to every man alive).41 In slight contrast to the Arthur of Wace’s poem who was a “large dunere” to those who asked of him (lines 9022–23), Laȝamon’s Arthur is a liberal giver to everyone alive, both those within his circle and without, and it is only after this description of his generosity that any mention is made of his martial prowess. He is called a “cnihte mid þan bezste, wunder ane kene” (a knight among the best, exceedingly bold),42 and although the English cniht had a less specific range of meaning than the French chevalier throughout the earlier Middle Ages, its nearly 800 uses in the full text of Laȝamon’s poem almost universally signify warriors of the noble class, marking the term roughly synonymous with chevalier for Laȝamon’s purposes but perhaps without the cultural baggage of specifically “chivalric” social manners. Rather, Arthur’s renown in the Brut comes less from his manners or curteisie than the fact that “þe king beold al his hired mid hæȝere blise” (the king kept all of his followers in great bliss).43 In fact, it is explicitly stated in the following line that it was “mid swulche þings he ouercom alle kinges” (in such things he surpassed all kings).44 These two lines are the most direct instance of source-target translation from Wace’s text to Laȝamon’s, and they represent in miniature the full scope of Laȝamon’s changes to Arthurian ethics. Wace’s Arthur is said to surpass other rulers first in “curteisie e de noblesce” (in courtesy and nobility), the explicit and exclusive values of the ruling class, and only then “de vertu e de largesce” (in power and generosity) (lines 9031–32), the qualities one might expect of any competent leader. The portrait in Laȝamon’s Brut, instead, celebrates an Arthur dedicated to the wellbeing of the people of all social stations in his charge, paying no attention to his own class or its intrinsic virtues beyond mention of his military prowess. Over and over, Laȝamon elides signifiers of genetic or socially exclusive nobility in favor of emphasizing the king’s responsibility to his followers and the fact that “his hired hine lufede / æc it wes cuð wide of his kinedome” (his followers loved him / and it was well known far from his kingdom).45 The reduction of Wace’s courtly, chivalric language is palpable in the Brut’s description of Arthur, especially in his rendering of Arthur’s reputation abroad, and this attitude is only intensified in successive passages. 41

Barron and Weiberg, Laȝamon’s Brut, line 9946. Ibid., line 9947. 43 Ibid., line 9956. 44 Ibid., line 9957. 45 Ibid., lines 9960–61. 42

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In addition to presenting Arthur as a chevalier for the first time, Wace is also responsible for the earliest extant appearance of the Round Table in Arthurian literature. In later centuries – and, indeed, chiefly due to Wace’s influence – the Round Table would become shorthand for whichever stripe of chivalry was practiced and embodied by Arthur and his court in a given romance, e.g., in the aforementioned fifteenth-century example of the Round Table Fellowship’s Pentecostal Oath in Malory’s Morte Darthur, but as with the influential description of a “courtly” Arthur discussed above, it is prudent to remember that figuring the Round Table as the symbol of Arthurian ethics was presumably Wace’s original creation. We should not impute to his nascent version of the court the same values implicit in later authors like Chrétien de Troyes or Thomas Malory lest we risk fundamentally misunderstanding the tenor of Wace’s particular addition to the narrative he found in Geoffrey’s Historia. Although it is the Round Table’s first appearance in the tradition, it is not given any particularly detailed history. Rather, Wace records that “pur les nobles baruns qu’il out… Fist Arthur la Runde Table / Dunt Bretun dient mainte fable”46 (for the noble barons that accompanied him, / Arthur made the Round Table, / of which Britons tell many tales). Seated at the table with their king, Arthur’s knights are considered “tuit chevalement e tuit egal”47 (all in chief and all equal) such that “nul d’els ne se poeit vanter / Qu’il seïst plus halt de sun per”48 (none of them could boast / that he sat above his peers). This particular detail about the Round Table – that all of Arthur’s knights and barons are considered peers – has persisted across nearly all of its literary iterations, but in later texts, the equalizing fellowship of the Round Table is further solidified by a mutual commitment to the active practice of romantic chivalry. In Malory’s telling, to take one characteristic example, the king is said to have given his knights land and charged them never to do outerage nothir mourthir, and allwayes to fle treson, and to gyff mercy unto hym that askith mercy, uppon payne of forfiture of theire worship and lordship of Kynge Arthure for evir more; and allwayes to do ladyes, damesels, and jantilwomen and wydowes soccour, strengthe hem in hir ryghtes, and never to enforce them uppon payne of dethe. Also that no man take no batayles in a wrongefull quarell for no love ne for no worldis goodis. So unto thys were all knyghtes sworne of the Table

46

Ibid., lines 9747, 9750–51. Ibid., line 9754. 48 Ibid., lines 9757–58. 47

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Rounde, both olde and yonge, and every yere so were they sworne at the hyghe feste of Pentecoste.49 (commanded them never to act with intemperance or commit murder, and always to flee treason, and to give mercy unto those who ask mercy, upon pain of losing their honor and the lordship of King Arthur forevermore; and always to give succor to ladies, damsels, gentlewomen, and widows, to fight on their behalf, and never to violate them on pain of death. Also that no man do battle in a wrongful quarrel, neither over love nor wordly goods. So unto this were all knights of the Round Table sworn, both old and young, and every year were they so sworn at the high feast of Pentecost.)

The chivalric ethic of the Round Table fellowship is defined in the Morte Darthur and other such texts by its attention to officially sanctioned, temperate violence and especially to the protection of women, and it is this version of Arthurian chivalry that has been widely disseminated in popular culture, thus indelibly forming the horizon of expectation for many modern readers. For such readers, I must once again state emphatically there is no such oath in the Roman de Brut. In fact, there is no gesture at all toward a socially unifying ethical practice of any kind regarding violence or the treatment of women, the stock in trade of Arthurian romance. Instead, Wace records that no one in all of western Europe was held courteous – i.e., noble, aristocratic – if they did not belong to Arthur’s court. What banded these noble knights together was their mutual commitment to the “vesteüre / E cunuissance e armeüre / A la guise que cil teneient / Ki en la curt Arthur serveient”50 (clothing / and heraldic symbol and armor / in the fashion of those / who served in Arthur’s court). Chivalry, in other words, operates in the Roman de Brut as a literal sartorial fashion that bestows cultural capital on Arthur’s knights and those who would join them. After driving the Saxons out of Britain and subduing the kingdoms of the North Sea, Arthur is said to have reigned in peace among the knights of the Round Table for twelve years. Wace adapts this narrative arc directly from Geoffrey of Monmouth, but as with the introductory portrait of Arthur earlier in the text, his courtly additions alter the military ethos of the received story. This version of Arthur, “par sei, senz alter enseinement”51 (on his own, with no other instruction), acquires “grant afaitement / E se cuntint tant noblement, / Tant bel e tant curteisement, / N’esteit parole 49

Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, ed. P. J. C. Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), 97. 50 Weiss, Wace’s Roman de Brut, lines 9769–72. 51 Ibid., line 9735.

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de curt d’ume”52 (great manners, / and such noble behavior, / so proper and so courtly, / that no court of men was so talked about). Once again, although Arthur’s martial prowess is explicitly what has won him and his followers their twelve years of peace, what he is known for far and wide is his inherent courtly refinement, a reputation then diffused among the knights of his court through their affectation of high-status symbols and articles of clothing. As ever, Laȝamon’s amplification of the scene significantly reshapes its tone and presentation of chivalric ethics. Instead of dropping in a symbolic table that ensures none of Arthur’s barons with hereditary titles considers himself superior to his likewise aristocratic peers, Laȝamon provides a rich and lengthy narrative rationale for the table’s creation, beginning with the observation that during the Christmas season, Arthur was visited by seven kings’ sons and their 700 knights: “Ælc hafede an heorte leches heȝe / and lette þat he weore betere þan his iuere”53 (Each had haughty feelings in his heart and believed that he was better than his companions). Because they had come from diverse nations, there existed a rivalry between these once-warring factions now united for the first time under Arthur’s rule. Jacqueline Burek has noted that “Arthur’s court is by far the most diverse of all the British kings [in the Brut],” but it should be understood that the presence of other lords in his court in this scene and others like it “emphasizes their subjugation to Arthur and the Britons, rather than their mutual interaction.”54 Indeed, the service of food and drink to people of differing social ranks at the Christmas feast appears to enrage the duȝeðe (company), resulting in first a food fight, then a fist fight, and finally, a series of murders. Ultimately, Arthur appears with a hundred armed warriors and imposes his political order on pain of execution, saying of any who should violate his terms: “ich wulle al fordon þat cun þat he of com”55 (I will annihilate his entire race). The dead are buried, the assembled men are cleaned up, and the feast resumes in peace for a full week “al for Arðure æiȝe, aðelest kingen”56 (only out of respect for Arthur, noblest of kings). In his preceding war of conquest, Arthur expanded the bounds of Britain as a cultural entity, and Laȝamon’s insertion of internecine strife at the very beginning of the ensuing period of peace demonstrates, contrary to Wace’s account, the societal need for a symbolic unifier such as the Round Table. 52

Ibid., lines 9736–39. Barron and Weinberg, Laȝamon’s Brut, lines 11353–54. 54 Burek, “Ure Bruttisce speche,” 113. 55 Barron and Weinberg, Laȝamon’s Brut, line 11400. 56 Ibid., line 11418. 53

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The table itself is actually offered to Arthur by a craftsman in Cornwall. He tells Arthur that while traveling on the Continent, he had heard about the violence among Arthur’s knights at Christmastime. As a corrective, he offers to construct a “a bord swiðe hende”57 (a very fine table) so that Arthur might never fear “þat æuere ænie modi cniht at þine borde makie fiht, / for þer scal þe hehȝe beon æfne þan loȝe”58 (that ever any proud knight might make conflict at your table, for there shall the high be even with the low). It has only rarely been observed that Laȝamon introduces into this passage a stark reversal of one of Wace’s central images: the sterling reputation of Arthur’s court abroad. From the moment he establishes his rule around the North Sea in the Roman de Brut, Arthur is praised in sundry lands for his great manners and noble behavior, as previously established. In Laȝamon, however, the picture is more complicated, a Yuletide brawl sparking rumors of civil unrest and requiring the monarch’s direct action and pointed imposition of an aspirational symbol of social cohesion. Whereas Wace’s Round Table almost seems to appear ex nihilo as an emanation of the unity and camaraderie that the nobles of Arthur’s court intrinsically embody, Laȝamon’s Arthur has to work for that degree of peace and recognition thereof, intentionally seating previously sworn enemies both highborn and common around a specially crafted piece of symbolic furniture in order to create a society of equals under Arthur’s example where one did not previously exist. The quasi-cosmopolitan tone of Laȝamon’s adaptation is characteristic of his translation praxis. He modifies the elite cultural energy of Wace’s scene as it would appear to his noble Francophone audience so as to present an ethic perhaps more practicable by his own provincial Anglophone audience: a multicultural, pluralistic state that achieves lasting peace through imitation of Arthur’s example and adherence to his rule of law. Rosamund Allen argues that understanding the difference in scope between the two Bruts is fundamental to critical discourse: “Wace so often simply reports a speech act, inviting admiration for the way a procession of great figures from the past manipulates those around them, but paying less attention to the underlying network of communication with the lesser folk who make leaders’ decisions happen.”59 She goes on to argue that Laȝamon’s theme throughout the Brut is that “men, not God or fate, shape history,”60 and it is this concern with the behavior of 57

Ibid., line 11433. Ibid., lines 11440–41. 59 Allen, “Did Lawman Nod, or is it We that Yawn?,” 45. 60 Ibid., 51. 58

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“lesser folk” that underlies his construction of chivalric ethics and how this new “chivalry,” liberated from the confines of the upper class, might be enacted in the public sphere. Wace’s poem records that no one who did not belong to Arthur’s court – adopting its fashions and affecting its manners – was considered noble or courteous, but once the Round Table fellowship has been established in the Middle English text, Laȝamon relates that no man “weoren ihalde god cniht no his deden itald oht / bute he cuðe of Arðure and of aðelen his hirede, / his wepnen and his weden and his hors-leden”61 (was held to be a good knight nor his deeds remembered unless he could tell of Arthur and of his noble court, his weapons and his garments and his horsemen). Instead of presenting a particularized set of affectations that imparts nobility to an already noble class, Laȝamon opens the possibility of becoming a god cniht to anyone who can remember the example of Arthur – presumably an ethical directive to his own non-aristocratic audience. Moving beyond the example of the Round Table, the difference between Wace and Laȝamon’s configurations of an ethical ideal is perhaps best exemplified in each author’s respective treatment of the scene in which Arthur seeks advice from his barons about going to war with Rome. Substantial changes in Laȝamon’s account signal an important adaptation that both further diminishes Wace’s celebration of the noble class and establishes his own emphasis on the ethical responsibilities of individual people. According to Wace, when Arthur’s sovereignty is challenged by Roman emissaries and he takes counsel from his barons regarding how he should respond, a smiling Duke Cador says on the way to the meeting place: En grant crieme ai, dist il, esté, / E mainte feiz en ai pensé, Que par oisdives e par pais / Devenissent Bretun malveis. Kar oisdive atrait malvaistied / E maint hume ad aperecied. Uisdive met hume en peresce, / Uisdive amenuse prüesce, Uisdive esmuet les lecheries, / Uisdive espret lé drueries. Par lunc repos e par uisdive / Est juvente tost ententive A gas, a deduit e a tables, / E a alters geus deportables. Par lunc sujur e par repos / Poüm nus perdre nostre los. (I’ve often thought and been very afraid that the British would become weaklings through peace and idleness. For idleness attracts weakness and makes a man lazy. Idleness brings indolence, idleness lessens prowess, idleness inflames lechery and idleness kindles love affairs. Much rest and idleness makes youth give all its attention to 61

Barron and Weinberg, Laȝamon’s Brut, lines 11481–483.

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jokes, pleasure, board games, and other amusing sports. Through long rests and inactivity we could lose our renown.)62

Cador is itching for battle, a chance to shake the rust off his instruments of war, fallen into disuse in the Pax Arthuriana. His is an attitude apparently common to older generations, disdainful of the very peace he has won for the younger populace through his valor. In an addition original to Wace, the young knight Walwein responds: “Bone est la pais emprés la gurre, / Plus bele e mieldre en est la terre; / Mult sunt bones les gaberies / E bones sunt les drueries. / Pur amistié e pur amies / Funt chevalier chevaleries” (Peace is good after war and the land is the better and lovelier for it. Jokes are excellent and so are love affairs. It’s for love and their beloved that knights do knightly deeds).63 In later romances, Walwein would become the very embodiment of romantic chivalry, and we may locate an early node of that tradition here in the Roman de Brut. He counters the miles Cador with a chevalier’s perspective, contending that the purpose of war is to bring about peace so that love and laughter might flourish. True to his later metatextual character, Walwein serves as the mouthpiece of Continental, romantic, perhaps even literary chivalry. A true knight’s martial deeds, he argues, are performed in service to his beloved (amie). The poetic concept of fin’amor, thought by many historians to have been brought to the Anglo-Angevin court by the coterie of Eleanor of Aquitaine herself, is the very reason for which a chevalier would do (faire) chevaleries, and Walwein’s advice here – informally delivered and roundly ignored by Arthur and his barons – serves to rhetorically undercut the British appetite for conquest by showing that their lust for battle serves no higher purpose. The advice of Cador and the other barons does not match, in sum, Wace’s own aristocratic attitudes toward knightly behavior as related through Walwein; one may surmise it is Arthur’s failure to listen to Walwein in this scene – his failure to conform to specifically twelfthcentury Continental chivalric norms – that ultimately leads to the Britons’ downfall, suggesting that if Arthur had but further modeled his war on the dictates of French chivalry, he might have continued to rule in peace. Laȝamon gives this scene an entirely different cast. When the Roman message is delivered, the Britons in attendance are outraged and attempt to murder the messengers. Arthur intervenes and admonishes his people, much as in the earlier introduction of the Round Table, reminding them that “Ælc mon mot liðen þer his lauerd hine hateð gan” (Every man 62 63

Weiss, Wace’s Roman de Brut, lines 10737–52. Weiss’s translation. Ibid., lines 10767–72.

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must go where his lord orders him to go);64 in other words, the Roman messengers should remain unharmed because they are simply following orders. Afterward, the king and his barons adjourn to a nearby fortress to discuss their response. In Laȝamon’s version, it is only after the formal council has begun, rather than on the stairs on the way to the meeting, that Cador speaks, saying something very similar to what is found in Wace: Ich þonkie mine Drihte þat scop þes dæies lihte þisses dæies ibiden þa to hirede is iboȝen and þissere tiding þe icumen is to ure kinge, þat we ne þuruen na mare aswunden liggen here. For idelnesse is luðer on ælchere þeode for ildelnesse makeð mon his monschipe leose, ydelnesse makeð cnihte forleosen his irihte, idelnesse græiðeð feole uuele craften, idelnesse makeð leosen feole þusend monnen; þurh eðeliche dede lute men wel spedeð. For ȝare we habbeoð stille ileien – ure wurðscipe is þa lasse. (I thank my Lord who created the light of day that I have lived to see this day dawn in the court and hear this news which has come to our king, so that we need no longer lie idle here. For idleness is hateful to all peoples since idleness causes a man to lose his valor, idleness makes a soldier neglect his duty, idleness leads to many evil deeds, idleness brings to ruin many thousands of men; few men prosper through idle habits. For a long time we have lain idle – our honor is the less.)65

Although the text of Cador’s speech remains fairly consistent in the adaptation, relocating it to the formal war council changes the character of his message. It is no longer the extemporaneous and unsought opinion of an old veteran but rather official political counsel, which in turn shifts the reader’s reception of Walwain’s likewise official response: Þat iherde Walwain, þe wes Arðures mæi, and wraððede hine wið Cador swiðe þa þas word kende; and þus andswærede Walwain þe sele: “Cador, þu ært a riche mon! Þine rædes ne beoð noht idon, for god is grið and god is frið þe freoliche þer haldeð wið – and Godd sulf hit makede þurh his Goddcunde – for grið makeð godne mon gode works wurchen for alle monnen bið þa bet þat lond bið þa murgre.”66 64

Barron and Weinberg, Laȝamon’s Brut, line 12406. Barron and Weinberg, Laȝamon’s Brut, lines 12428–38. Barron and Weinberg’s translation. 66 Ibid., lines 12451–58. My translation. 65

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(Walwain, who was Arthur’s kinsman, heard that and was greatly enraged with Cador, who had said these words; and thus the good Walwain answered: “Cador, you are a wealthy man! Your counsel is not appropriate, for peace and quiet are good if they are freely embraced – and God himself created them through his divinity – for peace allows a good man to do good deeds through which all men may be made better and the land happy.)

Walwain’s response, scathing enough in its brash delivery in Wace, is recalibrated in Laȝamon: he is enraged, indignant, and the narration is clearly sympathetic. His speech, like Cador’s, is entered as official counsel, which marks it as serious ideology instead of playful banter. Moreover, his message has been changed. He responds directly to Cador, pointing out his own social status as the reason for his flawed perspective: Cador is wealthy. The adjective riche, occurring at line 12454, has often been translated as “powerful,” including in the standard Barron and Weinberg edition. While riche certainly does have that valence, that particular translation can be misleading if the reader connotes military power rather than social power. The emphasis here is on Cador’s social remove from the rank and file, and Walwain is “wraððede hine wið Cador swiðe” (greatly enraged with Cador) due to his callous ignorance of the universal benefit of peace. As a man of high birth, Walwain argues, Cador cannot perhaps see the toll war exacts on everyday foot soldiers. Rather than pontificate – like Wace’s Walwein – on love and prowess or the proper behavior of an aristocratic soldier, Laȝamon’s Walwain advocates for the common good, a broader notion of the chivalric ethical ideal perhaps more easily embraced by Laȝamon’s audience. Peace is the circumstance that allows the kind of generally good behavior among people that benefits all society and the very earth itself. Because of this change, Walwain’s advice no longer undermines the specific wartime ethic of the Britons – it no longer imposes, that is, a markedly twelfth-century Continental upperclass approach to military honor. Instead, it comments more generally on the ethics of warfare. Walwain, having lived in Arthurian peace for over a decade, tells Cador in no uncertain terms that there is no human goodness without peace, and he even appears to suggest through this conclusion that Arthur need not expand his borders any further. Thus, in spirit, Wace and Laȝamon’s accounts of this interaction are similar, each employing Arthur’s nephew to comment on the proceedings and herald the end of Arthurian peacetime through the rejection of his advice, but Laȝamon’s text characteristically shifts its emphasis from the explicit Continental virtue of fin’amor toward a more general attention to the everyday behavior of a broader class of people.

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The general shape of Laȝamon’s Brut bears clear witness to its literary pedigree, descending directly from Wace’s Roman de Brut, itself directly descended from Geoffrey’s Historia. Each text, however, was written in a distinct cultural moment by authors of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds writing for audiences of different social class and composition. It is clear, reading Wace’s translation of Geoffrey, that there was a desire among the Norman-Angevin aristocracy to seize on the popularity of the clerical Historia and claim its contents for the secular courts through translation into vernacular verse. In the course of this translation, Wace understandably catered to his patron, presenting an Arthur in the image of a French lord, the Normans still relatively new in power and looking for a cultural foundation myth, however oblique the connection. When it came time for Laȝamon to treat the same material, likely near the nadir of Angevin cachet in England under King John, the history of Britain as told to another Angevin monarch was evidently not deemed fit for his provincial English audience. Laȝamon’s great project over the course of the Brut was ultimately to provide an early argument against the “great man” theory of history, drawing sustained attention to the “lesser folk” who carried out the plans of prophets and kings and formed a layered network of efficient causes for the progression of history. One of the most notable ways he accomplishes this in the Arthurian section of the Brut is to displace chivalry, figured primarily in Arthur, as an ethical system exclusive to the ruling class by altering its terms such that anyone, regardless of class or background, might “do chivalry” by remembering and following the examples of Arthur’s generosity, bold demeanor, and dedication to the wellbeing of all people.

6

Imperial Ambitions and the Ethics of Power: Gender, Race, and the Riddarasögur

NAHIR OTAÑO GRACIA

M

y research on Arthuriana from the Global North Atlantic tends to focus on two interrelated axes. First, I pay careful attention to the dissemination of Arthurian texts throughout Europe, depicting the nonlinear circulation of the materials, and how they shape and are shaped by the political, historical, and commercial interconnections between Africa, Europe, and the Islamicate worlds.1 Second, I focus on the ideologies that circulated within these texts, finding that they tend to support Christian chivalric ideologies because ethically speaking,2 these texts are part of a system constructing a medieval European self by erasing European 1



See Nahir Otaño Gracia, “Vikings of the Round Table: Kingship in the Islendingasögur and the Riddarasögur,” Comitatus 47.1 (2016), 69–101; “Towards a Decentered Global North Atlantic: Blackness in Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd,” Literature Compass 16.9–10 (2019); “Borders and the Global North Atlantic: Chaucer, Pilgrimage, and Crusade,” English Language Notes 58.2 (2020), 261–75; “The Past and Future Margins of Catalonia: Language Politics and Catalan Imperial Ambitions in Guillem de Torroella’s La Faula,” in Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality, ed. Kay Reyerson, Debra Blumenthal, Ann Zimo, and Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher (New York: Routledge 2020), 70–90. For a different perspective on the translation of romance, specifically French romance’s roles in the Europeanisation of Sweden see Sofia Lodén, French Romance, Medieval Sweden and the Europeanisation of Culture (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer 2021). 2 Chivalric is the term I use to encompass the ideologies that promoted the creation and reification of medieval colonization and medieval whiteness. There has been a lot of debate about the meaning of the term chivalric; I use the term to describe a pervasive ideology that describes knighthood within a framework of toxic masculinity that values heteronormative ideals of men in power. Geraldine Heng’s Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) shows how romance functions within this framework, and Christopher Jensen’s essay in this volume gives a nuanced take on the subject.

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diversity,3 dehumanizing Muslims and other racial and religious groups, and normalizing these violent ideologies.4 In other words, these Arthurian texts function within an ethical framework of whiteness because the texts normalize certain forms of dehumanization;5 the texts normalize exclusionary violence based on race. Nevertheless, the inclusion of this chapter in a volume on Arthurian ethics has less to do with the ethics inherent in the texts and more to do with my own ethics. Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh’s work has helped me articulate my own ethical stance vis-à-vis my research. She writes: Who I am shapes my canon. It determines what I read, why I read, how I read, and what I experience while reading. And yet, scholars’ fears of anachronism, their desires to protect objects of study yield criticism that welcomes me only as an academic, not as a Muslim. The depoliticized observational and analytical objectivity that we have learned to value as reliable, authoritative, and accurate in scholarly academic inquiries asks me to decenter my Muslim, Iranian heritage and to sideline my rage with the Islamophobia in the objects 3



On a special issue on fortress Europe, Jiska Engelbert, Isabel Awad, and Jacco van Sterkenburg point out that “The very term ‘Europe’ is far from singular or unequivocal in meaning. In contrast, ‘Europe’ is a political project that ideologically (re)produces Europe not only in terms of territory, but also, and arguably increasingly more, in terms of a population connected in its ‘Europeanness.’” “Everyday Practices and the (Un) making of ‘Fortress Europe’: Introduction to the Special Issue,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 22.2 (2019), 134. My own research on the borders of medieval Europe shows that medieval Europe was a political and biopolitical project that was being constructed. As I explain: “In the Middle Ages the borders of Europe were not static; even though the medieval kingdoms of Europe were trying to territorialize themselves, their borders were in constant flux, changing through battles, contracts, and marriages. In Arthurian texts the borders of the Arthurian realm were created to promulgate Christian expansion and rationalize religious and racial exclusion.” “Borders and the Global North Atlantic,” 262. 4 See Otaño Gracia, “Towards a Decentered Global North Atlantic” and “Borders and the Global North Atlantic,” passim. 5 Phillip Atiba Goff et al. differentiate between dehumanization and prejudice: “Prejudice is a broad intergroup attitude whereas dehumanization is the route to moral exclusion.” Dehumanization can lead to “the denial of basic human protections to a group or group member.” While prejudice would lead to devaluing a person from a disliked group, dehumanization can lead to the “endorsement of genocide or extreme violence.” Phillip Atiba Goff, Matthew Christian Jackson, Brooke Allison Lewis Di Leone, Carmen Marie Culotta, and Natalie Ann Di Tomasso, “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106.4 (2014), 527. See also Otaño Gracia and Daniel Armenti, “Constructing Prejudice in the Middle Ages and the Repercussions of Racism Today,” in Subsidia on Microaggressions, Harassment, and Abuse—Medieval and Modern, ed. Linda Mitchell and Jennifer Edwards, Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 53.1 (2017), 176–201.

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of study. But I cannot. I will not. As a result, I am left with the laborintensive process of making explicit for myself the Islamophobia and racism of the primary material that scholars have chosen to keep implicit in their scholarship.6

Rajabzadeh points out that what we have learned to value as academics – what she calls a “depoliticized observational and analytical objectivity” that is supposedly “reliable, authoritative, and accurate scholarship” – is ultimately tied to whiteness because it is tied to exclusion. For the most part, medieval scholarship excludes research by those of us that cannot and will not study literature through a “depoliticized observational and analytical objectivity.” Our work is deemed anachronistic, less rigorous, or unreliable. I stand by the ethical position that a “depoliticized observational and analytical objectivity” creates heteronormativity because it presupposes that white subjectivity is objectivity and tells those of us with a different subject position that our subjectivity is anachronistic and therefore useless to the study of the Middle Ages. My ethics as a human and as an academic demand that I reject white subjectivity as objectivity, and that I embrace the fact that BIPOC subjectivity is an exceptional form of research and inquiry. Therefore, this essay’s ethical standpoint derives from my positionality as a Puerto Rican medievalist and how that positionality shapes my research. I am a Caribbean woman and a Puerto Rican, a colonial subject of the United States, and my ancestors were colonial subjects of Spain. I grew up speaking Spanish, and I learned English when I was twelve. My grandfather and uncle were drafted to World War II and Vietnam, respectively, and willingly or not, they participated in the enterprise of Empire of the United States.7 These legacies are a part of myself while they tie my history to that of other Puerto Ricans, and they exemplify how my subjectivity makes me an ideal scholar to articulate how cultures, such as those of the Irish, the Welsh, and the Icelanders try to confront and resist 6

Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, “The depoliticized Saracen and Muslim erasure,” Literature Compass 16.9–10 (2019), 2. 7 I briefly mention my other grandfather in the essay “Broken Dreams: Medievalism, Mulataje, and Mestizaje in the Work of Alejandro Tapia y Rivera.” I discuss how his subject position as a farmer and a black man goes against the ways the 1930s Puerto Rican elite constructed the Puerto Rican farmer as an off-white farmer. My point here is that my Caribbean, Puerto Rican, Colonial background gives me insights into the study of medieval literature that help create new forms of inquiry. See Otano Gracia, “Broken Dreams: Medievalism, Mulataje, and Mestizaje in the Work of Alejandro Tapia y Rivera,” in Race, Equity and Justice in Arthurian Studies, ed. Richard Sévère, Arthuriana 31.2 (2021), 77–107.

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their subordination from the colonial ambitions of those that subordinate them to their rule. In the case of the Irish, the Welsh, and the Icelanders, they are fighting against becoming prospective colonized subjects of the English and the Norwegians, respectively.8 The tactics of both Welsh and Icelandic Arthuriana, however, show that the texts reject ideologies of expansion where it relates to their own medieval colonization, but uphold these ideological systems where they promote expansion within and beyond the borders of a white medieval Europe. This chapter explores the role of women in Old Norse-Icelandic Arthurian texts – Möttuls saga, Ívens saga, Erex saga, and Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar – and how they legitimize or delegitimize conquest and colonization. Although I prioritize the Riddarasögur, I begin with the ways that several Ulster tales from the Irish Book of Leinster have also discussed the topic, and I use The Historia Regum Brittaniae (Historia) as a point of comparison to discuss the Norwegian Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar. These texts exemplify how the Riddarasögur follow a pattern of using women’s bodies as a form of biopolitics to dehumanize the enemies of the main characters, mainly Arthur and his knights, to justify violence against them. As a group, their moral principles show a disregard for nonchivalric human life through biopolitics. Therefore, it is useful to think through the ways that race and biopolitical ideologies function within the parameters discussed. Both Joseph Derosier and Coral Lumbley show that medieval literature is concerned with race and biopolitics.9 While Derosier points out that Perlesvaus creates “a vision of community formed not by inclusion, but rather by exclusion, and ultimately necropolitics,”10 and that Perlesvaus “is predicated on the exclusion of a certain life that is allowed to live on the periphery – under the conditions that the periphery is governed by the center;”11 Lumbley uses biopolitics to show that “slavery, race-as-spectacle, and anti-blackness draws on the framework of 8

Imtiaz Habib explains that the humanity of a prospective colonized subject is discarded in favor of objectifying “the material prospects of the lands that it inhabits, which must be refashioned as the facilitator of the colonizer’s exploitation of the resources of that land for his benefit and profit…” In both Welsh and Icelandic medieval Arthuriana, the prospective Welsh and Icelandic colonized subject argues for his humanity by dehumanizing other prospective colonized subjects such as Muslims, Jews, Africans, and Pagans. See Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 242. 9 Joseph Derosier, “The Forest and the Heath: Defining the Human in Medieval Romance,” Literature Compass 16.9–10 (2019); Coral Lumbley, “The ‘Dark Welsh’: Color, Race, and Alterity in the Matter of Medieval Wales,” Literature Compass 16.9– 10: (2019). See also Derosier’s essay in this volume. 10 Derosier, “The Forest and the Heath,” 11. 11 Lumbley, “The ‘Dark Welsh,’” 12.

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racial biopolitics in order to show that perceived physiognomic darkness, operating as epidermal race, served as a key apparatus of exclusion.”12 Their research shows the ways that the body carries political meaning through exclusionary practices. Moreover, Catherine Mills posits that biopower fosters life through “political conjunction of the individual and the population,”13 and, as I understand it, biopolitics helps us think through the ways that life and death are brought into the political.14 As I show, these Arthurian texts bring up political and ethical considerations that use the life of women to justify the death of the enemies of the knights. Although I did not know it at the time, my interest in understanding biopolitics began with my study of the relationship between the concepts of law and sovereignty in Irish texts.15 I will expand on that earlier analysis to study the role of women in the Riddarasögur. As I argued in “Medieval Irish Kin(g)ship,” Irish stories can help us take account of the relationship between women upholding the law and women representing sovereignty. For example, the Book of Leinster contains a version of the following Ulster stories: Scéla Conchobair maic Nessa, Mesca Ulad, and Loinges mac nUislenn. These three texts portray women, specifically Ness, Emer, and Deirdre, as important for legitimizing Conchobar, the king of the Ulstermen, by either supporting or challenging his right to kingship. Although early scholarship tied this connection to the theme of sovereignty,16 I have shown that these women complicate our understanding of sovereignty because they validate or invalidate 12

Ibid., 3. Although both Derosier and Lumbley begin their analysis with Michel Foucault, it is important to note that Derosier grounds his readings through Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics, and Lumbley grounds hers on the work of Foucault and Catherine Mills. See: Michel Foucault, La volonté de savoir (Histoire de la sexualité I) (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); “Il faut défendre la société”: Cours au Collège de France, 1976 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997); Society must be defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. D. Macey (New York: Picador, 2003); Sécurité, Territoire, Population: Cours au Collège de France (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil 2004); Achille Mbembe , “Necropolitics,” in Public Culture, trans. Libby Meintjes, 15.1 (2003): 11– 40; “Provincializing France?,” in Public Culture, trans. Janet Roitman. 23.1 (2011), 85–119; and Catherine Mills, Biopolitics (New York: Routledge, 2018). 13 Mills, Biopolitics, 2. 14 Ibid., 175. 15 Nahir Otaño Gracia, “Presenting Kin(g)ship in Medieval Irish Literature,” Enarratio 22.1 (2018): 1–24. 16 Amy C. Mulligan offers a great description of The Sovereignty: “When Ireland suffers famine, war, or lacks an effective leader, then sovereignty is aged, ugly, and infertile. When she encounters the right ruler, someone who will treat Ireland well, perhaps free it from unjust or foreign rule, she regains her idealized feminine form. The many accounts in which Ireland is represented as a woman have been explained by association with female and deities, or tutelary goddesses, in pagan Celtic tradition.” “Playing for Power: Macha Mongrúad’s Sovereign Performance,”

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Conchobar’s rule by using the language of kingship as expressed in the law.17 These women have an important political and legal role within the community represented in the stories; they help to choose or reject the king, and they recall the law to do so. In this sense, their gendered bodies and their lives and deaths are tied to the politics of the kingdom (Deirdre, for example, kills herself so that she doesn’t have to endure being raped by Conchobar and Éogan). As I explained in “Medieval Irish Kin(g)ship,” these texts use women, the law, and sovereignty to respond to ideologies of expansion: The use of the female voice to accept kingship or to criticize the abuse of power and the distancing of the sovereignty motif in these Irish texts implies a preoccupation with the use of the female body to transgress against Irish sovereignty. The inclusion of women in the texts and the possibility of women controlling “meaningful conduct” as well as their understanding of the law works against the discourse of feudal transgression, a discourse used by the Anglo-Normans as early as the eleventh century in the First Crusade.18

These Irish texts respond to chivalric aggression through biopolitics, using the women to reject Anglo-Norman transgression. Similar to the Irish texts, Arthurian texts such as Möttuls saga, Ívens saga, and Erex saga also use women’s bodies for their own ethical and political needs.

Biopolitics of Marriage: Möttuls saga, Ívens saga, and Erex saga I see a similar process in Old Norse-Icelandic Arthurian texts in which the texts also work with or reject chivalric transgression. As I argue in “Vikings of the Roundtable,” many of the texts that fit under the rubric of Riddarasögur might have begun as Norwegian but the copies we have available are Icelandic. I explain that “The Icelanders adapted the Norwegian translations for their own purpose, a type of resistance to Norwegian domination.”19 And as I show in “Towards a decentered in Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland, ed. Sarah Sheehan and Ann Dooley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 75. 17 See Otaño Gracia, “Presenting Kin(g)ship.” Important scholarship critiquing the totalizing effect of the sovereignty motif include Joanne Findon, A Woman’s Words: Emer and Female Speech in the Ulster Cycle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Mulligan, “Playing for Power;” and Sarah Sheehan, “Loving Medb,” in Gablánach in Scélaigecht: Celtic Studies in Honour of Ann Dooley, ed. Sarah Sheenan, Joanne Findon, and Westley Follett (Dublin: Four Court Press, 2013), 171–86. 18 The term “meaningful conduct” is taken from Ann Dooley, Playing the Hero: Reading the Irish Saga Táin Bó Cúailnge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 163. 19 “Vikings of the Roundtable,” 73.

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Global North Atlantic,” Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd justifies Tristram’s kingship of Spain and England by racializing Tristram’s enemies and constructing them as a threat to both Spain and Scandinavia. These questions regarding political hegemony and autonomy are also present in the construction of women. While Möttuls saga, Ívens saga, and Erex saga seem to reject female possession (these texts are translations or rewritings of Le mantel mautaillié, Yvain, and Erec and Enide, respectively), Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar (and Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd) seem to sanction medieval colonization (Tristrams saga is the only complete translation of Brother Thomas’ version of Tristan and was instrumental for the reconstruction of the French version).20 In both instances, women become geopolitical tools to think through the positionality of Iceland and Norway within North Atlantic politics of expansion and colonization. While Möttuls saga, Ívens saga, and Erex saga argue for Scandinavian, especially Icelandic, inclusion in the medieval borders of Europe, Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar and Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd argue for chivalric expansion against Africans, Muslims, and giants.21 Möttuls saga, Ívens saga, and Erex saga give greater leeway to women to choose whom they marry. This shift, however, is uniquely Scandinavian since the French versions of these romances do not give women such choices. There are several elements at work in the French and Scandinavian texts that can account for this discrepancy. First, there was a tendency in Old Norse-Icelandic society to give women more rights, as

20

The extant Brother Thomas’ Tristan texts only include fragments of the romance. As the only existing complete version of the tale, Tristrams saga was instrumental to Joseph Bédier reconstruction of what is considered Thomas’s “original” version. See Heidi Støa, “The Lover and the Statue: Idolatrous Love in Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar,” Scandinavian Studies 87.1 (2015), 131. 21 Although this essay will only discuss the thirteenth-century Tristrams saga, I have written on the ways the fourteenth-century Saga af Tristram adheres to chivalric ideologies: “Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd which uses racial markers, which can include skin color, religious difference, and geographical difference among others, to dehumanize the enemies of Tristan as heathens – including the Sámi, the Bjarmar, the Karelians, and the Russians. The saga uses a kind of racial profile to mark the characters as different because they are associated with Africa, Spain, or the Islamicate. Fúlsus, a character that attacks England, is described as “heathen as a dog” (heiðinn sem hundr), Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd, 1999, 281; another of the enemies of Tristram is Túrnes King of Blakamannavelir (the plains of Black men) who is more than likely from Tunis, Africa; and Isold of the White Hands, who betrays Tristan, is transformed into Ísodd svarta from Spain (translated as Ísodd the dark but it is more accurate to translate it as Black Ísodd). I end by noting how the last two examples have been subtly erased from the text and ignored by academics, demonstrating a complicity in erasing the fact that medieval Scandinavians had racial awareness,” “Towards a decentered Global North Atlantic,” 2.

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seen by the right of widows to choose their second partner.22 Moreover, the women portrayed in the Scandinavian texts do not have the same role as their counterparts in the French romances. Chrétien de Troyes’s romances find their place at the heart of an emerging literary system;23 his female characters become the object of desire in which the men are able to exert their chivalric prowess and ultimately create conquest that expands the Arthurian lands. Enide, for example, is not named until she marries Erec.24 The Scandinavian counterparts to these stories do not function in the same way, giving women more freedom in their marriage choices. There are ideological differences between the portrayal of men and women in Egils saga and other Christian influenced sagas, such as Njal’s Saga, hinting that Christianity brought about a different gender system, replacing the previous system.25 Could the right of women to choose who they marry, which is often a strong component of the Arthurian sagas, be influenced by Christianity which – in theory at least – required mutual consent in all marriages? If Christianity did have this influence in the Norse tradition, then the French romances remain to be explained, as they were also created within the context of a Christian culture but offer noble women less choice in the realm of marriage than their Scandinavian counterparts. And yet, biopolitics suggests a different path to understanding gender practices in the sagas as well as their concern with marriage.26 They point to a culture deeply anxious with their role within the chivalric practices emerging across Europe. Icelandic Arthurian sagas criticize men who try to force women to marry. In fact, many of the Scandinavian redactors change the tales from the French source texts to undermine attempts to marry women without 22

Jenny M. Jochens, “Consent in Marriage: Old Norse Law, Life, and Literature,” Scandinavian Studies, 58.2 (1986),144, and Women in Old Norse Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 27. 23 Maria Tymozcko, “Translation as a Force for Literary Revolution in the Twelfth Century,” New Comparison: A Journal of Comparative Literature and General Literary Studies 1 (1986), 7–27. 24 Ad Putter, “The Twelfth-Century Arthur,” in Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 45. 25 Carol J. Clover, “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe,” Representations 44 (1993), 18. See also Jochens, “Consent in Marriage” for a discussion on the ways that ecclesiastical intervention changed Scandinavian laws in twelfth-century Scandinavia, and how the literature represents or does not represent those changes. 26 Although this essay is not delving into the topic, I bring up the subject of Christianity and paganism because it is of great importance to the analysis of the Icelandic Sagas as well as the analysis of archival findings, as Jochens’ work on the topic exemplifies.

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their consent. Blaisdell and Kalinke agree that “The [French] romance’s attitude toward woman, who is at the same time an object of slave like veneration and a piece of property to be acquired and disposed of at will, gives way to the image of the rather independent woman found frequently in the native sagas.”27 In Erec et Enide (c. 1170) by Chrétien de Troyes, Enide is handed in marriage to Erec without asking for her consent. In Erex saga, which is considered an Icelandic redaction or translation,28 her father makes sure to ask for her consent, which she immediately gives: Opt hefi ek heyrt þín getit at hreysti ok riddaraskap, ok at engum vil ek því neita at gipta þér mina dóttur, ef þat er hannar vili… Ek var fyrri rikr ok mikils ráðandi af höfðingjum; en nú þykkir engum um mik vert síðan fátæktin sótti mik. En þess væntir mik at af viti ok kvennligum listum hafi mín dóttir eigi síðr en vænleik. Ok nú segi hún sinn vilja.29 I have often heard your bravery and chivalry mentioned, and by no means do I want to refuse to give you my daughter in marriage, if that is her will… But I suspect that my daughter is no less endowed in intelligence and womanly accomplishments than in beauty. Now let her speak her own mind.30

In the Icelandic version, Earl Placidus respects Enide’s wishes not to marry, letting her decide for herself; in the French romance, by contrast, the Earl makes her go through a wedding ceremony.31 The treatment of Enide by Earl Placidus in Erex saga is more akin to the interactions between women and men in sagas such as Laxdæla saga. In this sense, Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide has more in common with Egils saga which reflects a “pre-Christian” ethos about women.32 27

Foster W. Blaisdell and Marianne E. Kalinke, “Introduction,” in Erex saga and Ívens saga: The Old Norse Versions of Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec and Yvain, trans. Foster W. Blaisdell and Marianne E. Kalinke (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 1977), xiv. 28 Marianne E. Kalinke, “Introduction,” in The Arthur of the North: The Arthurian Legend in the Norse and Rus’ Realms, ed. Marianne E. Kalinke (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), 2. 29 “Erex saga,” in Norse Romance, II: The Knights of the Round Table, ed. and trans. Marianne E. Kalinke (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 226; 228. 30 Ibid., 227, 229. 31 Blaisdell and Kalinke, “Introduction,” xiv. 32 I am drawing from the work of Clover and Jochens who show that gender, sex, marriage, and consent, as social and legal constructs, had significant shifts during the Middle Ages, especially after the introduction of Christianity to both social and legal customs. Both Clover and Jochens show that the sagas include a varying degree of ideologies that are distinguished as Christian and pre-Christian. See “Regardless of Sex” and “Consent in Marriage.”

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In Ívens saga, the redactors also change the source material to give women a choice. In the scene when the father of a maiden offers her hand in marriage to Íven for battling the giants, the French Yvain excuses the offer by stating that she is too beautiful for the likes of him, but the Icelandic Íven refuses to bargain over the fate of a woman. Íven says, “Guð láti mik eigi hana kaupa, heldr skal hún jafnan frjáls fyrir mér;” “God keep me from bartering for her, rather she shall always be free on my account.”33 The French Arthurian texts give women less power over their own marriage; the Scandinavian Arthurian materials give women control to decide who to marry. Through a biopolitical lens, these Arthurian sagas’ preoccupation with giving women a choice to marry, which is less prevalent in the family sagas,34 show that women’s choices to marry are tied to inclusion of the knights into the political body created in the sagas. Möttuls saga treats the women in many respects like those in Egils saga: the women become the space where the men gain respect and honor or, alternatively, shame.35 Möttuls saga is about a mantle that reveals the fidelity or infidelity of the women that wear the mantle. Before the women in the story try on the mantle, the men are eager to show that their women are loyal to them by making remarks about the women’s greatness by remarking on the women’s chastity and loyalty to their husbands. As each woman puts on the mantle, which inevitably fails to fit her properly, each woman is proven unfaithful. In response, the rest of the men, particularly Sir Kay, mock the woman’s respective partner. When it is the turn of Sir Kay’s lady to try on the mantle, he says it is to her honor if she is proved to be faithful and to her disgrace if she fails. When she tries the mantle and is found to have deceived Kay, the text states that “Ok er kæi sá hversu unnasta hans hafði fallit, þá vildi hann heldr at aldri hefði hún þar komit en þvílíka skömm ok svívirðing fengit;” “When Kay saw how his beloved had fallen, he would have preferred that she had never come there rather than to receive such shame and disgrace.”36 Once she is found guilty, the shame and disgrace are Kay’s. The honor of the men is tied to the women’s fidelity; the irony of the situation constructs

33

“Ívens saga,” Norse Romance II, 86–87. Jochens, “Consent in Marriage,” 150–67. 35 I have discussed Möttuls saga in “Vikings of the Round Table” which focuses on the relationship between gift-giving and kingship in the Old Norse-Icelandic Romances. The essay is also a good introduction to the Riddarasögur and their position vis-à-vis the Icelandic sagas. 36 “Möttuls saga,” Norse Romance II, 18, 19. 34

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the court negatively.37 Karadin takes the opposite attitude than the rest of the men. He tells his lady not to try the mantle because he would rather not disgrace her if she were deceitful. Although many of the women that had been deceitful have names, it is worth noting that Karadin’s love in particular is not named. Karadin is the exception among the men in Arthur’s court. The portrayal of women as the platform where men gain honor or experience shame is similar to the way in which women’s bodies serve as the site where men gain lands, goods, and friendship in Egils saga. Other Old Norse-Icelandic Arthurian sagas give women more control than they have in Egils saga. After all, Karadin, the main knight of the tale, refuses to let his lady be such a platform, marking him as superior to the other men just before she is shown to be the only faithful woman in any court. Möttuls saga represents women in similar ways to the Old Irish texts discussed above. The preoccupation with women’s bodies and conduct, and the women’s ability to shame or elevate the knights and their position at court, become ways to argue for chivalric inclusion within the borders of the Arthurian realm. The ethical and biopolitical implications of the material is that women become a way to measure the men and their position within the Arthurian milieu created by the sagas. Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, the Norwegian version of the Tristan legend commissioned by King Hákon Hákornason in 1226, portrays women differently than the examples provided above. The most striking case is the rewriting of the death of Helena from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia. Tristrams saga turns the Historia’s scene with the two giants into two different scenes, and rewrites Helena’s death so that it is no longer poignant but gruesome and comical. The changes enacted by Tristrams saga shows that chivalric aggression no longer needed a justification to be enacted, perhaps it is better to say that the justification to chivalric aggression did not need to have the same nuance because an ethical chivalric rhetoric was already embedded in European politics. I would like to take a step back, both rhetorically and historically, and discuss the Historia first and then move to a discussion of Tristrams saga to point out how the portrayals of women discussed above and the portrayal of women discussed in the Historia and Tristrams saga below conform to an ethical ideology of biopolitics.

37

Marianne Kalinke, King Arthur North by Northwest: The matière de Bretagne in Old Norse–Icelandic Romances (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Boghandel A/S., 1981), 30; 126; Carolyne Larrington, “The Translated Lais,” in The Arthur of the North, 89.

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Helena, St Ursula, and the Codification of Women’s Bodies The Historia combines historical, literary, and oral techniques in order to tell a greater story about the history of the kings of Britain while using the guise of a translation. As Antonia Carcelén-Estrada writes, “translations of myths also provide new models for building a unified identity around an imaginary historical tradition.”38 The Arthurian section of the Historia, as well as the rewriting of the Ursula legend, are examples of a new emerging identity through “an imaginary historical tradition” where women’s bodies are codified to transgress and expand the borders of medieval Europe and to support medieval colonization. The scene at Mont Saint Michel exemplifies the ways the Historia uses women to argue for chivalric political hegemony and violence. Geoffrey portrays women with sympathy to align women to his political themes. Similar to the Irish and Old Norse-Icelandic texts described above, women are indispensable to the exploration of biopolitics. Arthur, on his way to Rome, takes a detour with Kaius the steward and Beduerus the butler to Mont Saint Michel to kill the giant who kidnapped Helena, duke Hoelus’s niece. The giant is described in very gruesome terms and as a cannibal who is from Hispania. Beduerus manages to find Helena’s nurse who tells him that Helena died before the giant was able to rape her. The giant rapes the nurse instead. Arthur, then, kills the giant and proceeds to tell of a second giant who collected the beards of kings and turned them into a cloak. This second giant asked Arthur to send his beard over to him so that he could add it to the cloak or otherwise, engage in a fight to the death. Arthur also fights this earlier giant and wins. The scene ends with Hoelus grieving the death of his niece by building a church on top of the mount known as Tumba Helenae. The scene at Mont Saint Michel uses the giant to create a common British threat. A monstrous, cannibalistic giant attacks a young Helena and her elderly nurse and is only killed after the tragic death of Helena whose death is commemorated in stone. Geraldine Heng shows the romance motif of “the chivalric rescue of aristocratic maidens” begins with the giant scene.39 The Historia, however, “reassures” us that although Helena is at risk of being raped by the “Eastern/Spanish” giant, she dies before the act. 38

Antonia Carcelén-Estrada, “Oral Literature,” in Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation, ed. Kelly Washbourne and Ben Van Wyke (New York: Routledge, 2018), 134. 39 Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 44.

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Geoffrey tends to use the deaths of women to create this type of affective strategy in which the women’s death justifies violence against those deemed culpable for their deaths, and the women are then commemorated to celebrate that violence. The effect of this process combined with the framing of the Historia results in the creation of historical myths such as that of Arthur alluded to above. Another example is Geoffrey’s remake of the Ursula legend which becomes eerily similar to Helena’s own story.40 The religious cult of Saint Ursula originates from an inscription attributed to the fifth century called the Clematius Incription which is currently housed at the Saint Ursula church in Cologne. “The inscription tells us that certain holy virgins shed their blood in Christ’s name. It also attests to the rebuilding of a church in their honor by one Clematius, who came to Cologne from the East after experiencing visions. But the legend remains undocumented for several hundred years thereafter.”41 The legend slowly gained popularity after the ninth century onward so that by the eleventh century the legend was codified. The legend tells the story of Ursula, a Christian princess of Britannia who was promised to the pagan prince Aetherius. She decides to go on pilgrimage to Rome before her marriage and takes with her 11,000 virgin women companions.42 On her return trip from Rome, a storm takes her and her companions to Cologne where the Huns just happen to be attacking the city. The Huns threaten the women with rape, but instead the women are killed. In 1106 thousands of remains found outside of Cologne were attributed to the virgins, and those remains began to be exported as early as 1113, giving further credence to the legend.43 40

Dan Armenti and I discuss the relationship between the Ursula Legend and the Historia in our essay “Constructing Prejudice in the Middle Ages and the Repercussions of Racism Today.” We conclude that the deaths of the women in the Historia “are a reminder that women must be protected by a Christian patriarchal society against an ‘evil’ non-Christian threat. This threat is both Eastern and pagan,” Medieval Feminist Forum 53.1 (2017), 191. 41 Pamela Sheingorn and Marcelle Thiébaux, “The Passion of Saint Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins (Regnante Domino),” Vox Benedictina 6.3 (1989), 257. 42 Scott B. Montgomery, “Ursula and Her Companions,” in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, ed. Margaret Schaus (New York: Routledge, 2006), 109. 43 Montgomery, “Ursula and Her Companions,” 109. On the Ursula legend in particular Armenti and I write that “given that the finding of the remains happened about thirty years before Geoffrey wrote the Historia and that the remains were circulating throughout Europe, it is very likely that Geoffrey and his contemporaries knew the legend. The codification of the legend, the remains of the bodies, and the Church named after St Ursula authenticated the legend within the medieval imaginary. The legend became evidence of the perils that women face from pagans,” “Constructing Prejudice,” 190.

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Geoffrey rewrites the Ursula legend to elicit sympathy for the women of Britain. Conanus, the first Briton to rule Brittany, begins taking over Brittany and decides he needs Briton women to marry his men so that they do not marry French women. Fiona Tolhurst remarks that the scene implies that “the Britons living in this second Britain will lose their ethnic identity as well as their colonial powerbase; therefore, compliant young women are essential if this conquest is to become successful colonization.”44 Conanus sends messengers to Britain asking for women to be sent to Brittany. Britain sends 11,000 noblewomen and 60,000 “girls of common birth,” to London, and ships them to Brittany but the women never make it there. The scene laments the death of the women and invites the reader to sympathize with them. It places the blame on the men that send the women on the trip in several ways: Geoffrey highlights that many were unwilling to take the voyage, that none of them had a choice in the matter, and by detailing their gruesome deaths.45 They are shipwrecked, sent into slavery, and killed while successfully defending their virginity from the “evil army of Wanius and Melga” (nefandum exercitum Wanii et Melgae), a non-Christian Hun and a non-Christian Pict. Per maritima ergo saeuientes, obuiauerunt praedictis puellis in partes illas appulsis. lnspicientes ergo earum pulcritudinem, lasciuire cum eis uoluerunt. Quod cum abnegauissent puellae, irruerunt in eas ambrones maximamque partem sine mora trucidauerunt.46 While ravaging the shoreline, they came upon the girls who had been driven there and, when they saw how beautiful they were, they wanted sex with them. When the girls refused, the villains fell on them and most of the Britons were quickly killed.47

The Ursula rewrite is significant twofold: first, the scene is placed amidst the colonization of Brittany by the British, a colonization that is successful despite the lack of British women, and the successful but shortlived conquest of Rome by Maximianus, a conquest that Arthur uses to legitimize his own move against Rome later in the text.48 Second, it also 44

Fiona Tolhurst, Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Translation of Female Kingship (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 94. 45 See Tolhurst’s work for her take on the scene (Translation of Female Kingship, 95). Although Tolhurst and I agree that the scene sympathizes with the women, we do not necessarily agree with the reasons behind that decision. 46 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Geoffrey of Monmouth: The History of the Kings of Britain: An Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum (Historia regum Britanniae), ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), 109. 47 Ibid., 108. 48 After the destruction of the women by Wanius and Melga and the men by the betrayal of Gratianus, book five closes by explaining that Armorica is now known

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leads to the destruction of the rest of Britain because the island cannot protect itself (the able-bodied men are off in battle).49 Ultimately, the men and women from different social classes, the whole British society, suffers because of the political decisions made by their leaders. When Geoffrey’s version of the legend of Ursula is juxtaposed with the codified version of the legend, which includes a Church named after St Ursula and the remains of the bodies found in Cologne, the scene connects the death of Briton women to Helena’s death in the Arthurian section: the women become a symbol to be used by the “feudal politics of medieval courtly fantasy.”50 Both the Ursula rewrite and the scene at Mont Saint Michel tell the stories of virgin women threatened with rape and killed by pagans. The women are commemorated and fetishized through the veneration of their remains and with a church named after them. They become a reminder that women must be protected by a Christian patriarchal society against an “evil” non-Christian threat. Both the Historia and the Legenda use women to justify violence, to rationalize expansion, and to begin the process of medieval nation formation. The political and ethical concerns of these examples are tied to ideologies of nation formation and expansion, and not to the women that are used as an excuse to push for these ideologies. The ideologies embedded in the Historia, and in Romance in general, are a political tactic that identifies territories with the women in the texts. The women, then, are used to empty space of meaning “by ignoring previous existing territorialities,”51 and in the process turning the inhabitants and enemies of the heteronormative knights into essentialized identities that are subject to dehumanization and who are portrayed as not belonging to the Arthurian as a second Britain – Armoricam, quae iam altera Britannia uocabatur (Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia, 111). Geoffrey seems to associate Britain and France in an attempt to naturalize the Norman Conquest. Tolhurst, Translation of Female Kingship, 58. 49 The next sentence in the text explains that Wanius and Melga find out that Britain does not have armed soldiers because Maximianus took all the able young men to Rome and the farmers left on the island cannot defend it. Maximianus heard of the slaughter caused by Wanius and Melga and sends Gratianus with two legions to help. Gratianus’s friends kill Maximianus in Rome, slaughter and scatter the British men, and the surviving men leave Rome to Brittany. Gratianus expels Wanius and Melga, seizes the British crown, becomes a tyrant, and is killed by the British left on the island. Wanius and Melga return with the Irish, Norwegians, and Danes, and “they put the land to fire and the sword from sea to sea” (conducentes regnum a mari usque ad mare ferro et flamma affecerunt). Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia, 111. 50 Heng, Empire of Magic, 45. 51 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 313.

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borders.52 The Old Irish and Old Norse-Icelandic texts mentioned above seem to be working in tandem with these ideologies to discuss their own position within the medieval borders of Europe.

Tristan, Arthur, and the Giant in Norway I have spent considerable space demonstrating how the Historia uses biopolitics to cast women as objects that deserve our pity and protection – what Heng calls the “chivalric rescue of aristocratic maidens.”53 I do so because the same scene is rewritten a century later in the Norwegian Tristrams saga; and while Geoffrey’s version casts Helena as a victim and gives her Nurse (who is not present in this version) a voice by allowing her to say what happens to her and Helena, the Norwegian version turns the scene into a comical and grotesque sight that disembodies the action, and Helena and the Nurse, from the context of the Historia. Superficially, the scene seems to be adhering to the dry humor and understated irony that we find in several Old Norse-Icelandic texts as well as the giant myths of Old Norse-Icelandic mythology, but the overall implications of the scene, which strips all agency away from Helena and forces her to submit to someone else, becoming a biopolitical tool to promote chivalric expansion against the giants who, in this version, are mostly coming from Africa. Although Tristrams saga does not seem to adhere to the same chivalric ideologies as depicted in Möttuls saga, Ívens saga, and Erex saga, they represent another aspect of the same ideologies, mainly the justification of chivalric aggression against racialized giants. In Tristrams saga not only is the conversation between the Nurse and Beduerus eliminated, Helena dies because she bursts under the weight of the Giant as he tries to rape her. The Mont Saint Michel scene of the 52

See Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) for a succinct explanation on the trope of identifying foreign land with women and the ramifications of these political maneuvers especially in North Africa, especially 48. See Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018) to understand the ways that race functions in the European Middle Ages. Regarding race, romance, and fantasy, Heng writes that “cultural fantasy does not evade but confronts history, as I show repeatedly through the chapters of my book. Fantasy engages with lived events, crisis and trauma, and conditions of exigency in ways that render intelligible to humans the incalculable and the incommensurate. In particular… fantasy is unusually conducive to conceptualizations of race and race discourse: Race itself, after all, is a fantasy with fully material effects and consequences,” in Empire of Magic, 15. 53 Heng, Empire of Magic, 44.

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Norwegian text does demand swift retribution against the Giant, but this Helena does not incite sadness, mourning, or a need to protect her and her memory: Hann hafði ok tekit dóttur Orsl hertuga ok sótti hana með afli ok hafði hana með sér í braut. Ok hét hún Elena. En hann helt hana með sér í hellinum. En því at hún var hin fríðasta kona, þá girntiz han líkams losta af henni. En þá er han gat ekki unnit þat, er han vildi, sakir mikilleil hans ok þunga, þa kafnaði hún undir honum ok sprakk.54 The giant had also captured the daughter of Duke Orsl, seizing her by force and taking her away with him. Her name was Elena, and he kept her with him in the cave. Because she was a most beautiful woman, he desired carnal relations with her, but he did not achieve what he craved. Due to his size and weight, she suffocated and burst beneath him.55

Sprakk is the third-person singular past indicative of Springa – “to crack, break, split open, burst; to explode, blow up; and to collapse or die.”56 Helena, then, dies by collapsing and exploding under the weight of the giant. Helena’s death, however, is sidelined in this version. The scene centers on the giant whose size and weight kills her before he can rape her (Geraldine Barnes writes that the giant was “thwarted by his very monstrousness in his attempt to ravish her, crushed her to death”).57 The saga introduces Helena’s scene as part of an episode of chivalric aggression against the giant Moldagog. Tristram is in Brittany with Duke Kardín whose kingdom borders the region of the giant. Tristram and Kardín are described as best friends who have “captured large cities and strong castles” (tóku af þeim stórar borgir ok sterka kastala) and that “powerful princes, vassals, and knights were subject to them” (gengu undir þá ríkir höfðingjar, lender men ok riddarar). They were men of great influence, and they captured Nantes (Namtesborg).58 Although Kardín and Moldagog have a treaty and Kardín orders Tristram not to go 54

“Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar,” ed. and trans. Peter Jorgensen, in Norse Romance I: The Tristan Legend, ed. Marianne E. Kalinke (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 182–84; emphasis mine. 55 Ibid., 183–85; emphasis mine. 56 I find it fascinating, if unrelated to my topic, that in Middle English, the adjective sprak means “Energetic” or “brisk” or is used as a surname. See the Middle English Dictionary entry: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/ dictionary/MED42382. 57 Geraldine Barnes, “The Tristan Legend,” in The Arthur of the North, 69. 58 “Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar,” 178–79.

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into the giant’s territories, Tristram sees value in the forest that belongs to the giant and disobeys Kardín. Tristram, in honor of Ísönd, goes to the forest and tells the giant that the forest is beautiful and he wants to build a house for himself there and cut down as many trees as he can. The giant asks him to leave because of his treaty with the duke, but Tristram continues to taunt him and challenges him to a fight. The giant says: Þú hyggr, at ek sé Urgan jötunn, er þú drapt. Nei, ekki er svá. Hann var föðurbróðir minn, en sá frændi minn, er þu drapt í Spaníalandi. En nú ertu niðr kominn í Bretlandi at ræna mik skógi mínum. En fyrr skaltu berjaz við mik.59 You think that I’m like Urgan the giant, whom you killed, but that isn’t so. He was my uncle, and you also killed a relative of mine in Spain. And now you have come to Brittany to rob me of my forest, but before you do, you will have to fight with me.60

Tristram and Moldagog fight and Tristram beats and humiliates the giant who is turned from a land-owner to a servant. It is in Moldagog’s territories that Tristan finds the cave described in the quotation above. Tristram uses the cave, which happens to be the same cave Arthur’s giant used to keep Helena, and he turns it into a “temple” of sorts with several statues including one of Ísönd that he kisses and talks to. He also creates a statue of Moldagog in which the giant is depicted gnashing his teeth and with fierce eyes “as if he wanted to kill everyone who entered.” He was wearing a “big shaggy goatskin” that only reached to his navel so that his penis was exposed: En hann var klæddr stóru bukkskinni ok loðnu, ok tók kyrtillinn honum skammt ofan, ok var hann nakinn niðr frá nafla ok gnísti tönnum, grimmr í augum, sem hann vildi berja alla þá, er inn gengu. He wore a big, shaggy goatskin, and his tunic didn’t come down very far, so he was naked from the navel down. He gnashed his teeth and had fierce eyes, as if he wanted to kill everyone who entered.61

Barnes and Heidi Støa write that the cave scene depicts Tristram’s love. Barnes writes that “Tristram’s harnessing of Moldagog’s riches and labour to the transformation of this house of sexual horror into a sanctuary of perfect love becomes a more glorious conclusion to the Mont-SaintMichel episode…”62 and Støa argues that “Tristram’s hall represents a 59

Ibid., 180. Ibid., 181. 61 Ibid., 186–87. 62 Barnes, “The Tristan Legend,” 69. 60

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striking externalization of his lovesick psyche, and that the inclusion of the episode therefore indicates a strong interest in the psychology of love.”63 A different reading, however, shows that Tristram’s harnessing of Giant Moldagog’s resources and the transformation of the cave is wrapped in the language of chivalric aggression. The scene continues the medieval colonial fantasy of expansion that the Historia introduces by having Tristram take over the resources of giants in the name of his love for Ísönd. I would like to point out that Tristram disobeys orders and breaks a treaty between landowners when he meets with Moldagog, a treaty that Moldagog tries to adhere to and respect when he asks Tristram to leave. The reader also learns that Tristram has killed several of Moldagog’s family members, a giant genocide. And ultimately, Tristram humiliates Moldagog by creating a statue of the giant with his penis exposed, and in the process essentializing giants by turning Moldagog into the embodiment of sexual transgression against aristocratic women and by extension Helena and Ísönd. The giants are thoroughly dehumanized to revel in their deaths and humiliation. A comparison of the treatment of Helena in the saga and the Historia, however, shows that the tactics used to represent women have shifted. The Historia’s scene at Mont Saint Michel separates the description of the giant from the death of Helena. The result is that the reader can separate the gruesomeness of the giant from Helena’s death, even if her death is caused by the horror the giant elicits in her. But Tristram saga does not elicit pity from the reader and the death of Helena is not mourned. Instead, her death becomes grotesque and intrinsically tied to the giant, and Helena (and Ísönd) continues to be used as a vehicle to excuse colonial expansion, the trope has been reduced so that the women become one-dimensional props and their value is tied to the gruesomeness of the giant, and to the dehumanization of giants. The changes in the Norwegian version make poignant the ways that Helena, and the search for chivalric love, become a prop to excuse chivalric aggression and expansion. Moreover, a comparison of Tristram saga with Möttuls saga, Ívens saga, and Erex saga problematize the latter sagas. In their totality, these texts show a preoccupation with sovereignty, and these Arthurian texts in particular respond to that preoccupation by using women – their bodies and their consent – to humanize the knights or to dehumanize the enemies of the knights. These texts use women to reject chivalric aggression against Norse knights whose actions argue for 63

Støa, “The Lover and the Statue,” 130.

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inclusion into medieval European whiteness while they promote chivalric aggression against Africans, Muslims, and giants. My positionality as a Puerto Rican woman of color and a colonial subject of the United States frames my ethical impetus as a medievalist; it shapes my research agenda and it guides the questions that drive my scholarship. How did disenfranchised communities argue for their humanization? In Arthurian texts in particular, they argue for their humanization by aligning themselves with whiteness. Furthermore, using biopolitics as a theoretical framework demonstrates how women’s bodies, on the one hand, are used to bolster the humanization of the knights, who are constructed as white and as defenders of women. On the other hand, protecting women’s bodies from the enemies of the knights becomes a tool to dehumanize the enemies and enact violence against them. Or as the saying goes “all’s fair in love and war” which shows the pervasiveness and the normalization of these tactics.

7

Lowland Ethics in the Arthur of the Dutch

DAVID F. JOHNSON

T

he larger questions underpinning my contribution to this volume are ones I have no hope of answering adequately in a study of this length: How do we define ethics in the context of Arthurian romance as a genre? How are Arthurian ethics encoded in these texts? Are we looking primarily at morals defined by the Church, or expectations raised by the secular courts, or both? Furthermore, do the ethical conflicts described in this literature differ amongst the many “national traditions”? Do we find, for example, in the English Arthurian romances ethical dilemmas that can in any significant way be distinguished from those in the French, or German, or Italian romances? Any attempt to answer this larger question will have to wait until we possess an overarching, comprehensive map of ethics in Arthurian literature, and that would entail a much more expansive treatment of a large number of passages from the Middle Dutch Arthurian romances. Here, I would like to make a start at exploring the ethics of the Middle Dutch Arthurian corpus based on only a very limited selection of passages.1 Before looking at those examples from the Dutch tradition, I want to begin with one of the most famous, explicit codes of ethics in all of Arthurian literature: the Pentecostal Oath appearing in Book III of Malory’s Morte Darthur, which Arthur required all of his knights to swear; in Dorrie Armstrong’s translation: 1

Stefka Georgieva Eriksen has taken a step in this direction for the Old Norse tradition with her scrutiny of Arthurian ethics in four Old Norse texts: “Arthurian Ethics in Thirteenth-Century Old Norse Literature and Society,” in Riddarasøgur: The Translation of European Court Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, ed. Karl G. Johansson and Else Mundal (Novus Forlag: Oslo, 2014), 175–98. A major difference between thirteenth-century Old Norse literature and culture and that of the medieval Dutch and Flemish courts is that the latter had enjoyed a longer period of exposure to (especially) French courtly custom, as opposed to the relatively late introduction in the Scandinavian regions of courtly culture and the ethics that went with it.

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Thus, when the quest of the white hart was completed by Sir Gawain, and the quest of the brachet was completed by Sir Tor, King Pellinore’s son, and the quest of the lady who was taken away by the knight was completed by King Pellinore, then the king established all his knights, and bestowed on them riches and lands. He charged then never to commit outrage or murder, always to flee treason, and to give mercy to those who asked for mercy, upon pain of the forfeiture of their honor and status as a knight of King Arthur’s forever more. He charged them always to help ladies, damsels, gentlewomen, and widows, and never to commit rape, upon pain of death. Also, he commanded that no man should take up a battle in a wrongful quarrel – not for love, nor for any worldly goods. So all the knights of the Round Table, both young and old, swore to uphold this oath, and every year at the high feast of Pentecost they renewed their oath.2

I do not think it is too bold to say that nearly all of the ethical dilemmas that occur in Malory’s text can be traced in some way to the concerns raised by this oath. Every knight, at least, is implicitly judged by how well or how poorly he maintains the ethical standards laid out in this oath, regardless of whether he belongs to the fellowship of the Round Table or not. Of course, it would be ludicrous to hold the Middle Dutch tradition to the standard expressed in Malory’s text, far removed as it is in time and space from the medieval Low Countries (and ignoring for the moment complicating factors arising from the distinction between original compositions and romances translated from other languages), but I would suggest it is a pretty accurate formulation of trans-traditional Arthurian ethical ideals as they had been portrayed in romance long before Malory took up his quill.3 Having said this, is there anything in the Dutch tradition similar to Malory’s codification of knightly ethical behavior? The closest we come to something like it is a section in Lodewijk van Velthem’s Merlijn-continuatie, a continuation of Jacob van Maerlant’s translations of (the prose versions of) Robert de Boron’s Estoire del Saint Graal and Estoire de Merlin.4 Maerlant, about whom I shall say more below, 2



Translation from Dorsey Armstrong, ed. and trans., Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur: A New Modern English Translation Based on the Winchester Manuscript, Renaissance and Medieval Studies (West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2009), 70–1. Malory’s corresponding passage is found in P. J. C. Field, ed., Le Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 97–98. 3 See Melissa Ridley Elmes’s essay in this volume. 4 Velthem’s Merlijn-continuatie exists in just one manuscript and is found in one very problematic edition: J. van Vloten, Jacob van Maerlants Merlijn. Naar Het eenig bekend Steinforter handschrift uitgegeven door J. van Vloten (Leiden: Brill, 1880). The

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was a thirteenth-century Middle Dutch poet from Flanders, and according to many the tradition’s most accomplished writer (the fourteenth-century Brabantine poet Jan van Boendale calls him die vader der Dietscher dichtren algader or “the father of all Dutch poets”).5 Lodewijk van Velthem was his literary successor after a fashion, active in the fourteenth century. Velthem drew upon the Suite Vulgate du Merlin in his efforts to complete or complement Maerlant’s poems. In both the French and Dutch versions of this text, following the wedding of Arthur to Guinevere, Arthur for the first time makes his famous vow never to eat until some adventure has presented itself, but moreover Nascien speaks for all of Arthur’s knights when he pledges to protect women, an oath which all knights present agree to swear, as well. Doe quam Nascien vor den koninck voert



28520

Then Nascien stood before the king

Ende seide so hoge sine tale,

and spoke his piece so loudly

Datsise alle hoerden in der sale.

that everyone in the hall could hear him.

“Here, heer kininck!” zeide Nascien tien stonden,

“My lord, sir King!” said Nascien then,

problems surrounding this text do not start with Vloten’s edition, however: no witness to the original Middle Dutch text has survived; rather the manuscript (Burgsteinfurt, Fürst zu Bentheimsche Schloßbibliotheek, B 37) contains a Middle Low German Umschreibung of all three texts: Maerlant’s Historie vanden Grale (an adaptation of Robert de Boron’s Estoire del Saint Graal), his Boek van Merline (an adaptation of Boron’s Estoire de Merlin), and Velthem’s Merlijn-continuatie, a translation of the Suite-Vulgate du Merlin. What makes Vloten’s edition of these texts problematic (his is lamentably the only edition of the Merlijn-continuatie) is the fact that he sought to back-translate and reconstruct the original Middle Dutch text rather than edit the Middle Low German text as it has come down to us. A more recent edition does provide us with a much more reliable text of the first two works by Maerlant, but unfortunately for our purposes it does not include Velthem’s Merlijn-continuatie. See Timothy Sodmann, Historie van den Grale und Boek van Merline (Köln: Böhlau, 1980). For more on Velthem and his work, see De Boeken van Velthem: Auteur, oeuvre en overlevering, Middeleeuwse Studies en Bronnen, ed. Bart Besamusca, Remco Sleiderink, and Geert Warnar (Hilversum: Verloren, 2009) and Bart Besamusca and Frank Brandsma, The Arthur of the Low Countries (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2021). For a brief introduction in English to Maerlant and Velthem’s Arthurian works, see Geert H. M. Claassens and David F. Johnson, “Arthurian Literature in the Medieval Low Countries: An Introduction,” in King Arthur in the Medieval Low Countries, ed. Geert H. M. Claassens and David F. Johnson (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2000), 1–34. 5 For details concerning Jan van Boendale and his assessment of Maerlant, see Claassens and Johnson, “Introduction,” p. 2, note 3.

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“Hier sijn die ridders van der Tafelronden, Die oec willen doen hier een belof,

“Present here are the knights of the Table Round 28525

who also wish to make a pledge,

Dat hier nembermeer joncfrouwe in den hof

that henceforth no damsel shall ever again

Comen en sal om helpe negene,

come to this court beseeching help,

Opdat tegen enen ridder allene

if it can be accomplished by one knight

Te doene es, daer en sal een ridder varen

against another, without a knight riding out

Waer dat sine leiden wille daernare,

28530

to wherever she shall lead him,

Ende also vele pinen daerombe dan,

and he shall do his utmost

Dat men haer recht sal doen voertan

to bring it about that the injustice done

Van den onrechte, dat haer es gedaen.”

to her is put right.”

Doe vragede die koninck Artur saen,

At this King Arthur asked

Ochtsi dat sekeren wouden alle alsoe,

28535

whether they would all pledge

Alse daer Nascien hadde gesecht doe,

to what Nascien had spoken.

Si zeiden, ja si, alle daernaer;

To a man they all replied, “Indeed we will!”

Doe zwoeren si te houdene daer

They then all swore to keep

Allegader toter doet toe

6

6

that pledge until their dying day

J. van Vloten, Jacob van Maerlants Merlijn, 28520–39, pp. 317–18 (translation mine). This parallels the corresponding section in the Old French L’Estoire de Merlin: “Sir,” said Nascien, “the companions of the Round Table, who are here, swear to God, before you and all the barons who are here, that, as you have sworn an oath, they will swear another oath – that henceforth, whenever a maiden in need comes to your court seeking help or assistance that can be carried out by a single knight fighting against another, one of them will willingly go to help her out of trouble wherever she may wish to take him, and he will strive until he has righted all the wrongs that have been done to her.” The Story of Merlin, trans. Rupert T. Pickens, ed. Norris J. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, vol. two (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 344–45. Since the Dutch

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The contents of this section of the Suite raise the intriguing question of whether it may have served as partial inspiration for Malory’s oath. At any rate, Velthem’s early fourteenth-century translation of it presumably indicates that it enjoyed some circulation in the medieval Low Countries.7 But even though an explicit articulation of Arthurian ethics such as Malory’s may be lacking in the Dutch corpus, it goes without saying that the tradition is filled with situations in which characters must deal, directly or indirectly, with ethical dilemmas. There are good kings, queens, knights, ladies, and damsels who behave ethically; they do good things, they do right by others, they retain their honor, and their actions redound to the glory of Arthur’s court. Likewise, Middle Dutch texts are filled with their moral and ethical counterparts, scoundrel knights, evil scheming ladies and queens, dishonorable kings, thieves, torturers, and base evil doers of all kinds. Rather than fixing a code of knightly ethics as Malory does in his Pentecostal oath, in these texts the unspoken rules of Arthurian ethics unfold as they progress. Most of the characters from the Arthurian stable that we are familiar with from the other national traditions behave pretty similarly in their Middle Dutch manifestations. Arthur is first the newly crowned and rising king, a leader in battle, and then, as elsewhere in the episodic romances from Spain, France, England, Germany and other language areas, he is the monarch who welcomes new heroes to his court and bemoans their loss when they go out on their quests. Gawain (here, Walewein) is for the most part the epitome of knightly virtue, Keye is possessed of his familiar biting tongue and petty jealousies, and Lancelot and Guinevere persist in their morally questionable love affair. Rather than trying to define Arthurian “Lowland Ethics” in any kind of absolute way, it is more interesting (and possible) to have a look at cases in this literature that contribute to the general formation of ethical behavior in Middle Dutch Arthurian literature,



Arthurian texts are less well known and have only recently been made available in English for modern readers, I quote from my translations extensively in this essay to demonstrate the value of Dutch Arthuriana in the wider consideration of Arthurian ethics. 7 Edward Kennedy suggested that Malory was influenced by Hardyng’s Chronicle (E. D. Kennedy, “Malory’s Use of Hardyng’s Chronicle,” Notes and Queries 214 (1969), 167–70: 169). Kennedy also acknowledges that “Ideas such as serving ladies and righting wrongs would, of course, be included in any statement of chivalric aims, and these similarities do not necessarily point to Hardyng’s influence upon Malory” (quoted after Norris, 20). See Ralph Norris, Malory’s Library: The Sources of the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008). Richard Barber suggests there is a strong correspondence between Malory’s oath and that of “charges read to the initiate Knights of the Bath” (“Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Court Culture,” Arthurian Literature XII (1993), 148–49); see Norris, Malory’s Library, 20.

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but which are also in some way ambiguous or surprising, rather than defining for the entire tradition. Let me start with the Roman van Walewein, the jewel in the crown of Middle Dutch Arthurian romance.8 Composed in the mid-thirteenth century by two poets, Penninc, who started it, and Pieter Vostaert, who finished the work of over 11,000 lines, the poem is a Walewein/Gawain tour de force. Judging by his endeavors in an overwhelming majority of Middle Dutch Arthurian romances, Walewein is beyond doubt the most ethical knight in Arthur’s court. He lives by the chivalric code, the Arthurian ethos as it was much later codified by Malory. He protects widows, damsels, ladies, pages, underdogs, the oppressed, and even his enemies, once he has defeated them. He seems never to enter into unfair combats, or fight for base or unjust causes, and respects the honor of others even as he protects his own and that of his sovereign uncle.9 It is especially in the Roman van Walewein that critics read him as the epitome of knightly virtue, the so-called vader der aventuren or ‘Father of Adventure.’ In fact, there is a description of Walewein in the poem itself that hits most of the high points of the chivalric ethos laid out by Malory: Sine doghet ende zine ere

His virtue and his honor

Es meerre ende van betren love

are greater and of better repute

Dan yemens binnen sconinx hove

than those of any man at the king’s court,

8



There are a number of reasons why this text has been regarded as such in criticism of the poem over the years; not least of these is the fact that it is an original Middle Dutch production, and not a translation of some lost French precursor. More important, however, must be the exceptionally high regard in which poets from the medieval Low Countries held Walewein/Gawain. For more on Walewein’s status in the Middle Dutch tradition, see the introductions in Claassens and Johnson, in King Arthur in the Medieval Low Countries and David F. Johnson and Geert H. M. Claassens, eds and trans., Dutch Romances, I: Roman van Walewein (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), as well as J. D. Janssens, “The Roman van Walewein, an Episodic Arthurian Romance,” in Medieval Dutch Literature in its European Context, ed. Erik Kooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 113–30, and most recently Simon Smith and Roel Zemel, “Indigenous Arthurian Romances: Walewein, Moriaen, Ridder metter mouwen, Walewein ende Keye, Lanceloet en het hert met de witte voet,” in The Arthur of the Low Countries: The Arthurian Legend in Dutch and Flemish Literature, ed. Bart Besamusca and Frank Brandsma (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2021), 113–46. 9 That he never fights “for base or unjust causes” is certainly the case in the indigenous Middle Dutch romances, unlike his German counterpart, who at times does just that. See Evelyn Meyer’s contribution in this volume.

LOWLAND ETHICS IN THE ARTHUR OF THE DUTCH

Van al gader zinen lieden. Wat mochtic jou van hem bedieden?

157

out of all of his men. 3210

What can I tell you of him?

Hi es der aventueren vader!

He is the Father of Adventure!

Hi bescudse alle gader

He protects everyone

Die der hulpen hebben noot;

who requires help in their need.

Sine doghet es so groot:

His virtue is so great,

Hi vordert weduen ende wesen 3215

he defends widows and orphans

Ende alle die hi vint in vresen

and protects everyone whom he finds

Bescud hi ende hi set daer voren

living in fear, risking his own life

Sijn lijf.’

in the process.’10

In this romance, in order to procure a magic chess-set for Arthur, Walewein must first acquire two other “objects” – one of these the beautiful Isabel, princess of Endi – in a series of adventures that take him further and further from Arthur’s court. Along the way he saves damsels in distress, fights on the side of the oppressed, and performs impressive feats of martial prowess. Yet the first cracks in this seemingly perfect outer sheen of chivalric perfection and adherence to its unspoken code of ethics are visible, I would argue, from the very beginning of the romance. The opening scene shows Arthur holding court and repeating his famous vow not to start the meal before he sees or hears of some adventure. No sooner has he spoken these words than a flying chess-set comes hovering through the window and settles on the ground in front of the awestruck court. It is a splendid object, finely crafted from the most valuable of materials, and of course it flies! Before anyone can react, it hovers back out through the window. Neither Arthur’s reaction, nor Walewein’s, I would offer, casts them in a particularly positive ethical light: Daer die heren aldus saten Naden etene ende hadden ghedweghen Also hoghe liede pleghen 10

When the barons were thus assembled, 45

having finished their meal and washed their hands (as noble-folk are wont to do),

All text and translations from the Roman van Walewein cited here are taken from Johnson and Claassens, Dutch Romances, I: Roman van Walewein.

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Hebben si wonder groot vernomen

they witnessed a great marvel:

Een scaec ten veinstren in comen

they saw a chess-set fly in through the window

Ende breede hem neder uptie aerde

and settle itself on the floor.

Hi mochte gaen spelen dies beghaerde

50

He who wished might play as he pleased.

Dus laghet daer uptie wile doe

And so for the nonce it stood there.

Daer ne ghinc niemen of no toe

Yet not a one of those

Van allen gonen hoghen lieden

high-placed lords dared approach it.

Nu willic u tscaecpel bedieden

Now I should like to describe the chess-set for you:

Die stapplen waren root goudijn

55

its legs were made of red gold,

Entie spanghen zelverijn

and the rims of silver.

Zelve waest van elps bene

The board itself was of ivory

Wel beset met dieren stene

and inlaid with precious stones.

Men seghet ons in corten worden

We are told in few words

Die stene die ten scake behorden

60

that the pieces belonging to the chess-set

Waren wel ghewaerlike

were, in truth, more valuable

Beter dan al Aerturs rike

than all of Arthur’s kingdom.

Dus saghen zijt alle die daer waren

And so all who were there saw it;

Metten hieft up ende es ghevaren

then suddenly it rose up and flew off

Weder dane het quam te voren

65

back to where it came from before.

Dies adde die coninc Artur toren

This disappointed King Arthur

Ende sprac bi mire coninc crone

and he said, “By my royal crown

Dit scaecspel dochte mi so scone

that chess-set seemed a splendid one to me indeed;

Maerct ghi heren ende siet

Mark you, noble sirs, and take heed,

LOWLAND ETHICS IN THE ARTHUR OF THE DUTCH

Hen quam hier sonder redene niet

70

it came here not without reason.

Die up wille sitten sonder sparen

To whomsoever will mount without delay

Dit scaecspel halen ende achter varen

and pursue and capture that chess-set

Ende leverent mi in mine hant

and deliver it into my hands,

Ic wille hem gheven al mijn lant

I will give all my land;

Ende mine crone na minen live

75

Willic dat zijn eghin blive

159

and my crown after I depart this life by my will he for himself shall hold.”

The entire court gawks in awe, and all the knights look at their shoelaces as Arthur repeats his request twice more, before concluding that he will just have to do it himself. It is then that Walewein steps forward: Deer Walewein die nu ende echt

Sir Walewein, who is now (and always has been)

In dogheden es ghetrect voort

at the fore in knightly deeds of virtue,

Hi scaemde hem als hi dit hoort

was ashamed when he heard

Datter niemen was soghedaen

that there was no one so disposed

Die dat belof durste anevaen

110

that he dared accept that promise

Van sinen here den coninc

from his lord the king,

Ende hi trac voort metteser dinc

and he stepped forward and spoke,

Ende seide coninc Artur here

“King Arthur, my lord,

Die worde die ghi heden ere

the words which you have spoken just now

Seid die hebbic wel verstaen

115

I have marked well:

Die jou ghelof wille anegaen

you will honor with your pledge,

Suldi houden also ghi seit te voren

as you said before, the man

Dien eet die ghi hebt ghezworen

who accepts your quest?”

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D AV I D F . J O H N S O N

Die coninc andworde mettien Ja ic so moete mi goet ghescien

The king answered without delay, 120

“Indeed I shall, and may it bring me good fortune!

Ware enich rudder bin minen hove

If there be any knight at my court

So starc of van zulken love

so strong or of such fame

Diet mi leverde in mine hant

who can deliver it into my hands,

Ic wille hem gheven al mijn lant Ende mine crone na minen live

I will give him all my land 125

and it would be my wish that

Willic dat zijn eghijn blive

my crown be his own after I depart this life—

Dies ne keric heden mijn wort

I shall not go back on my word.”

To begin with, we might question Arthur’s judgment in promising all of his lands and his crown later to whoever fetches this shiny magical bauble for him. Is this how the matter of succession to the Arthurian throne is to be determined? Moreover, there is something basely venal about Walewein’s insistence that Arthur confirm the promise he has just made before he agrees to undertake the quest.11 This comes dangerously close to engaging in a quest for “worldly goods.” And make no mistake, Walewein’s is a quest of acquisition: he must first fetch the Sword with the Two Rings, a magical blade that only the best of knights can draw from its scabbard without being killed by it. He finds this sword and need not even attempt to draw it: feeling the presence of Walewein, the sword leaps out of its sheath and prostrates itself before the most worthy of knights. He is given the sword by its owner, King Amoraen, on condition 11

On the face of it Walewein’s request may not seem unusual or be unique. As Evelyn Meyer reminded me in a personal communication, Meljaganz does much the same thing in Hartmann’s Iwein when he asks Arthur to restate his publicly made promise, making it legally binding. The comparison, however, does nothing to soften the accusation of venality against Walewein (that is, this quest is in part motivated by a desire to procure the “worldly goods” Arthur offers to whomever succeeds), the more so because Meljaganz’s motivation is grounded in deceit and unchivalric behavior, and while two instances does not make a pattern, both could be read as reflecting poorly in equal measure upon these two knights. See her chapter in this volume; the relevant passage in Hartmann’s Iwein appears in Hartmann von Aue, Iwein, Middle High German Text according to the seventh edition of G. F. Benecke, K. Lachmann, and L. Wolff, trans. Thomas Cramer, third edn (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1981), lines 4530–610.

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that he use it to fetch the woman he is in love with: princess Ysabele, daughter of King Assentijn of Endi. Now, this part of his quest is when things start to get a bit tricky when it comes to ethics. Ysabele is not in love with Amoraen, and King Assentijn has no intention of giving her up. So Walewein storms the great castle of Endi single-handedly, in a fashion not unreminiscent of John Cleese’s Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, wielding his magical sword to great effect and cutting his way through all opposition. The castle has twelve walls, with a moat between each pair, and metal-reinforced gates guarded by forty knights each. He kills every one of the men guarding the first five gates, and by the time he is overwhelmed by the defenders and taken prisoner, the body count has risen to 400. Before Walewein came on the scene, Ysabele was not a damsel in need of protecting, and there really is no way around characterizing his actions as anything other than abduction. Naturally, the princess falls in love with Walewein while he is awaiting torture and execution, and the two make good their escape. Vostaert skirts around the rather nettlesome issue of Walewein’s obligation to hand his lady love over to the owner of the Sword with the Two Rings, King Amoraen, by conveniently having him expire before the pair arrive in his kingdom to make the trade. Before they learn of the old king’s demise, however, Walewein makes it absolutely clear that he intends to hand her over, and she is not well pleased.12 These instances of questionable behavior on the part of a character assumed by both medieval and modern audiences alike to have been the epitome of virtue raise interesting questions about the flexibility of ethical standards in these texts. My second text is taken from that compendious fourteenth-century cycle of Middle Dutch Arthurian romance, the Lancelot Compilation. Inserted between translations into rhyming couplets of the Old French vulgate Quest de Saint Graal and Mort Artu are five non-canonical romances, the fifth and last of which is the Torec. This we know to be an adapted version of a translation made c. 1262 by Jacob van Maerlant, the famous thirteenth-century poet I mentioned above. A full summary of the poem can be found elsewhere (as well as a complete translation; it is some 4,000 lines long), so suffice it to say that it is the story of an outsider, a non-member of the Round Table, who moreover has no intention of joining that institution.13 Torec is a biographical romance, a story of 12 13

Johnson and Claassens, Roman van Walewein, lines 9408–37. From a passage in one of his other writings, we know he translated the work from an Old French model, the Torrez chevalier au cercle d’or (Torrez, knight of the circlet of gold). See: Geert H.M. Claassens, “De Torrez à Torec. Un roman Arthurien en moyen néerlandais et sa source inconnue en ancien français,” in Lors est ce jour

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revenge and recovery, with the eponymous hero spending most of the tale trying to recover the circlet of gold once owned by his mother, while at the same time seeking to win the hand of a damsel named Miraude. When Arthur and his Round Table knights do appear, they are cast in an ethically less than positive light. Two episodes illustrate this. The first direct confrontation between Torec and Arthur takes place about halfway through the story (lines 1925–2085), when Torec encounters a damsel who has been dealt with unfairly by the king: Doe reet hi vort, dat secgic u,

1925

He rode on, I tell you,

Ende gemoette ene joncfrouwe,

and encountered a damsel,

Die doe dreef groten rouwe.

who was lamenting loudly.

Ende Torec vrachde saen daer nare

At once Torec inquired

Wat hare dus te weenne ware.

as to what it was caused her to weep thus.

Ende si telde Torecke al daer,

1930

So then she told Torec

Dat hare ontwiest waren, vor waer,

that, in truth, she had been deprived

In Arturs hof .XXX. castele,

of thirty castles in Arthur’s court,

“Die ic hadde te minen dele.

“Which I had inherited.

Mijn verlies es mi te hoge.

My loss is unbearable.

Artur ne hedde nie orloge,

1935

Arthur was never involved in a war

In stont hem te staden daer of.

that I did not lend him my support.

Ic was gedaget driewaerf int hof.

I was summoned to court three times.

Hets waer, in quam niet voren.

It is true that I did not appear.

Hier bi hebbic min lant verloren.”

For this I have lost my lands.”

Torec seide: “Desen wijsdoem

1940

Torec said, “A man of honor

grant joie nee. Essais de langue et de littérature Françaises du Moyen Age, ed. M. Goyens and W. Verbeke (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), 159–75. A summary of the Torec can be found in the appendices to Claassens and Johnson, King Arthur in the medieval Low Countries, 232–36, and a full translation in Dutch Romances III: Five Interpolated Romances from the Lancelot Compilation, ed. David F. Johnson and Geert H. M. Claassens (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 562–727.

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En hout nember goet man over roem.

would never be proud of such a verdict.

Dit willic met u bedingen,

I will help you contest it,

Ende, canic, oec te poente bringen.”

and if I can, correct it.”

“God lone u, here, deser word!

“God reward you, my lord, for these words.

Ic blive u amie embermer vord.”

1945

I will be your friend forevermore.”

Dus kerde Torec met hare, vor waer,

And so Torec fell in with her

Ende reet so lange oec daer naer

and subsequently rode

Dat hi den coninc vant na dat

until he found the king

Te Tyntageel binnen der stat,

at Tyntageel in the stronghold

Daer hi hof hilt te dien male.

1950

where he was holding court at that time.

Torec beette ende ginc int sale,

Torec dismounted and went into the hall

Daer hi den coninc Arture vant.

where he found king Arthur.

Hi groette den coninc daer te hant

He greeted the king without delay

[195 vb] Ende seide: “Here, bi mire trouwen,

and said, “My lord, by my faith,

Dat men ontwiest ere joncfrou- 1955 wen,

that a damsel should be stripped of her lands,

Al ne quam si tharen dage niet,

though she did not appear on her day in court,

Dat es selden igeren gesciet.

this has seldom happened anywhere.

Ende die dit wiesde en seide niet wale.”

And whoever spoke this verdict did not speak well.”

Doe seiden si alle in die sale

Then everyone in the hall said

Dat si tfonnesse wiesden alsoe, 1960

that they had spoken the verdict

Ende dat oec bliven sal daer toe.

and, what is more, that it would remain in effect.

Doe seide Walewein, die riddere vri:

Then said Walewein, that noble knight,

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“Dit vonnesse en treckic niet an mi,

“I take no responsibility for this verdict,

Want in waser over niet.”

for I was not in favor of it.”

Torec Waleweine wel besiet

1965

Torec took a good look at Walewein

Ende vrachde doe wie hi ware.

and then asked him who he was.

“Ic beent, Walewein,” sprac hi daer nare.

“It is I, Walewein,” he replied.

Doen sprac Torec: “Edel here,

Then Torec said, “Noble lord,

U doget en argeret nembermere.

your virtue will never diminish.

Gi sijt so goet ende so vermogen!

1970

You are so good and powerful!

Ic segt oec dat si alle logen

I say as well that all those

Dat dit vonnesse gaven uut,

who pronounced this verdict are liars,

Want het was een dorper geluut.”

for it was a cruel decree.”14

In this romance, it seems Walewein is the only knight in all of Arthur’s court who demonstrates an ounce of integrity. He disagrees with Arthur, who is unbending and stands by the verdict. Torec proves the injustice of this decision by defeating Ywain in single combat. While the kind of explicit codification of ethical behavior for the ruling, knightly elite such as we find in Malory may be lacking in the surviving Middle Dutch corpus, there is an episode so far as I am aware unique to this tradition that accomplishes much the same thing but in negative terms. Rather than stipulate how knights should comport themselves, as Malory’s oath does, this passage describes (and laments) the extremely unethical behavior of the ruling elites, among whom the reader is surely meant to include not just sovereigns, but knights of every station. This episode appears in the Torec and is an absolutely central event in the development of its eponymous hero. Not long after the trial scene described above, Torec finds himself at the court of Ydras, a baron who delights in nothing more than entertaining knights errant. He invites Torec to stay with him for three days as his guest. Torec initially refuses, 14

All text and translations of the Torec cited here are taken from Johnson and Claassens, Dutch Romances III.

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eager to be back out seeking adventure, until Ydras tells him that on the third day he will witness (and be able to take part in) an adventure like no other: once a year an unmanned vessel makes landfall there, the “Ship of Adventure,” and no man who enters it is ever seen again. This ship is due on the third day of Torec’s stay with him. The boat arrives and Torec boards it without hesitation. Unmanned by sailors or helmsman, it nevertheless takes him to a distant shore where Torec disembarks and approaches a fine marble castle standing in a meadow. On its walls are murals which depict a vibrant and elegant court: Dat menechste gescrefte dat mochte sijn,

He saw the most variegated scenes

Sach hi daer in gescreven nu:

depicted there on the walls:

Die menechte joncfrouwen, secgic u,

a great many damsels, I tell you,

Ende vrouwen ende joncheren also wel,

2330

and ladies, and squires, as well,

Di speelden menegertiren spel,

were engaged in many a pastime there,

Scaecs, wortaflen, dansen, reien;

chess, backgammon, dancing, roundels;

Met voglen, met honden, si hen meien;

they entertained themselves with birds and dogs;

Van minnen leerde daer elc di wilde.

anyone who wished learned much about love there.

This is an unambiguous first indication that this episode is to feature prominently in the education of our young knight. It then appears that Torec has stumbled upon an Evil Custom: he is informed by the imposing knight he encounters inside the castle that he must fight him or one of his barons or die. Before the combat, however, he will be shown the camere van wijsheiden (Chamber of Wisdom), where he “will learn of all manner /of wisdom, and courtliness /and joys” (2353–55). Torec accepts the challenge, is given good food and lodging for the night, and the next day is led to the Chamber of Wisdom. The full episode is too long to cite here.15 What he witnesses while there is essentially a crash course on 15

See Johnson and Claassens, Dutch Romances III, lines 2363–622 for the episode in full. For more on this episode see especially, Jeanette Koekman, “Torec, een vorstelijk verhaal. Zinvolle verbanden in een complexe tekst, De nieuwe taalgids 81 (1998), 111–24: 117–19, and Jeanette Koekman, “Torec in de Kamer van Wijsheid: over het

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ethics, for the virtues and vices that the wise men gathered there discuss provide Torec with a virtual blueprint for future ethical behavior. As my first example from the Torec above demonstrates, our hero had already displayed a fully developed sense of knightly right and wrong by his championing of a disadvantaged lady, a lady whose legal rights were being threatened by none other than King Arthur himself. In the Chamber of Wisdom episode other virtues are extolled. Torec’s host takes him to the “judgment” in the Chamber of Wisdom, informing him that no man has been allowed to witness what happens there before him (2363–72). The chamber and its furnishings are constructed of the finest materials (2373–79). As they enter, the wise men gathered there are discussing the merits of moderation, and the air is filled with a pleasant, healing aroma. Torec and his host take their seats and the debate begins (2380–89). The first elder to speak extols wise words and speech, yet notes that dull men benefit but little from them: “According to the capacity of a man’s wits/ wisdom will take root in him” (2399). This same elder suggests they speak “again of the world,” and because high lords take precedence, he begins with them. All of them, he says, sin against virtue and bring the world to ruin. The common folk should be able to look up to them as examples of virtuous behavior, but these days they are evil and entirely devoid of honor. They should teach and show their inferiors the righteous path, but instead they are all stone-blind, the blind leading the blind (2400–15). A second wise man opines that landholders have the power to corrupt an entire folk if they turn to evil: “if the head is ailing/ then all the limbs will suffer” (2421–22). He claims further that bravery is a thing of the past, with few courts possessing any who exhibit it. Because the greater always teach the lesser, if rulers behave cruelly, their barons will follow suit. Evil, he says, originates with the most powerful and this in turn corrupts the common folk, who do not avoid evil, either. Therefore, he declares, that there can be no virtue that does not come from love (2437). With interpreteren van Middelnederlandse teksten,” in Monniken, ridders en zeevaarders. Opstellen over vroeg-middeleeuwse Ierse cultuur en Middelnederlandse letterkunde (…) aangeboden aan Maartje Draak, ed. D. R. Edel, W. P. Gerritsen and K. Veelenturf (Amsterdam: Gerard Timmer Prods, 1988), 141–53. Willem P. Gerritsen reads the Torec as a possible Mirror for Princes for the young Floris V in “Wat voor boeken zou Floris V gelezen hebben?,” in Floris V.: Leven, wonen en werken in Holland aan het einde van de dertiende eeuw (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 241–61. Jeanette Koekman makes an even stronger case for the romance having been composed by Maerlant with a clear didactic function in mind; she concludes: “Ik ken geen andere Arturroman die zo treffend de dubbele functie ‘lering ende vermaeck’ illustreert als de Torec (I know of no other Arthurian romance that illustrates the double function of ‘edification and entertainment’ as saliently as does the Torec. Koekman, “Torec in de Kamer van Wijsheid” (1988), 151).

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this, he remains silent and another wiseman speaks up, noting that there is a debate about which is better: courtliness coupled with goodness, or bravery, a good heart, and moderation. He challenges those present to reveal which is better (2444). Courtliness springs from a noble heart, and bravery leads to renown for those who possess it, whereas cowards are never praised. Strength (and bravery) are linked to a good heart and moderation, for “He who is good can follow the path that is very straight and narrow” (2459–60). Giving in excess or its opposite, hoarding, are equally stupid and undesirable, “But it is a perfect man who is able to practice moderation” (2476–77) and moderation is always accompanied by honor: “Whatever is good in this earthly kingdom is enjoyed in moderation” (2482–83). The wise men further lament that wealth has replaced prowess as the measure of one’s power and influence, and the lot of the poor man is woeful indeed. Rampant greed prevents nobility from thriving: “A bad weed grows quickly” (2527). There follows here a further debate between a damsel and a lady on the subject of whose love is to be preferred, the virgin damsel’s or the experienced lady’s. Oddly enough, the combat stipulated at the beginning of this episode never takes place. Torec spends three full days in the Chamber of Wisdom, soaking up the lessons offered there (the subjects of which, the poet assures us, are so vast that he is compelled to provide only these few examples (2598–600). When he goes to bed on the evening of the third day, Torec fully expects to ride forth the next morning (to the combat with his host): Ende als hi die ogen heeft ontaen,

But when he opened his eyes

– Hier mogedi wonder groet verstaen –

– now you may hear a great marvel –

So vant hem daer die jongelinc

the youth found himself

Daer hi irst te scepe in ginc.

2625

where he had first boarded the ship!

Van wondere sach hi harentare,

He looked around him in wonder,

Idoch werd hi wel geware,

yet he perceived well

Dat hi daer nu was, sonder waen,

that he was now, without a doubt,

Aldaer hi te scepe was gegaen.

in the very place where he had boarded the ship.

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The topics touched upon in the Chamber of Wisdom do not, of course, match what we saw in Malory’s Pentecostal Oath, or even the more implicit norms for ethical knightly behavior revealed in the Roman van Walewein, except in the most general of terms. To be sure, nobility, goodness of heart, bravery, prowess and wisdom all underlie the tenets of knighthood in both examples. What stands out in this enumeration of virtues, though, is moderation in all things, and it is particularly relevant to our discussion of knightly ethics in that, “It is justly praised when adventures are involved” (2466).16 The qualities, virtues, and desired behaviors touched on in this episode are precisely the ones Torec will need to have internalized in order to succeed in his quest and when he becomes ruler of his own kingdom. He is an eager student and cannot get enough of these teachings, but it cannot be emphasized enough that the ruler whom the wisemen are (at least implicitly) invoking here is King Arthur, himself. The ethical lessons offered up in this episode depend to great degree upon a contrast between the theoretical behavior posited by the wise men, and the actual practices of rulers and landholders (and knights) in the here and now of the poem. Chief among these is King Arthur. The first episode cited above illustrates this point nicely: Arthur and his entire court – with the sole exception of Walewein – behave unethically toward a damsel in financial and legal distress, and Torec’s positive behavior in demonstrating bravery, prowess, goodness of heart, and nobility redound to his credit. A final short episode from this romance sheds some further light on my argument. As the end of the story draws near, Torec finds himself in the rather unusual position of having to take on and defeat Arthur’s entire Round Table, because his lady love, Miraude, has set that as the condition for agreeing to marry him. He receives some chivalrous help from Walewein – who obligingly persuades his comrades to cut the girths of their saddles so they are all unhorsed at the first shock. Torec still refuses to ride to Arthur’s court until he has been unhorsed by some knight. Arthur, it seems, did not receive Walewein’s memo about cutting his girth, and instead rides out in disguise to fight him, but succeeds in unhorsing him only by the most unconventional and unchivalric means: 16

On the importance of moderation as one of the four main courtly virtues (along with constancy, justice, and generosity), see Evelyn Meyer’s contribution to this volume. Thomasin von Zerklaere features prominently in her discussion, and many of the German author’s statements on contemporary ethics have their parallels in the works of Jacob van Maerlant. On these parallels (and the differences between these two authors) see F. P. van Oostrom, Maerlants Wereld (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1996), 459.

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he grabs Torec in a bear-hug and wrestles him to the ground. The poet offers an explanation for this startling development (3681–706): En was nie so conen man,

There was no man so brave,

Noch so starc mede daer an,

nor so strong, either,

Noch die soe wel conde riden,

nor who could ride so well,

Maer quam Artur bi sire siden,

that if Arthur came next to him,

Hine name in sine arme wel,

3685

he could not take him in his arms

Waest in nerenste, waest in spel,

– whether in earnest or in jest –

Ende leidene vor hem op sijn part

and lay him across his horse in front of him

Ende vordene daer hi wilde ter vart.

and take him wherever he wished.

Waleweine ende oec Lancelote,

Walewein and even Lancelot,

Perchevale ende al die genote

3690

Percheval and the entire company

Die waren vander meester namen,

of the most renowned knights

Die heeft hi alle geproeft tsamen,

had all of them been tested,

Maer har ne geen const onstaen,

but not a one of them could escape

Hine leidene op sijn paert saen.

Arthur laying them across his horse.

Ende om dese sake, om dese dinc,

3695

And it was for this reason

Sone liten si geen tijt den coninc

that they never allowed the king

No josteren noch torniren,

to joust or take part in tournaments,

Om dat hise alle soude falgiren

for he would defeat them all

Ende den prijs soude hebben allene,

and have the prize all to himself,

Ende harre alre dade oec clene

3700

and all of their feats of arms would

Souden scinen, wet vor waer,

seem as nothing, of this you may be sure,

Jegen die siene oppenbaer.

when compared to his.

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Ende hierom beden si den coninc,

And this is why they asked the king

Dat hi af stoede derre dinc

to renounce these things

Ende liet hen bejegen prijs ende lof, Ende hi soude here sijn daer of;

3705

and let them pursue renown and praise, and he would be their lord on that basis;

Arthur’s unconventional and unchivalric mode of combat may not rise to the level of being unethical, but I think it comes close. If it had been just this once, we might have forgiven Arthur’s enthusiasm, but the fact that his own knights have effectively banned him from jousts and tournaments, not because of the danger to his sovereign person, but rather because of the way he steals their glory, as well as the means he employs to win these tournaments, is telling, I would argue. What are we to make of Arthur’s less than chivalric mode of combat, and the contrast this sets up between him and Torec, the outsider? At the very least it provides a stark contrast with Torec’s own approach to the combat, expecting as he does – as may the audience of the poem – a crossing of lances with the great king.17 Moreover, if we consider this episode in light of the debate in the Chamber of Wisdom, Arthur – who is certainly brave and strong, as a good king must be – falls short in at least one important quality expected of him: moderation. The wise men tell us (and Torec) that “Strength exalts 17

The issue of the text’s critical stance towards King Arthur has been commented upon in more detail by several critics. See for example K. Heeroma, Maerlants Torec als ‘sleutelroman,’ Amsterdam, 1973, Mededelingen der KNAW, afd. Letterkunde, Nieuwe reeks 36.5; Roel Zemel, “Over drie romans in de «Torec»,” Voortgang, jaarboek voor de Neerlandistiek 20 (2001), 47–71; F. P. van Oostrorn, “De oorspronkelijkheid van de Torec, of: de vrije val van een detail door de Nederlandse literatuurgeschiedenis,” Spiegel der Letteren 21 (1979), 197–201; Sîan Echard, “‘Seldom does anyone listen to a good exemplum’: Courts and Kings in Torec and Die Riddere metter Mouwen,” Arthuriana 17.1 (2007), 79–94; Geert H. M. Claassens, “De Torrez à Torec: un roman arthurien en moyen néerlandais et sa source inconnue en ancien français,” in Lors est ce jour grant joie nee: Essais de langue et de littérature françaises du Moyen Âge, 159– 75; Katty De Bundel and Geert H. M. Claassens, “Alle daventuren van Logers. Over de samenstelling van de Lancelotcompilatie,” in Maar er is meer. Avontuurlijk lezen in de epiek van de Lage Landen Studies voor Jozef D. Janssens, ed. Michèle Goyens and Werner Verbeke (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 2005), 303–18; David F. Johnson, “Questing in the Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation,” in The Grail, the Quest and the World of Arthur, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 101–07; A. A. M. Besamusca, “Approaches to Arthurian Fiction: The Case of Torec,” Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society 63 (2011), 295–323. See also Marjolein Hogenbirk and David F. Johnson, “Translations and Adaptations of French Verse Romances: Tristant, Wrake van Ragisel, Fergut, Perchevael, Torec,” in The Arthur of the Low Countries, 107–08 and note 54.

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many men who also possess a good heart and moderation” (2457–56) and “Moderation is so good, know this well, that honor itself accompanies it” (2477–78). A good heart King Arthur may well have, but this scene shows us, I argue, that his manifest lack of moderation also entails a diminution of his honor. There is a great deal more to be said about the placement of this particular romance in the cycle as a whole. It depicts Arthur and all of his court, with the exception of Walewein, as high-handed and unjust in their judgment against an innocent damsel, and there is a persistent tension between the hero Torec and King Arthur’s court, culminating in his refusal to join the Round Table. In the manuscript, the text inserted immediately before this one, Lanceloet en het hert met de witte voet, reminds us of the adulterous relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere, and immediately following this romance comes the tale of the fall of Arthur’s kingdom, brought low by Lancelot and Guinevere’s love and the treachery of Mordred. What strikes me as remarkable in these examples, and others that could be produced, is that such morally ambivalent actions are attributed to the “good guys” by these poets, that for them, at least, Arthur’s court does not represent an ethically untarnished ideal. The most important question raised by such moments, I think, has to do with the poets’ intentions. What were they trying to accomplish? Was it their aim to stimulate critical reflection of knightly ethics? Or do these situations serve rather to lend a patina of realism to these stories? In other words, without such blemishes, perhaps, Arthur and his knights are just too good to be true. One of the editors of this volume summed it up better than I could, and I gratefully repeat her words here: “The drama of bad behavior from unexpected corners is one of the hallmarks of the Arthurian romance.”18 That Arthur’s court is represented as less-than-ideal in the Torec will come as no surprise to those familiar with the work of Jacob van Maerlant, especially his magnum opus, the Spiegel historiael. He seems to have a predilection for choosing negative examples to drive home his pedagogical points (as the excerpt from the Chamber of Wisdom episode cited about clearly illustrates), thus underscoring the fact that moral and ethical lessons can be taught with illustrations of negative behavior as well as positive ones. Negative examples of this kind abound in his Spiegel historiael.19 Another factor that may have played a role here is the 18 19

Dr Melissa Ridley Elmes, personal communication. A good discussion of “royal ethics” in Maerlant’s works – including the Torec – is by Marian Andringa, “Vorstenethiek in het werk van Maerlant” in Wat is wijsheid? Lekenethiek in de Middelnederlandse letterkunde, ed. J. Reynaert (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1994), 37–53.

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likelihood that the originally Flemish Arthurian texts (be they adaptive translations or original compositions) were composed for an audience of significantly lower status than, say, that of Chrétien de Troyes or, as Bart Besamusca notes, the French speaking courts of the upper nobility in Flanders itself. As Besamusca has shown, these texts were most likely aimed at members of the (Dutch speaking) lower nobility or urban patriciate, a group that would have had a more critical stance toward the upper nobility (as represented by King Arthur’s court) might well have identified with characters and situations in these texts that could be seen to consolidate their own social status.20 Is there then such a thing as “Lowland Ethics”? I am not in a position to make that claim assertively, but the texts I have drawn my examples from are to a greater or lesser degree authentic “Lowlands” romances, so in that regard their inclusion of situations in which normally virtuous characters act in ways that are ethically questionable might be a nod in that direction. What I hope to have shown is that some of the most interesting cases of Arthurian ethical dilemmas in Middle Dutch Arthurian romance are those in which the so-called good guys do not always conform to their literary reputations or to the codes of knightly behavior they are meant to live by, and that moreover there is still a great deal of promising work to be done in exploring the ethics of this fascinating corpus of texts.

20

See Bart Besamusca, “De Vlaamse Opdrachtgevers van Middelnederlandse Literatuur: Een Literair-Historisch Probleem,” De Nieuwe Taalgids 84 (1991), 150–62, especially 156-62. On page 160, Besamusca describes how the financial straits of the lower nobility in Flanders often compelled them to seek alliances through marriage with daughters of the wealthy urban patriciate. He observes further: “Dit soort verbintenissen lijkt voor mij voor het probleem van de Vlaamse opdrachtgevers van Middelnederlandse literatuur van belang, omdat juist in de steden volop in het Nederlands werd geschreven. Het vermoeden lijkt gewettigd dat de familierelaties die zo tussen adellijke en stedelijke geslachten ontstonden, literaire milieus hebben bevorderd waarin het adellijke gebruik om literatuur te laten schrijven samenging met de stedelijke welvaart, ambities èn voorkeur voor het Nederlands.” (This kind of alliance seems to me to be important with respect to the problem of the patronage of Middle Dutch literature, because it was precisely in the towns that writing in Dutch was so dominant. The suspicion seems justified that the connections created in this way between noble and urban patriciate families would have promoted literary milieus in which the noble practice of the patronage of literary production would have been combined with urban wealth, ambition, and a preference for Dutch.) See also Evert van den Berg, “Genre en Gewest. De geografische spreiding van de ridderepiek,” Tijdschrift Voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 103 (1987), 1–36. I am indebted to my friend and colleague Prof. Dr Geert H. M. Claassens for reminding me of Besamusca’s study, and for reading this essay and helping me clarify my tentative conclusions.

8

Contesting Royal Power: The Ethics of Good Lordship, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the March of Wales

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ostcolonial theory has opened up new spaces and possibilities for interpretation in many disciplines, including medieval studies. One text that has received a considerable degree of such attention in the last twenty years is the fourteenth-century alliterative poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In this viewpoint, the narrative justifies English colonialism through Arthur over Welsh subjects like Bertilak/ The Green Knight, wherein ‘Welshness’ signifies barbarity, treachery, and monstrosity.1 In this approach, it is often taken for granted that when the poet describes the land Gawain is venturing through as being infested with various monsters, he is describing Wales, and suggesting that Welsh people are barbaric. And yet, as other scholars have pointed out, Hautdesert is not located in Wales at all.2 One consequence of this

1



See Lynn Arner, “The Ends of Enchantment: Colonialism and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48.2 (2006), 79–101; Patricia Clare Ingham, “’In Contrayez Straunge’: Colonial Relations, British Identity, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” New Medieval Literatures 4 (2001), 61–93 and ‘“In Contrayez Straunge’: Sovereign Rivals, Fantasies of Gender, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 107–36; Rhonda Knight, “All Dressed Up with Someplace to Go: Regional Identity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25 (2003), 259–84; Helen Young, “’Bi contrary caryez this knyght’: Journeys of Colonisation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Philament 1 (2003), n.p. www.philamentjournal.com. 2 See Tony Davenport, “Wales and Welshness in Middle English Romances,” in Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales, ed. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 137–58; Robert W. Barrett Jr, Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195–1656 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009); and Joshua Byron Smith, ‘“Til

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postcolonial framework is that it can posit a unified, top-down colonizer/ colonized framework that does not manifest clearly in the poem, and has the implication of obfuscating the contests of lordly power that the poem is invested in. In this essay, I suggest we can more productively examine the political ethics of lordship at the heart of the poem by situating it in the context of the March of Wales, a fluid, and multicultural border region commanded by lords with considerable autonomy, wherein the writ of the king of England did not hold sway. Such Marcher lords could be antagonistic toward royal lordship, particularly when it encroached upon their customary rights. In attending to this unique context, we shall see that in the poet’s framing of Bertilak as a Marcher lord, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight draws our attention to Bertilak/The Green Knight’s good lordship and his regal qualities. In positioning Bertilak/The Green Knight in this way, the poet reveals the political ethics of lordship through his confrontation with Arthur and his interactions with Gawain, which illustrates the often-conflicted relations between Marcher lords and English kings in the later Middle Ages.

Ethics of Lordship, Marcher Demesnes, and Royal Overreach While lordship in the Middle Ages was exploitative as a matter of course, medieval people understood the difference between good lordship and bad lordship.3 Even if we concede that not all lords over their demesne were ethically minded, they would recognize for their own self-interest that the only way that a lord could maximize the demesne’s productivity to him was if it had support from the community he governed. Thus, lords in the Middle Ages had to be good stewards of their lands and over the people they ruled. What did it mean to be a good lord? While the specifics could vary from place to place, and the term itself “was an elastic concept that defies a precise formulation,” we can nonetheless glean a common set of assumptions governing the ethics of lordship in the Middle Ages.4





þat he neӡed ful neghe into þe Norþe Walez’: Gawain’s Postcolonial Turn,” The Chaucer Review 51.3 (2016), 295–309. 3 Thomas Bisson has argued that one of the challenges for understanding medieval lordship is that while the concept was so pervasive in almost all aspects of medieval life, it has been something of a will-o’-the-wisp for scholars because it so easily “subsumed [itself] under other themes: for example, kingship, feudalism, the landed estate.” See Bisson, “Medieval Lordship,” Speculum 70.4 (1995), 746. 4 Gordon McKelvie, “Kingship and Good Lordship in Practice in Late Medieval England: Henry VII, the Earl of Oxford, and the Case of John Hale, 1487,” Journal of Medieval History 45.4 (2019), 516.

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At its essence, the term “good lordship” signaled an expectation that lords would offer both aid and protection to those they governed.5 Such aid could take many forms, including, but not limited to, economic, military, or legal support. Similarly, the lord’s obligation to protect could involve offering shelter from one’s enemies, or even prosecuting war against them. In this way, good lordship was understood to be a mutually beneficial and reciprocal arrangement between the lord and those he ruled over. The lord was obligated to those he governed, and those he governed were obligated to him in turn. Breaches on either side of the arrangement could be considered grounds for voiding the social contract, and there were formal mechanisms for signaling that something was wrong and in need of remedy. One such mechanism was defiance, or diffidatio, discussed later. In brief, such formal acts of defiance underscored the central point that the social contract was one of mutual bonds of reciprocity, which meant that when one party had violated the principles of the arrangement, the one party could renounce their relationship to the other. One major expectation of the ethics of lordship was that lords should not act arbitrarily, and without respect to customs, liberties, norms, laws, or advice in their demesne. This idea was so important to conceptualizing good lordship that it was even enshrined in the Coronation Oath of Edward II,6 reflecting the idea that 5



The scholarship on lordship and governance is considerable, but see especially J. P. Canning, “Law, Sovereignty, and Corporation Theory, 1300–1450,” in Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c. 1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 454–76; R. R. Davies, Lords & Lordship in the British Isles in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Brendan Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Michael Hicks, English Political Culture in the Fifteenth Century, (London: Routledge, 2002); Paul R. Hyams, “Warranty and Good Lordship in TwelfthCentury England,” Law and History Review 5.2 (1987), 437–503; Anthony Musson, “Magna Carta and Statutory Law,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature, ed. Candace Barrington and Sebastian Sobecki (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 54–65; Kenneth Pennington, The Prince and the Law, 1200–1600: Sovereignty and Rights in the Western Legal Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993); Seymour Phillips, “Royal Authority and its Limits: The Dominions of the English Crown in the Early Fourteenth Century,” in The March in the Islands of the Medieval West, ed. Jenifer Ní Ghrádaigh and Emmett O’Byrne (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 251–60; Paul Raffield, “Custom and Common Law,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature, 42–53; and Andrew Spencer, Nobility and Kingship in Medieval England: The Earls and Edward I, 1272–1307 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 6 The line in question reads: “Sire, grauntez vous a tenir & [promettez vous a defendre] les leys & les custumes dreytureles, les queux la comunalte de votre Realme aura esclutz, & les [afforterez] al honour de Dieu [solome] vostre poer?,” which roughly translates to, “Lord, do you grant/agree to hold and do you promise to defend the laws and the rightful customs, which encloses the community of your realm, and in a way that is befitting to the honor of God, and in accordance with

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lords ought to govern in a way that would “benefit the entire realm, not simply for their own enrichment.”7 In the March in particular, it was critical that lords practice good lordship. Marcher lords had to “establish a measure of rapport with the local community,” which required deliberate effort, with high costs for failure.8 Indeed, “if lordship became simply an instrument of extortion… then the community could quickly be alienated from its lord.”9 Thus, while a postcolonial lens might invite us to imagine Marcher lordships in the fourteenth century as an extremely harsh environment, with the native Welsh being ruthlessly exploited simply because they were Welsh, and the native ruling classes having no political power, this was not usually the case.10 Scholars remind us that while the framework of government and law was definitely English, and that the highest positions in power tended to be concentrated in the hands of Englishmen, “the reality of local power continued to reside in the hands of the native leaders of Welsh society… which had now transferred their loyalty and service to the new English lords.”11 If Marcher lords were ethical, took care in cultivating their relationships with native Welsh leaders in their demesne, and made it a point to respect long-standing legal traditions, liberties, and customs, they could prove themselves to be good lords and stewards of their demesne, which is, after all, what the inhabitants of any realm wanted in the Middle Ages.12 your power?” See Statutes of the Realm, 1 (London: Record Commission, 1810; repr. London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1965), 68. 7 McKelvie, “Kingship and Good Lordship,” 504–05. 8 R. R. Davies, The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063–1415 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 408–09. 9 Ibid., 410. 10 Davies notes that the main reason English law dominated in the March was not because it was imposed in top-down fashion, but because so many noble Welsh families wished for “the ‘law of Hywel’ [to] be replaced by inquest and the ‘law of twelve,’” Age of Conquest, 423. While existing Welsh law was highly individuated and differed from community to community, despite sharing some basic legal concepts and traditions, many prestigious Welsh families gravitated toward English law and legal framework because it was so regularized, making it easier for those families to protect their interests and consolidate power and property. 11 Ibid., 416. 12 This is not at all to suggest that Marcher lords were infallibly ethical in their governance over their domains, for indeed part of their undoing in the fifteenth century was their ruthless estate management, which enabled contenders like Owain Glyndŵr to tap into that discontent. Davies merely cautions against reading Pre-Conquest Wales from the position of modern nationalist sentiment or even the propaganda cultivated by Welsh princes in the thirteenth century, reminding us that Pre-Conquest Wales was organized into many small, autonomous kingdoms ruled by Welsh elites who were very often at odds with one another, as each tried to expand their power bases: “it was a country of many kings, many dynasties,

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One of the unique characteristics of the March, as far as lordship is concerned, is that unlike all other lordships within the polity of England, March demesnes were much like sovereign kingdoms unto themselves. In fact, Marcher liberties and territories were explicitly classified as independent and separate from the laws and liberties of England in Magna Carta.13 This autonomy was derived from their conception as feudal states, since Marcher lordships had been created in the wake of a militarized frontier, and such lordships needed to be able to govern and militarize themselves at the local level.14 What this meant was that Marcher lords were, in essence, kings in their own right, and had royal powers, like the authority to build and crenelate castles, wage private war, raise armies, make peace, seize the lands of traitors, create legislation for his own domain, and enforce them.15 Trespasses against the Marcher lord’s law were “committed against his peace, not that of the king [of England],” and cases that were heard and decided in the Marcher lord’s domain could not be brought up for appeal with the king of England; the only recourse was to bring the matter to the lord himself, or his council.16 Thus, although the lands they ruled over were technically held in chief from the English king – “albeit by the loosest and most nominal of feudal ties”17 – Marcher lords were kings of “truly… sovereign jurisdictional unit[s].”18 But despite the relative autonomy of Marcher lords, English kings sometimes sought to bring them to heel in ways that were perceived as many kingdoms… There was no necessary or ineluctable progress towards political consolidation within or between dynasties… Multiple kingships was a norm.” Age of Conquest, 14. As Anglo-Normans began to invade Wales and attempted to conquer it in fits and starts, starting from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, it was certainly the case that Welsh nobles could and did put aside their rivalry to thwart Anglo-Norman advances. But it was also the case that, seeing that a more favorable opportunity for advancement lay with the Anglo-Norman lords, Welsh nobles sometimes chose to serve these new lords. 13 Davies, “Kings, Lords and Liberties in the March of Wales, 1066–1272,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 29 (1979), 56. 14 See Davies, Age of Conquest, especially Chapters four and ten. See also Davies, “The Law of the March,” Cylchgrawn Hanes Cymru/Welsh History Review 5.1 (1970), 1–30; Maxwell Lieberman, The Medieval March of Wales: The Creation and Perception of a Frontier, 1066–1283 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Maxwell Lieberman, The March of Wales: A Borderland of Medieval Britain, 1067–1300 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). 15 See especially A. C. Reeves, The Marcher Lords (Swansea: Christopher Davies Publishers, 1983); David Walker, Medieval Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society in the March of Wales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). 16 Davies, Age of Conquest, 401. 17 Ibid., 283. 18 Davies, Lords & Lordship in the British Isles, 172.

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unethical by these lords, such as by restricting or revoking the rights they had previously enjoyed, or by deliberately pursuing political goals that conflicted with their interests.19 This was especially true as the March of Wales stabilized in the late thirteenth and throughout the fourteenth centuries.20 In response to what they saw as a violation of ethics, Marcher lords often framed their arguments in terms of feudal and/or customary law, signaling their willingness – and right – to respond to such breaches of lordship with formal acts of feudal defiance – diffidatio – and force, if necessary.21 By invoking the language of feudal law, which conceives of felony as a breach in faith between lords and vassals, Marcher lords reminded English kings that their defiance was the mechanism for settling matters of breaches of faith.22 Within this feudal framework, their actions were on sound ethical ground. Such acts of defiance could take many forms, including performances, such as verbal acts, or even taking up arms. For example, in 1199, William Baose would forcefully claim that “no royal writ ran in the March, no royal sheriff or other officer had authority there, and no royal justices held their sessions there.”23 Later, 19

For instance, in the late twelfth century, Henry II had brokered a peace with Lord Rhys ap Gruffydd, and had great difficulty in trying to control Marcher lords who continued to wage private war because they insisted on their customary rights. In order to compel obedience, Henry relied on threats of confiscation of property and titles, execution, and restitution, at the lord’s expense, for actions against Wales. Davies, Age of Conquest, 276. 20 Tensions were still present, but life was considerably more peaceful and stable for the Welsh and the English in Wales and on the Welsh Marches. Indeed, Davies declares that, “With the exception of the rebellion of Llywelyn Bren in Glamorgan in 1316, there was no major revolt or war in the country between 1295 and 1400,” Age of Conquest, 412. As evidence of this peace, and the faith that it was indeed a lasting peace, Davies points to evidence of large-scale domestic building projects that were undertaken during this time, ranging from towns to churches, and the castle renovations to enhance comfort and style. As Elizabeth Salter has pointed out, we should not imagine that linguistic and cultural differences were impediments to communication and cultural exchange; rather, we should note that such an environment like the March fostered the “interpenetration of cultures,” and created a multicultural environment that required mutual cooperation and mutual benefit within those communities. See her English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art and Patronage of Medieval England, ed. Derek Pearsall and Nicolette Zeeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 9. 21 As Canning has argued, medieval jurists conceived of feudal custom as an obligation on the part of the prince, which could restrict his sovereign powers, since he was obligated to honor them. In this way, “Feudal custom thus performed its function of protecting the rights of the subject against the ruler’s whim… Feudal custom therefore appeared as a fundamental ethical norm, and one which severely limited the sovereignty of the princeps.” “Law, Sovereignty and Corporation Theory,” 462. 22 See Davies, “The Law of the March,” 15. 23 Ibid., 286.

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in the thirteenth century, John Fitzalan would argue that “he was obliged to do nothing at the king’s command nor would he do so.”24 Some Marcher lords with a penchant for the theatrical would make their point much more forcefully: in 1250, Walter de Clifford III was served with a writ from Henry III, and compelled the messenger to eat it, including the seal, before being sent packing back to Westminster.25 Nonetheless, despite frequent royal attempts to curtail Marcher lord power – ranging from Henry II to Edward III – they successfully defended these powers, reminding English kings that they were, in effect, sovereign communities. It would not be until 1536 until the Marches of Wales were fully dissolved and subsumed to English royal polity, but it was a continual battle against royal overreach. What the historical context of the fourteenth-century March of Wales suggests, then, is an important and ongoing dispute concerning lordship and ethics. At the heart of the matter is that, while Marcher lords were granted greater seignorial powers than many other lords and much more independence from the English Crown, these franchises were often contested by English kings who wanted to subordinate them more firmly to the royal prerogative by withdrawing some of the liberties and rights that Marcher lords had previously enjoyed. These attempts were perceived by Marcher lords as unethical breaches of faith, and such lords were free to use the mechanisms of justice at their disposal, ranging from verbal acts of defiance to trials of law at court, and on to armed resistance against English kings, as Marcher lords sought to maintain their power, honor, and autonomy against royal overreach. Attesting to this phenomenon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight depicts the tensions between Arthur and the Green Knight in ways that would echo those between Marcher lords and English kings, illustrating the strategies of resistance that might be employed to defy royal authority.

The Green Knight’s Diffidatio: The Optics of Martial Resistance One of the ways that we can see the poet’s framing of the Green Knight as a defiant regent is evident from the first line of his description when he first enters Camelot: “Ther hales in at the halle dor an aghlich mayster” (line 135) (“When there bursts in at the hall door a terrible figure”).26 24

Ibid., 286. The story is recalled by Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, vol. five, ed. H. R. Luard (London: Longman & Company, 1880), 95. 26 All citations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. and trans. James Winny (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1992). Unless 25

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According to the Middle English Dictionary, “aghlich” means “inspiring awe or respect,”27 but given that it can also mean “dreadfully,”28 I would suggest that this semantic tension might invite us to offer a third possibility, meaning something like “inspiring dread.” For the second term, “mayster,” the Middle English Dictionary gives us “A high official, civil or military; a governor, ruler, leader,”29 making it clear that the Green Knight has considerable authority, and suggests that this authority is clearly and visibly manifest upon his first appearance. Thus, when the Green Knight enters Camelot and is described by the poet as an “aghlich mayster,” what we have is an impressive lord who inspires both awe and dread in those who behold him. As I will suggest, the poet’s description of the Green Knight yokes together the man’s hypermasculine physical qualities with his social standing in order to convey the impression of a powerful regent who refuses to acknowledge Arthur’s lordship through various acts of diffidatio. And when we examine the Green Knight’s physicality, accompanied by his clothing which appears to enhance its rhetorical effects, as well as the Green Knight’s conduct, we can readily see how the Green Knight’s costume and demeanor might signify a Marcher lord defying an English king to a contemporary audience. The poet’s description of the Green Knight dwells in particular on his hypermasculine body. We are told that the Green Knight is, On the most on the molde on mesure hyghe; From the swyre to the swange so sware and so thik, And his lyndes and his lymes so longe and so grete, Half etayn in erde I hope that he were, Bot mon most I algate mynn hm to bene, And that the myriest in his muckel that myght ride; For of his bak and his brest al were his bodi sturne, Both his wombe and his wast were worthily smale. (lines 137–44) (In his stature the very tallest on earth. From the waist to the neck so thick-set and square, And his loins and his limbs so massive and long, In truth half a giant I believe he was, But anyway of all men I judge him the largest, And the most attractive of his size who could sit on a horse. For while in back and chest his body was forbidding, Both his belly and waist were becomingly trim)

otherwise noted, all Modern English translations are Winny’s. Middle English Dictionary, “Aueli,” Sense 1a. 28 Ibid, “Aueli,” Sense 1b. 29 Ibid, “Maister,” Noun, Sense 1a. 27

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He is the tallest, stoutest man on earth, and the poet observes that he must be half-giant because he is so large. As I have argued elsewhere, it seems like the Green Knight has an incredibly large, though idealized, physique, which was becoming increasingly evident and important to discourses of militarism and masculinity in late medieval English culture.30 His neck to his waist is described as “sware” and “thik,” inviting us to see his torso as “thick-set, sturdy… or strongly built,”31 and “large-framed… muscular,”32 with long and powerful arms and legs. Most significant to this visual narrative is the way this mysterious man’s body communicates its devastating military potential, and the way that it seems to defy the Arthurian community by bodily contrast. While the Green Knight’s body is described as hypermasculine, he mocks the apparent lack of manliness and courage in the Arthurian bodies before him, noting that, “Hit arn aboute on this bench bot berdlez chylder. / If I were hasped in armes on a heghe stede,/ Here is no mon me to mach, for myghtez so wayke” (lines 280–82) (“Those about me in this hall are but beardless children. / If I were locked in my armour on a great horse, / No one here could match me with their feeble powers”). By framing the Arthurian community as beardless, he is both suggesting a conspicuous lack in masculinity as well as their immaturity.33 Building upon his claim that the Arthurian knights are nothing more than children, the Green Knight harnesses their youthfulness and their lack of manliness to more forcefully suggest their lack of strength, and implicitly, courage in the 30

For an analysis of the developed male body in late medieval England, see Steven Bruso, “Bodies Hardened for War: Knighthood in Fifteenth-Century England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 47.2 (2017), 255–77. 31 Middle English Dictionary, “Square” Adj. Sense 3a. 32 Ibid., “Thik” Adj. Sense 6. 33 Not only did it connote manliness, but also maturity, since the growth of facial hair helped to mark the boundary between male children and their adult counterparts. The scholarship on medieval masculinity is voluminous, but see Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees, Thelma Fenster, and Jo Ann McNamara (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1997); Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley (London: Longman, 1999); Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, ed. Jacqueline Murray (New York: Garland, 1999); Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004); Derek G. Neal, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Negotiating Clerical Identities: Priests, Monks, and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. Jennifer D. Thibodeaux (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Katherine Lewis, Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England (New York: Routledge, 2013).

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remainder of the lines above. He claims that none have the power to “mach” him because they are all too “wayke,” but he first offers an image of himself “hasped in armes on a heghe stede,” implicitly suggesting that neither Arthur, nor the knights before him have the courage or the physical means to offer any kind of meaningful armed opposition. By depicting the Green Knight as physically powerful and imposing, and the Arthurian community as being unable to offer resistance to him, the poet makes him visible as a representation of Marcher lords, who had gained a reputation in late medieval English culture both for their militarism and their willingness to take up armed defiance against English kings who violated the ethics of lordship.

The Green Knight’s Diffidatio: Refusing to Acknowledge Authority In addition to signposting the Green Knight’s militaristic defiance through the form of his body, the poet also draws attention to another kind of formal defiance: the refusal to acknowledge the lordship or sovereignty of another. According to Lee Manion, medieval conceptions of sovereignty ultimately come down to acts of recognition and contest, in order to “[establish] the (fictional) origins of political power through ceremonial and legal acknowledgment.”34 Such acts of recognition were performances essential to determining and contesting power relations between superiors and subordinates, and Manion argues that “late medieval kings in general and English ones in particular defined and contested sovereignty with emperors, popes, their subjects, and each other through a discourse based on acts of recognition, which operated both verbally and ceremonially.”35 Through the Green Knight’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge Arthur’s authority at Camelot, and his ability to subordinate Arthur’s will to his own, the poet reveals how effective the strategy can be in resisting royal authority or overreach.36 Having arrived at Camelot and astounded the court with his presence, the Green Knight both signals his sovereign power and defies Arthur’s royal authority by refusing to recognize Arthur as the king.37 We 34

Lee Manion, “Sovereign Recognition: Contesting Political Claims in the Alliterative Morte Arthure and the Awntyrs off Arthur,” in Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Robert S. Sturges (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 69–91: 72–73. 35 Ibid., 72. 36 I am not the first to suggest that the Green Knight might critique Arthur’s sovereignty. See Patricia Clare Ingham’s fine analysis in “In Contrayez Straunge.” 37 The Green Knight’s conduct certainly seems to indicate he sees himself as sovereign, since his behavior parallels fourteenth-century juristic language defining sovereignty, in which the sovereign power of kings is defined through two

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are on reasonably safe ground in assuming that the Green Knight knows exactly where he is and knows very well who Arthur is because, as we later find out, he was specifically sent by Morgan to Arthur’s court, in the hopes of both testing the Arthurian community and literally scaring Guinevere to death.38 On his approach, he deliberately makes his way to the dais in the hall, and asks, “Wher is… The governour of this gyng? Gladly I wolde Se that segg in syght, and with hymself speke Raysoun. (lines 224–27) (Where is… The governor of this crowd? Glad should I be To clap eyes on the man, and exchange with him a few words”)

Here, the Green Knight’s question renders Arthur’s authority invisible, since he is not recognizable as “the governour of this gyng,” and the effect of his diffidatio is intensified by two key components: firstly, his questioning of Arthur’s sovereign identity and authority is made publicly, in front of all of Arthur’s followers, which undermines him; secondly, the semiotics of the hall and the table at the dais would have made the power relations absolutely clear. Indeed, as Molly Martin has argued, it is within physical spaces like the castle’s great hall where regents like Arthur can create, maintain, and project their social and political power.39 In feasting spaces, it would be customary that the lord would be seated at table on the dais with other notable worthies, including at a minimum, his lady and the highest clergy. As the poet describes the scene, this is precisely the case at Camelot: Queen Guinevere is seated at the highest table on the dais, placed in the center (lines 74–75), with Gawain seated somewhere beside her (line 109), and Agravain somewhere on the opposite side of her (line 110); Bishop Baldwin is at the head of the table (line 112), with Ywain next to him (line 113). Arthur’s position is a bit more difficult to coordinating phrases, according to Lee Manion: rex qui superiorem non recognoscit (the king who does not recognize a superior [is sovereign]) and rex in regno suo est imperator regni sunt (the king in his own kingdom is emperor). See “Sovereign Recognition,” 70–71. The scholarship on medieval sovereignty and political thought is extensive, but see The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c. 1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. J. P. Canning, “Law, Sovereignty, and Corporation Theory, 1300-1450,” 454–76; Anthony Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 38 See lines 2456–66. 39 See Molly Martin, Castles and Space in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), 35.

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work out, but he does seem to be at his place at the table, though he is standing. We are told at first that he “Stondes in stale the stif kyng hisselven, / Talkkande bifore the hyghe table” (lines 107–08) (“So there the bold king himself keeps on his feet, / Chatting before the high table”), which might suggest that he is standing perhaps at the opposite side of the table, facing Guinevere and everyone else on the dais. But at the moment that the Green Knight enters, we are told that the appearance was so surprising that “the lude myght haf leve liflode to cach” (line 133) (“the king might have leave to swallow some food”), suggesting Arthur must be close enough to his own place setting of food that he would be able to eat. In turn, this seems to imply that he is at his place at the table.40 But despite the clear signposting of lordly authority at the dais through customary seating arrangements, the Green Knight’s question undoes the optics of authority and hierarchy on display.41 In suggesting it is not clear whose hall this is, or who is in charge, the Green Knight stakes out his own sovereign power by first deliberately failing to recognize Arthur’s. Not only does the Green Knight refuse to see Arthur as a sovereign king before him, he also refuses to acknowledge his authority, even within his own court. This has especially important resonances for defying lordship and authority, since the court was “the forum where the lord brought his power of lordship to bear on his tenants and dependants and coerced them to accept and obey his authority across many aspects of their lives.”42 Having stunned Camelot into silence, Arthur speaks courteously, and “rekenly hym reverenced” (line 251) (“saluted him politely”) welcoming the Green Knight to Camelot. After introducing himself as Arthur, he tries to reclaim some of his authority jeopardized by the Green Knight’s query, and takes pains to position himself as the sovereign “hede of this ostel” (line 253) (“master of this house”). Having put forward his own authority, Arthur attempts to command the Green Knight, though he frames it as a polite invitation, saying, “Lyght luflych adoun and lenge, I the praye, / And quat-so thy wylle is we schal wyt 40

Though he is not seated, and it is not clear where, in relation to everyone else at the table, he is placed. Custom would indicate that he would be seated next to his queen, perhaps flanked by Gawain on one side of Guinevere and Agravain on the other. 41 Ingham points out that the Green Knight’s later criticism of the Arthurian community for their youthfulness and lack of manliness also has implications to Arthur’s sovereignty, since he is also described in youthful terms, and draws attention to medieval discourses surrounding sovereignty that reveal a deep anxiety about youth, immaturity, and kingship. See “Sovereign Rivals, Fantasies of Gender, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” 126–27. 42 Davies, Lords & Lordship, 127.

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after” (lines 254–25) (“Be pleased to dismount and spend some time here, I beg, / And what you have come for we shall learn later”). Arthur’s expectation here is that the Green Knight will comply by dismounting and joining them, subordinating his “wylle” for later. Indeed, despite the almost parenthetical, “I the praye,” which presents the order as a request, it is, nonetheless, a command: “come down from your horse and stay for a while.” As in his previous speech act, the Green Knight undoes Arthur’s authority, this time by flatly refusing the command, however politely articulated: “Nay, as help me… he that on hygh syttes” (line 256) (“No, by heaven… and him who sits there”). And we know that Arthur acutely feels the cut of the Green Knight’s defiance and his disparaging words about his reputation in lines 309–12 because, upon observing that his trusted knights are indeed standing there stunned, Arthur “wex as wroth as wynde” (line 319) (“grew red with rage”), and is compelled to act in accordance with the Green Knight’s wishes, to try to avoid shame.

The Green Knight’s Diffidatio: Visual Authority and Resistance Throughout the poet’s long description of the Green Knight, his dress is rendered in regal terms, which mirrors the way that Marcher lords clothed themselves in legal language that foregrounded their royal powers, especially when defying English kings who were perceived to be violating the principles of lordship.43 This language often “exulted in a phraseology which emphasized the regality of their position,” and so too does the Green Knight, although his is the language of fabric and semiotics.44 Since the poet provides no details of what Arthur is wearing, the poem makes Arthur unable to compete, semiotically, in this contest of visual power, which places him at a distinct disadvantage.45 The semiotic significance of the Green Knight’s attire can be parsed through existing sumptuary laws. While it is true that we have no records suggesting that this was enforced – for example, we do not have any surviving records 43

Davies, Age of Conquest, 391. Both Patricia Clare Ingham and Rhonda Knight view the Green Knight’s clothing as a kind of “chivalric aping,” to use Ingham’s term, or even “drag,” to use Knight’s. My own view is that the Green Knight is not really calling into question the performance of regality here as much as he is doubling-down on his raiment to signal royal power, which he seems to claim for his own. See Patricia Clare Ingham, “Sovereign Rivals, Fantasies of Gender, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” 124; Rhonda Knight, “All Dressed Up with Someplace to Go: Regional Identity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25 (2003), 259–84: 274. 45 On the importance of cultivating visual power through dress and regalia, see SunHee Kim Gertz, Visual Power and Fame in Rene D’Anjou, Geoffrey Chaucer, and The Black Prince (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 44

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of criminal charges or fines levied against any violator of the laws – they were laws, entered into official record. When created, they were declared publicly, during meetings of Parliament, and had the effect of prescribing an optics of power and hierarchy according to one’s dress. Thus, certain materials and ornamentation could connote one’s wealth and social standing, making these laws useful for considering how a wearer perhaps desired to be read. Covering his upper body, we are told that the Green Knight wears: A strayte cote ful streght, that stek on his sides, A meré mantile abof, mensked withinne With pelure pured apert, the pane ful clene With blythe blaunner ful bryght, and his hode bothe, That watz laght from his lokkez and layde on his schulderes. (lines 152–56) (A straight close-fitting coat that clung to his body, A pleasant mantle over that, adorned within With plain trimmed fur, the facing made bright With gay shining ermine, and his hood of the same Thrown back from his hair and laid over his shoulders)

The tunic that he wears, and the manner in which it fits his body, accords with fourteenth-century noble male fashion, wherein garments were cut closer and closer to the body and, as Susan Crane has argued, this tailoring created a “striking masculine silhouette.”46 Having already seen how the poet’s description of the Green Knight’s physicality foregrounds his imposing stature and strength, it is not hard to imagine the optics of muscularity that this tunic creates. But more important to the image of regality on offer here is the finely made mantle that the Green Knight wears, which is trimmed with brilliant ermine. According to some of the earliest English sumptuary laws that we have records of, one of the most notable restrictions was for fine furs, like ermine and miniver, which were the exclusive purview of royalty, aristocracy, and the highest clergy. Indeed, in some manuscripts, like Harvard Law School MS No. 21, completed sometime after 1450, though likely begun prior to this point, the association between royalty and ermine furs is made much more explicit, for the miniature of Edward III on fol. 1r, for example, features the king wearing what appears to be robes and a hat trimmed in ermine.47 46

Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity during the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 14. 47 This manuscript has recently been digitized. See https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/ manifests/view/drs:49675811$1i.

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The restriction of fine furs to royalty and aristocracy is evident from the Parliament roll dating to October 1363, where even knights whose lands or rents earned them 200 marks a year were explicitly forbidden to wear “a cloak, mantle, or gown lined with pure miniver, sleeves of ermine, or any apparel embroidered with precious stone or otherwise.”48 As the poet’s description moves to render the Green Knight’s lower body in image, the language highlighting the Green Knight’s aristocratic and royal bearing continues to manifest through his resplendent attire. According to the poet, Heme wel-haled hose of that same, That spenet on his sparlyr, and clene spures under Of bryght golde, upon silk bordes barred ful ryche… And all his vesture verayly watz clene verdure, Bothe the barres of his belt and other blythe stones, That were richeley rayled in his aray clene Aboutte hymself and his sadel, upon silk werkez. That were tor for to telle of tryfles and halve That were enbrauded abof, wyth bryddes and flyghes, With gay gaudi of grene, the gold ay inmyddes. (lines 157–67) (Neat tightly-drawn stockings coloured to match Clinging to his calf, and shinin spurs below Of bright gold, over embroidered and richly striped silk… And truly all his clothing was brilliant green, Both the bars on his belt and other gay gems That were lavishly set in his shining array Round himself and his saddle, on embroidered silk. It would be hard to describe even half the fine work That was embroidered upon it, the butterflies and birds, With lovely beadwork of green, always centered upon gold)

A few key details of the Green Knight’s raiment here reinforce the royal and aristocratic associations noted earlier. In particular, the presence of embroidery featuring precious stones and silk stands out. English embroidery had a distinctive style that was well-known in Europe through the fourteenth century and highly prized by regents everywhere.49 Indeed, Pope Innocent IV was so impressed and desirous of it after seeing 48

See Item 29 of “Edward III: October 1363.” Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, ed. Chris Given-Wilson et al. (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005). British History Online. Accessed 28 July 2020. www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/parliament-rollsmedieval/october-1363. 49 See M. A. Michael, “Creating Cultural Identity: Opus anglicanum and its Place in the History of English Medieval Art,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 170.1 (2017), 30–60.

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examples of it on English clergy that he immediately sent orders to the Cistercian abbots to acquire English-made orphreys for his own garb, according to Matthew Paris.50 Such works were often commissioned by kings and could be, and very often were, both extraordinarily beautiful and costly.51 In part, the high valuation of English embroidery in the fourteenth century was due to the increasing tendency to include more and more gold, silver, gems, and semiprecious stones in the work. The Black Prince’s Register provides some clues to the cost of gems, which helps us to see how they might have had royal and aristocratic associations: in an entry dated 14 February 1352, Edward had purchased from Sir John Beauchaump two rubies, totaling 30L.52 In a later entry, dated 1 March, the register lists “Divers jewels bought for the prince’s use,” which cost 38L 6s. 8d.53 Indeed, so much of this rich material was often included in the embroidery that aging and looted embroidered works were frequently burnt in order to harvest the raw precious material. As Margaret Wade Labarge points out, the worn-out embroidered copes and chasubles of Archbishop Lanfrac at Canterbury were burnt for this reason, yielding over ten pounds of gold.54 Given the extravagance of the material used, and the associations with kings and aristocrats, it is perhaps unsurprising that the sumptuary law of 1363 would make embroidery, with or without precious stones, prohibited for knightly families. For knights whose properties were valued at 200 marks, they were not permitted to own “any apparel embroidered with precious stones or otherwise.” The law makes provision for knights whose properties were valued at 400 marks and higher, up to 1,000L, to have embroidery, since it is not mentioned as a restriction, but they were still not permitted to have “apparel of precious stones,” except for head pieces. Likewise, wearing fine silk clothing had powerful semiotic connections, as it could connote royal and aristocratic lineage. In part, this was because silk was an extremely costly fabric in fourteenth-century England. It was so expensive to obtain that Margaret Scott likens the 50

See Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, ed. H. R. Luard, Rolls Series 57.4 (London, 1872–83), 546–47. 51 See Lisa Monnas, “Embroideries for Edward III,” The Age of Opus Anglicanum, ed. M. A. Michael (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2016), 36–73. 52 The Register of Edward the Black Prince, Preserved in the Public Record Office, ed. Michael Dawes and Charles Burdett, vol. 4 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930–33), 40. 53 Register of Edward the Black Prince, 41. 54 See Margaret Wade Labarge, “Stitches in Time: Medieval Embroidery in its Social Setting,” Florilegium 16 (1999), 77–96: 83.

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purchase of it to the expense of securing a custom, hand-built sports car.55 The Black Prince’s Register sheds some light on the cost of silk fabrics, but because it does not indicate how much, in yardage, they entailed, we cannot get a good read on the price per yard. Nonetheless, the cost is instructive: on 1 July 1352, Edward purchased samite (samit), sendal (sendale), and camaca (kamaca) totaling 43L 10s.56 Considering that these prices refer to the unworked cloth, since the order relates to William de Stretton, who was the prince’s tailor, the prices here suggest to us how costly it was to obtain the material alone, never mind the cost of having the material transformed into fully tailored garments. Since England had no domestic silk production until at least the eighteenth century,57 regents like Edward the Black Prince would have had to obtain them from merchants bringing them to England. Silk was thus an imported good, most probably coming from Italy or perhaps Byzantium. And because silk was an imported, non-native cloth, the sumptuary law of 1336 would prohibit anyone from purchasing, owning, or wearing silks, unless they were royalty.58 While the primary reasons for this restriction on purchasing non-native cloth are probably economical, rather than social – as John Munro and Diana Wood have separately argued, this policy would encourage spending on domestic goods, and wool exports, which in turn would allow Edward III to collect more tax revenue – the law (and the cost of the material) has the semiotic effect of linking silk garments to regal bearing.59 In wearing these sumptuous fabrics in his visit to Camelot, the Green Knight presents himself as royalty to the Arthurian community, and in ways that are calculated by the poem to deliberately upstage and defy Arthur’s own authority, since no details are provided for his own kingly attire.

55

See Margaret Scott, Fashion in the Middle Ages (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), 9. 56 See Dawes and Burdett, The Register of Edward the Black Prince, Vol. 4, 56. 57 See Maryanne Kowaleski and Judith M. Bennett, “Crafts, Guilds, and Women in the Middle Ages: Fifty Years After Marian K. Dale,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14.2 (1989); and Marian K. Dale, “The London Silk Women of the Fifteenth Century,” The Economic History Review 4.3 (1933), 324–35. 58 Although strangely, the 1363 statute does not specifically restrict knights from owning or wearing silk cloths. For the 1336 statute, see The Statutes of the Realm, Printed by Command of His Majesty King George the Third, in pursuance of an address of the House of Commons of Great Britain. From Original records and authentic manuscripts, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Luders et al. (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1810–28), 280–81. 59 See John H. Munro, Wool, Cloth, and Gold: The Struggle for Bullion in AngloBurgundian Trade (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972) and Diana Wood, Medieval Economic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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Modeling Good Lordship: The Green Knight/Bertilak If the Green Knight’s appearance at Arthur’s court and his defiance of Arthur therein models the ethics of resistance to royal authority, the narrative is not ultimately concerned with merely illustrating modes of resistance; rather, it takes pains to also foreground the ethics of good lordship in the person of Bertilak, as a kind of pedagogy of sound, ethical lordship. Since the Green Knight knows very well, from the beginning, that a representative from the Arthurian community will need to seek him out and then return home once again, as a condition of the beheading game, he knows these lessons will be brought back to Arthur and the Arthurian court writ large. In parallel to the sovereign optics that the Green Knight displays in Camelot, the poet highlights the Green Knight’s/ Bertilak’s kingly qualities and ethical lordship as seen through his lands, castle, and court culture. Numerous critics like Lynn Arner and Patricia Clare Ingham have noted the hardships Gawain faces on his journey to Hautdesert, but rather than signaling negative connotations of Wales, I argue that it offers a subtle critique of Arthur’s lordship, since the hazardous experiences Gawain has appear to occur in lands that Arthur controls.60 Scholars are indeed right to point out that in Gawain’s journey to Bertilak’s castle, where he crosses into the Wirral, Gawain does encounter numerous physical and environmental hardships, as is conventional in romance. Indeed, “at uche warthe other water ther the wyghe passed / He fonde a foo hym byfore” (lines 715–16) (“at every ford or river where the knight crossed / He found an enemy facing him”) and at times, he must fight dragons, wolves, wildmen, bulls, bears, boars, and ogres. Lynn Arner suggests that these hostile encounters indicate that the land is “teeming with savage beasts” and “residents of the Welsh-English borderland and Wales possess less humanity than the English.”61 However, a closer reading of this segment of the poem reveals that Gawain is still in territory governed by Arthur. For example, it is worth noting that, at the start of his journey, while Gawain is still in “the ryalme of Logres” (“the realm of England”), riding through it, this is the place where he is “Oft leudlez and alone he lengez on nyghtez / Ther he fonde noght hym byfore the fare that he lyked. / Hade he no fere bot his fole by frythez and dounez” (lines 691–95) (“Often friendless and alone he passes his nights, / Finding before him no food that he liked. / He had no fellow but his horse 60

See Lynn Arner, “The Ends of Enchantment: Colonialism and Sir Gawain the Green Knight,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48.2 (2006), 79–101; Patricia Clare Ingham, ‘“In Contrayez Straunge’,” 75–76. 61 Arner, “The Ends of Enchantment,” 84 and 85, respectively.

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by forest and hill”). And as Smith points out, it is only after Gawain seems to leave Camelot and Arthur’s domain that he might encounter other travelers or find hospitality along the way.62 Indeed, this is precisely what happens, for just when Gawain is exhausted, cold, and probably hungry, and he prays to God for some succor, that is when he sets eyes upon Hautdesert, which appears like a miracle. Moreover, the moments when he encounters wolves, ogres, and the like occur when he crosses over to the Wirral Peninsula, which is in Cheshire, and they occur within the wilderness, which is absolutely conventional in medieval romance. Indeed, Bertilak’s kingdom, despite its proximity to the wilderness and its position in the March of Wales, seems to be a model of what happens when a demesne is governed by good stewardship and ethical lordship in the person of its lord. One of the ways we can see the kingly qualities of Bertilak’s domain and implicit evidence of his good lordship is in the description of Bertilak’s castle, which seems more grand than Camelot, since no details are provided about it. Thus, in the same way that Arthur’s attire cannot compete semiotically with the Green Knight’s, resulting in an impression that the Green Knight is dressed more regally than Arthur, so too does Bertilak’s castle stand out as especially remarkable. As Dominique Battles has argued, “the poet employs such vivid and precise historical detail of castle architecture as to invite the reader to compare castle Hautdesert with actual examples of these buildings in the English landscape, including their social history as well as their design.”63 These vivid details have prompted some scholars, like Ordelle Hill, M. W. Thompson, and Carolyn King Stephens, to suggest Hautdesert may have been modeled on castles the poet had seen firsthand, like Grosmont Castle, Beeston, and Kenilworth, for example.64 While it is not my intention here to suggest a new candidate, or support one already offered, I follow Battles, Hill, and Thompson with respect to the castle’s importance, and its architectural details which point to the castles found in the March of Wales. By depicting Hautdesert as an imposing, as well as majestic, castle like those 62

Smith, “Gawain’s Postcolonial Turn,” 297. See Dominique Battles, Cultural Difference and Material Culture in Middle English Romance: Normans and Saxons (New York: Routledge, 2013), 75. 64 For Grosmont Castle, see Ordelle Hill, Looking Westward: Poetry, Landscape, and Politics in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2009), 95–98. For Beeston, see M. W. Thompson, “The Green Knight’s Castle,” in Studies in Medieval History Presented to R. Allen Brown, ed. C. Harper-Bill, C. Holdsworth, and J. L. Nelson (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989), 317–26. For Kenilworth, see Carolyn King Stephens, “The ‘Pentangle Hypothesis’: A Dating History and Resetting of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’” Fifteenth-Century Studies 31 (2006), 174–202. 63

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found in the March, the poet sets up an exceptional model, inviting us to see it as the result of good lordship, since castles were a legible indicator of lordship and power. As Gawain approaches the castle, he is immediately struck with wonder, and we can imagine his eyes lingering on each aspect of the castles as he observes them. To his eyes, what he observes is “A castle the comlokest that ever knight aghte” (line 767) (“The most splendid castle ever owned by a knight”), and the whole thing “schemered and schon thurgh the schyre okez” (line 772) (“shimmered and shone through the fine oaks”). Clearly, Gawain is impressed and the poet draws our attention to this by reiterating how it is the “comlokest” castle that any knight ever saw. Notably, Gawain considers it to be the most beautiful castle that any knight could own, suggesting that he himself finds it to be so. Implicitly, then, this castle is perhaps even more splendid than Camelot. The castle itself is physically beautiful, and its glimmering and shining walls suggest that they are white-washed, hinting at the refinement and sophistication he will encounter inside. While Gawain is awed by the beauty and majesty of the edifice, he is perhaps more impressed by the siting of the castle and its defensive capabilities; details, which reveal the structure to be the pinnacle of military engineering, mirroring the reputation of castles in the March of Wales, and indicating implicitly the superior quality of Bertilak’s lordship, since such engineering marvels were costly. As he approaches, he notices how impregnable the castle seems. The castle itself is set on a “lawe” (line 765), an artificial or natural hill designed to give the structure an additional advantage of height, and it is also set in a clearing or meadow (line 768, “payere”) permitting those within the castle to have a clear line of sight on its environs, so that hostile forces cannot approach undetected. Hautdesert is also kept in a state of readiness, with the drawbridge “upbrayde, / The gatez were stoken faste, / The wallez were wel arrayed” (lines 781–84) (“drawn up tight, / The gates were bolted fast. / The walls were strongly built”). These walls, we learn, are set “in the water wonderly depe, / And eft a ful huge heght hit haled upon lofte” (lines 787–88) (“in the water incredibly deep, / And then soared up above an astonishing height”), highlighting this impressive architectural marvel. Further underscoring their defensive value, we are told that the walls are made “Of harde hewen ston up to the tablez” (line 789) (“Made of squared stone up to the cornice”). Stone, of course, tends to be hard anyway, but by adding “harde” as an intensifier here, the poet seems to be signaling that the stone used to build the walls is especially so, implying its strength and ability to resist damage. Topping these walls, Gawain observes “carnelez” (line 801), or crenelations and “abatylment”

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(line 790), or battlements, conveying how densely fortified the walls are; and notably, these elements are crafted “in the best lawe” (line 790), suggesting they are the latest and greatest in design. This impression is emphasized by the point that Hautdesert’s walls also appear to possess machiolations, which would allow defenders of the walls to attack those directly beneath, at the base of the wall, without leaning over the edge and exposing their bodies to enemy fire.65 These outerworks are astounding, for “a better barbican [Gawain] blusched upon never” (Better outworks of a castle [Gawain] had never seen”; line 793). If the castle serves as an index of Bertilak’s lordship, he certainly seems to be taking seriously the lord’s ethical obligation to protect those beneath him. Though seemingly impregnable, Castle Hautdesert is not without fine interior architecture, design, and décor to convey its sophisticated court culture and sumptuous, royal comfort. From his vantage point outside, Gawain would already be able to tell that the castle was also designed with comfort in mind, since he sees several “chymnées” (“chimneys”; line 798), which indicate multiple chambers with private fireplaces located in the walls. As Dominique Battles points out, such architectural comforts were “costly amenities,”66 and Michael Thompson observes that this kind of feature “did not become normal in the hall until the next century,”67 which tells us that, just as the castles’ exterior defenses indicate that it is of the latest military design, so too does it have interior features that signal it is on the cutting edge of comfort. In fact, upon being showed to his own chamber – another sign of refinement68 – he is treated to a chair placed before his very own fireplace where charcoal was already burning,69 and servants set up his own private table to serve him food in his chamber.70 These textual details, Thompson argues, “conferred a mark of dignity” since “a chair was a rare article of furniture,” suggesting Bertilak’s wealth and sophistication.71 While the architecture speaks to sophistication and comfort, the lands of Bertilak’s domain, as well as the location the castle is sited upon, speak to Bertilak’s ethical lordship, since he seems to exercise sound stewardship 65

See Michael Thompson, “Castles,” in A Companion to the Gawain-poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 119–30. 66 Battles, Cultural Difference and Material Culture in Middle English Romance, 78. 67 Thompson, “Castles,” 128. 68 Battles reminds us that while we might take the word ‘chamber’ to simply indicate ‘a room,’ what we are really seeing here is something more like a private apartment for Gawain. See Battles, Cultural Difference and Material Culture in Middle English Romance, 78. 69 “A cheyer byfore the chemne, ther charcoal brenned,” line 875. 70 “Sone watz telded up a tapit on trestez ful fayre,” line 884. 71 Thompson, “Castles,” 128.

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over the landscape. Indeed, Ann M. Martinez has cogently argued that Bertilak’s kingdom “represent[s] the model of proper stewardship of the land.”72 While it is unclear where exactly the boundaries are for Bertilak’s domain, we do know it is somewhere on the Wirral, which allows us to examine that wilderness as being potentially a part of it. The poet describes this area as “a forest ful dep, that ferly watz wylde” (line 741) (“a dense forest, wondrously wild”), but as Martinez has argued, “wylde does not necessarily denote a negative connotation but can instead simply describe the unchecked vegetation growth that would be characteristic of an uncultivated and undeveloped area. Such a view, in fact, fits with the legal definition of a forest.”73 As historians have pointed out, lords were eager to manage and control the resources of “forest, pasture, and waste [because]… The vast majority of revenue from rents and services was fixed, customary and inflexible in character. Revenue from forest and pasture, on the other hand, was open to negotiation, often on an annual basis, so anxious was the community to have access to these resources.”74 And although some lords would sometimes turn to liquidating these land assets for quick cash – such as by felling trees and selling the timber – the land was more valuable over the long term, especially so if it was carefully managed. Since Bertilak’s castle is surrounded by forests teeming with vegetation and game, his land stewardship seems especially effective, which also indicates that he is a good lord. The castle itself is situated on a meadow, as noted previously, but this meadow is surrounded with “a park al aboute” (line 668) (“a park all around”) suggesting these enclosed grounds serve as a game preserve, like a royal forest.75 The implication of this language is that we should understand these lands to be reserved and carefully managed for hunting game, which paints a picture of the land being fecund and plentiful, with wildlife abound for hunting. Truly, this seems to be the case, as Bertilak has little difficulty returning from his hunts with game for his guest. And importantly, Bertilak seems to have separated what we might term the cultivated lands from the uncultivated lands, using the kinds of plants that medieval “people typically used as hedgerows.”76 It even seems that the cultivated grounds may even feature deliberate landscaping to create a more pleasing appearance; as Martinez has argued, Bertilak is identified 72

See Ann M. Martinez, “Bertilak’s Green Vision: Land Stewardship in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Arthuriana 26.4 (2016), 114–29: 114. 73 Martinez, “Bertilak’s Green Vision,” 117. 74 Davies, Lords & Lordship, 167. 75 Middle English Dictionary, “Park” Noun Sense 1a. 76 Martinez, “Bertilak’s Green Vision,” 118.

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as “this lorde by the lynde-wode” (line 1178) (“this nobleman… along the edges of [linden] woods”), and linden trees were “recommended as an ornamental tree.”77 This separation of green spaces reveals Bertilak’s concern for carefully balancing the wants and needs of a consumptiondriven courtly culture with the productivity of the landed estates that make that culture possible. If Bertilak’s castle and demesne speak to his good lordship, the inhabitants of the castle are further evidence of this, since much of a lord’s power was in his ability to command others. In many ways, the court culture at Hautdesert echoes that of Camelot, with its lavish foods. Upon arrival, Bertilak’s retainers welcome Gawain with “frenkysch far” (line 1116) (“exquisite manners”), signifying their great courtesy and courtly behavior. As they greet him, they “kneled doun on her knes upon the colde erthe / To welcum this ilk wygh as worthy hom thought” (lines 818-9) (“kneel[ed] down on their knees upon the cold ground / To welcome this knight in the way they thought fit”). And when he is finally brought to his accommodations, he is treated to “ryche robes… / For to charge and to chaunge, and chose of the best” (lines 862–63) (“costly robe / To choose from the best of them, change and put on”). Significantly, the fabric details, as is the case with Bertilak in his Green Knight garb, indicate kingly quality cloths, complete with ermine furs (lines 879–81). As Gawain rests comfortably before his fireplace, he is treated to a feast that outdoes the fare at Camelot, including, Sere sewes and sete, sesounde of the best, Double-felde, as hit fallez, and fele kyn fischez, Summe baken in bred, summe brad on the gledez Summe sothen, summe in sewe savered with spyces, And ay sawes so sleghe that the segge liked. (lines 889–94) (With many excellent dishes, wonderfully seasoned, In double portions, as is fitting, and all kinds of fish: Some baked in pastry, some grilled over coals, Some boiled, some in stews flavoured with spices, Always with subtle sauces that the knight found tasty)

The rich delectable foods offered to Gawain include savory spices, delicate sauces, and several varieties of fish, all cooked in different ways, and each one seems pleasing to Gawain. If we compare these details with their conspicuous lack at Camelot, the poet certainly seems to be suggesting that what Gawain experiences here in the way of food is far 77

Ibid., 119.

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more remarkable than what he receives at Camelot, since the food of that feast is not remarked upon at all. In this light, “Hautdesert” (line 2445), which means “High Desert,” signaling a barren, inhospitable wasteland, seems to be an ironic epithet, rather like the “Little” in “Little John.” For indeed, rather than “insinuat[ing] that there is little of value in that land”78 a closer and more careful examination of the text reveals that it has consistently drawn our attention to Bertilak’s lands’ productivity and fecundity; signs of his ethical lordship over them. And rather than suggesting the wildness or alterity of Bertilak, his kingdom and his people, the poet has taken considerable pains to portray him as a powerful, sophisticated lord with sovereign aspirations, as I have suggested. Perhaps, ultimately, what the earlier scenes of the wilderness demonstrate is simply Gawain’s faulty perceptions of the countryside and its characteristics. If we follow this line of thinking, it may well be, as Patricia Ingham Clare points out, that this “foreshadow[s] both the poem’s ethical concerns and its resolution; hint[s] at the problem of Gawain’s inability to see clearly; and raise[s] the possibility that the marvelous and menacing Green Knight may turn out to be not so exotic after all.”79 Given that the narrative was written in the Marches of Wales, perhaps by someone who lived there,80 and perhaps even commissioned by a lord in the March,81 I’ve argued that the poem cautions against 78

Arner, “The Ends of Enchantment,” 85. Ibid., 84. 80 The scholarly consensus is that the dialect of the poem is from the northwest Midlands, and can be more precisely located to the region around Chester. Within this framework, several candidates have been put forward for the identity of the poet, including John Massey, Richard Newton, and John Stanley. For John Massey, see Erik Kooper, “The Case of the Encoded Author: John Massey in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 83 (1982), 158–68. For Richard Newton, see Michael J. Bennett, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Literary Achievement of the Northwest Midlands,” Journal of Medieval History 5 (1979), 63– 89. For John Stanley, see Andrew Breeze, “Sir John Stanley (c.1350–1414) and the ‘Gawain’-Poet,” Arthuriana 14.1 (2004), 15–30. 81 Numerous potential Marcher patrons have been offered. W. G. Cooke and D’A. J. D. Boulton, along with Ordelle Hill, suggest Henry Grosmont as a likely candidate for patronage. Leo Carruthers makes a case for the Mortimer family, especially Roger Mortimer, fourth Earl of March. Ann Meyer suggests the patron is the Despenser family, while Andrew Breeze makes his case that the poet is Sir John Stanley, who was granted lordship over Mold and Hope by Henry IV. See W. G. Cooke and D’A. J. D. Boulton, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Poem for Henry of Grosmont?,” Medium Aevum 68.1 (1999), 42–54; Ordelle Hill, Looking Westward; Leo Carruthers, “The Duke of Clarence and the Earls of March: Garter Knights and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Medium Aevum 70.1 (2001), 66–79; Ann Meyer, “The Despensers and the “Gawain” Poet: A Gloucestershire Link to the Alliterative Master of the 79

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royal power running roughshod over the autonomy of the lords who live there, potentially alienating them. Indeed, considered in light of the prolific output of political writing in the fourteenth century – ranging from treatises in the speculum regis genre, like William of Pagula’s Mirror of King Edward III to literature of complaint, like the parliament of rats segment of Langland’s Piers Plowman – this criticism of royal authority fits within a well-established framework of fourteenth-century literature and thought. In the case of alienating the lords upon whom royal authority depended, this possibility could indeed prove dangerous to English kings, as the March was known to be both highly militarized, and an area where magnates could assemble to nurse their grievances.82 Most notably, the critical role Marcher lords played on the stage of English politics in thwarting, deposing, or even supporting royal contenders made them political forces to be reckoned with. But rather than suggesting that the relationship is necessarily antagonistic, the poet reminds us that good lordship ought to be predicated upon cooperation and mutual respect. If the heart of Gawain’s lesson at the hands of Bertilak is that true men pay back truly, signaling the importance of upholding one’s word and agreements one makes, then the poet from the March might be suggesting that English kings do the same: honor the long-standing custom, and the agreements made by previous English kings with respect to the March’s autonomy. Such lords, figured as the Green Knight/Bertilak, may well seem to be antagonistic of royal authority, but they need not be so in practice, if English kings would only pay back truly, as Bertilak suggests to Gawain.

Northwest Midlands,” The Chaucer Review 35.4 (2001), 413–29; and Breeze, “Sir John Stanley (c. 1350–1414) and the ‘Gawain’-Poet.” 82 Michael J. Bennett’s claim about the prevalence of violence in “civil commotion and armed rebellion” (164) in Cheshire and the Northwest is instructive on this point, since Cheshire was part of the March of Wales. And while Bennett concentrates on the militancy of knightly families, Davies work suggests that the willingness to take up arms, even against royal power, was present in the aristocracy as well, observing that “Disgruntled barons could retire here to lick their wounds and to prepare revenge,” and that in this way, the March “could act as an apron-stage for English political disputes,” Age of Conquest, 404 and 406. See Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

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“As egir as any lyoun”: The Ethics of Knight-Horse Relationships in Lybeaus Desconus

CAITLIN G. WATT

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f medieval, as modern, society sought to draw strict theoretical boundaries between the animal and the human, literary examples from noble lions to werewolves to beastly giants abound to suggest that in practice these boundaries were both tenuous and porous. This fragility, and the possibility of slippage between one category and another, is on spectacular display in Lybeaus Desconus, a fourteenth-century Middle English romance in the “Fair Unknown” tradition sometimes attributed to Thomas Chestre. Its eponymous hero, an illegitimate son of Sir Gawain, seeks to rescue the Lady of Synadoun, who has been turned into a serpent by malevolent enchanters. Readers of the romance have produced a rich body of scholarship on the resonant image of the feminine serpent, an image signifying both the transformative potential of the Lady’s metamorphosis and a dangerous monstrosity that the text attempts to contain.1 By comparison, the text’s many horses initially seem mundane, part of the ubiquitous construction of the knight on horseback that serves to signal a romance hero’s chivalry. I argue, however, that the horses of Lybeaus Desconus merit further attention as an important marker of its hero’s ethical development and as part of the poem’s exploration of the appropriate relationship between animals and humans. As Paul H. Rogers asks in his argument about the complex signification of horses in medieval French literature, might the ubiquity of the horse convey its value “not only as an intelligent, 1

See Eve Salisbury, “Lybeaus Desconus: Transformation, Adaptation, and the Monstrous-Feminine,” Arthuriana 24.1 (2014), 66–85; James Weldon, “‘Naked as she was bore’: Naked Disenchantment in Lybeaus Desconus,” Parergon 24.1 (2007), 67–99; and Caroline Jewers, “Slippery Custom(er)s: On Knight and Snake in the Bel inconnu,” Neophilologus 94 (2010), 17–31.

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wondrously effective means of transportation, but more importantly as a faithful animal companion to be cherished?”2 The many steeds of Lybeaus Desconus are not named or cherished as Arondel in Bevis of Hamptoun and Gawain’s Gringalet are, but this very lack of personal loyalty between the hero and his horses suggests the significance of these steeds in Lybeaus Desconus’s growth from wild child to Arthurian knight. Even as the romance indicates that Lybeaus’s “stedes” are chivalric combatants in their own right, the text’s repeated attention to their wounding and death suggests that corporal frailty and vulnerability to violence connect the animal to the human. Such a connection prompts a reading of the romance that is critical of the violent hero and perhaps of chivalry more generally. In this reading, Lybeaus’s casual, even callous, treatment of his horses signifies an ethical failure that, like his other failures, must be remedied if he is to be integrated into the courteous, irreducibly masculine world of chivalry. At the same time, Lybeaus Desconus evinces an ambivalence toward, even a muddled critique of, chivalry as an ethical system that, through its promotion of both men’s and horses’ pride and aggression, causes rather than contains violence.

The First Steed: Chivalry and the Medieval Characterization of Horses Although familial reconciliation between Lybeaus Desconus and his father, Gawain, appears in only two of the six extant manuscript witnesses of Lybeaus Desconus, the significance of this relationship to his identity as a knight is signaled early in other variants. The text in Lambeth Palace MS 306, for example, begins with an incipit reading, “A tretys of one Gyngelayne othir wyse namyd by Kyng Arthure Lybeus Dysconeus that was bastard son to Sir Gaweyne” (“A treatise about one Gyngelayne, who was Sir Gawain’s bastard son, otherwise named Lybeaus Desconus by King Arthur”),3 while versions of the text without the incipit still tell us that “Getyn he was of Sir Gawyne / By a forest syde” (“He was begotten by Sir Gawayne, by the edge of a forest”).4 These introductions establish 2



Paul H. Rogers, “Rediscovering the Horse in Medieval French Literature,” Neophilologus 97.4 (2013), 638. 3 References to Lambeth Palace MS 306, and to the text of Lybeaus Desconus more generally, come unless otherwise noted from Lybeaus Desconus, ed. Eve Salisbury and James Weldon (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013), and will be noted parenthetically in the text by line number. 4 From Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61, in George Shuffelton, ed., Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008), lines 8–9. Versions of the text in Lambeth Palace MS

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the fundamental tension of Lybeaus’s character: on the one hand, he is the son of Gawain, the paragon of King Arthur’s court and a model of chivalry (about which, more below), while on the other, his conception at the edge of the woods and his mysterious mother, whom one manuscript describes as a “giantis lady” (“giant’s lady”),5 associate him with the uncivilized realm of the in- or nonhuman. Along with this wildness comes a violence that must be contained, whether by chivalry or, as Lybeaus’s mother attempts, by strict isolation from chivalry: His moder hym kepte with hir myght That he shulde se no knyght I-armed in no maner, For he was full savage And gladly wold do outerage To his fellaues in fere. (lines 16–21) (His mother watched him with all her might so that he would not see any knight, armed in any way, because he was so wild and would happily do violence to his companions.)

This maternal isolation from knighthood is a common trope of “Fair Unknown” style romances, beginning with the eponymous hero of Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, but Lybeaus’s savagery and mysterious maternity suggest the internal collision of an uncanny element in the protagonist’s past with his paternal legacy of honorable knighthood. This, Eve Salisbury argues, may explain Lybeaus’s inappropriate actions on the road to chivalry; where other fairy-human hybrids in medieval literature such as the children of Mélusine in Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine are marked by physical irregularities, Lybeaus Desconus’s “otherness emerges in uncouth and indecorous behaviors.”6 Such indecorous behaviors, however, are inextricably intertwined with the hero’s inclination toward his paternal legacy: upon finding a dead knight in the woods, he strips the knight of his armor and immediately rides to Glastonbury to demand that Arthur make him a knight. Despite the crudity of the young man’s behavior and his disrespect to the dead knight, his attractive appearance induces Arthur to grant him the name



306; Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS XIII.B.29; British Library Cotton Caligula A.II; and the Percy Folio (BL MS Add 27879) contain some variation on this line in their first stanzas, though the incomplete Lincoln’s Inn 151 does not. 5 Libious Disconious (Biblioteca Nazionale, MS XIII.B.29), in Salisbury and Weldon, Lybeaus Desconus, line 2249. 6 Salisbury, “Transformation, Adaptation, and the Monstrous-Feminine,” 78.

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“Lybeaus Desconus” and invite him into the military fraternity of knighthood. This invitation is followed by a scene of welcoming and giftgiving by the most illustrious knights of the Arthurian court, first among them Lybeaus’s father: Sir Gawayn, his owe syre, Henge aboute his swyre A shelde with one cheferon; And an helme of riche atyre That was stele and none ire Sir Percyvale sett on his crowne; Lawncelett brought him a spere, In armes him with to were, And a fell fauchone; Iwayne brought him a stede That was gode at nede And egir as eny lyoun. (lines 252–63) (Sir Gawain, his own father, hung about his neck a shield with one chevron, and Sir Perceval set on his head a richly made helmet that was steel and not iron; Lancelot brought him a spear with which to engage in armed combat and a deadly falchion; Ywain brought him a steed that was good in battle and eager as any lion.)

This scene, in addition to reminding us of the hero’s paternity (as yet unknown to the characters) marks the first gesture of his acceptance into the knightly world and a first step in his education. It also illustrates what Susan Crane refers to as the “fundamental instability” in the knight-horse relationship, between a concept of this union as merely a “combat mechanism” and as “a conscious partnership.”7 The inclusion of the steed in a list of knightly equipment including a shield, a helmet, and a spear positions the horse as a useful tool in the new knight’s inventory. The steed’s description as “gode at nede” and “egir as eny lyoun,” however, suggests that the horse has an independent identity; he has enough experience in chivalric combat that the narrator can characterize him as handy in battle, and a spirited temperament as well as a passion for fighting. That the horse is a gift from Iweyne (Ywain, Yvain), a knight well-known for his interspecies partnership with a lion, suggests this horse is more than a material signifier of Lybeaus’s knightly status; he is also a participant in the hero’s chivalric education.8 Like the 7

Susan Crane, “Chivalry and the Pre/Post-Modern,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2.1 (2011), 70. 8 On the role of the lion in Ywain’s education in proper knighthood, see Christopher Jensen, “The Role of the Lion in the Middle English Ywain and Gawain,” Arthuriana

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maiden Ellene and the dwarf Theodeley, and indeed like Gawain, who briefly trains the hero in four of the six manuscripts, this steed will be an important part of the hero’s integration into the masculine chivalric realm of King Arthur. Later repetitions of the descriptor “egir as eny lyoun” continue to highlight the role of horses as knightly combatants. Indeed, this repetition signals a kind of parity or even slippage between steeds and the knights who ride them, as the same phrase is used in Lybeaus Desconus to describe the youngest nephew of the hero’s first knightly opponent, Sir William Delaraunche (or possibly the nephew’s horse): The yongest brother full yerne Upon a stede full sterne As egir as eny lyon, Hym thought his body can bren. (lines 514–17) (The youngest brother, very eager, upon a very strong steed, as eager as any lion, thought he could burn his body.)

Similarly, both Lybeaus himself and a later opponent, Synadoun’s constable Sir Lambert, are also described as “egyr as a lyon,” a phrase which again underlines the overlap between knights’ and warhorses’ roles and underscores both the ferocity and nobility of chivalric combatants. In this, the poet’s characterization of the steeds aligns with traditional medieval descriptions of horses, especially the elite horses associated with knights. According to Isidore of Seville, Horses have a great deal of liveliness, for they revel in open country; they scent out war; they are roused to battle by the sound of the trumpet; when incited by a voice they are challenged to race, grieving when they are defeated, and exultant when they are victorious.9

Likewise, Albertus Magnus recommends evaluating a horse based on its boldness; for example, a horse’s “digging and scratching at the earth, whinnying, its limbs trembling” in eagerness signifies bravery and thus stands as a point in the horse’s favor.10 If a stallion’s uncontrolled eagerness for fighting is viewed with suspicion by theologians like 30.1 (2020), 104–24, who argues that the lion models for Ywain a chivalric ethical practice grounded not in balancing martial prowess and erotic love, as in Chrétien’s original French romance Yvain, but in loyalty and keeping one’s word. 9 Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 249. 10 Albertus Magnus, De animalibus libri XXVI, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters vol. 16, ed. Hermann Stadler (Münster: Aschendorff, 1920), 1377–78.

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Gregory the Great, who uses the metaphor of a horse to describe the body which the soul must keep under control,11 this wildness is rewritten in chivalric ideology as a desirable quality in a noble mount. This might, at least at first glance, make Lybeaus and the first steed a well-matched pair – an experienced but lively horse seems excellently suited for a bold but inexperienced young knight, and their compatible personalities might allow the veteran horse to serve as a sort of mentor in what Bonnie J. Erwin describes as an interspecies apprenticeship.12 As Erwin delineates, an effective knight-horse partnership requires not merely brute strength, but rather mutual understanding, communication, and trust. Manuals such as Jordanus Rufus’s thirteenth-century De medicina equorum (About the medical treatment of horses) discouraged knights from brutal, punishment-based methods of handling their horses and instead proposed a more communicative method that “confirms the horse’s centrality to equestrian partnerships, honors his subjectivity and irreplaceability, and engages the horse mentally in the process of training for chivalric service.”13 Such focus on the subjectivity and irreplaceability of the horse might be of benefit to the “savage” Lybeaus and position this first “stede” as a valuable partner. Theoretically, at least, horses could teach knights “the submissive, cooperative behaviors required alongside their combative, individualistic actions on the battleground and tournament field,”14 thus facilitating the hero’s development from wild violence to courteous chivalry. In practice, however, the steed is far from irreplaceable – he is the first of a series of three “stedes” whose deaths or wounding underscore both the violence of knightly combat in the poem and the hero’s own lack of affective connection to his equine partners. On the evening following his fight against the three nephews of Sir William Delaraunche, Lybeaus is drawn into another fight, this time against two less chivalrous – indeed, less human – giants, one described as “red and lothelych” (line 405) (“red and hideous”) and the other “black as eny pyche” (line 406) (“black as any pitch”). Like their gigantic predecessors in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain or Wace’s Brut, these sexually 11

Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, Patrologia Latina vol. 76, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: Jacques-Paul Migne, 1849), 588. 12 Bonnie J. Erwin, “Beyond Mastery: Interspecies Apprenticeship in Middle English Romance,” Exemplaria 29.1 (2017), 41–57. 13 Elizabeth S. Leet, “On Equine Language: Jordanus Rufus and ThirteenthCentury Communicative Horsemanship,” in Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication, ed. Alison Langdon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 181. 14 Erwin, “Beyond Mastery,” 41–42.

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menacing figures have kidnapped a young maiden, and, in an apparent sign of the willingness to serve women that characterizes courtliness, Lybeaus comments on the necessity of saving the woman, Violet, from shame. After taking the black giant by surprise and killing him almost instantaneously, he enters into a lengthier, gorier battle against the red giant who, attacking “as wolfe oute of wede” (“like a wild wolf”), strikes a blow “so sore / That Lybeous stede therefore / Downe to grownde yede” (lines 648–51) (“so lethal that Lybeaus’s steed fell down to the ground because of it”). After Lybeaus, eager for vengeance, kills the red giant, the death of the horse seems to be forgotten, both by the characters and the narrator: Violet explains how she came to be kidnapped and that she is the daughter of an earl, Sir Anctour, and the whole party rides away: “To hors con they sprynge / And reden forthe all in same” (lines 707– 8) (“They leapt on their horses and rode forth all together”). On which horse, the narrator does not clarify. This apparent carelessness might well have stood out to audiences accustomed to reading about the dilemmas faced by knights deprived of horses, from Lancelot in Le Chevalier de la Charrette to Gawain in The Jeaste of Sir Gawain, who have also just read about Sir William Delaraunche falling out of the saddle and his steed running away in the middle of the battle. His request to Lybeaus at this point – “My stede is nowe agoo: / Sir, fyght on fote also, / Yff thou be a gentyll knight” (lines 354–56) (“My steed is now gone: sir, fight on foot, too, if you are a noble knight”) – reconfirms the commitment to a fair fight inherent to chivalric ethics in Lybeaus Desconus, even if it is frequently violated,15 but it also contrasts sharply with Lybeaus’s indifference to his own mount’s death in the battle against the giants. Such callousness about the horse’s fate is notable not only from the perspective of contemporary animal studies or of chivalric romance as a genre, but also from the perspective of pragmatic economic concern. The manuscript context of Lybeaus Desconus suggests that this might well have struck a dissonant note with contemporary audiences. Four of these manuscripts – BL Caligula A.ii, Lambeth Palace MS 306, Naples MS XIII.B.29, and Ashmole 61 – are miscellanies of romances, medical recipes, devotional texts, historical notes, and conduct poems seemingly directed at prosperous or aspiring bourgeois readers.16 Although it would be a 15

E.g. Lybeaus’s complaint that Sir William’s nephews’ decision to attack him two against one is unsportsmanlike, lines 343–44. 16 For work on the audience and ethos of these manuscripts, see Denise C. White, “BL Cotton Caligula Aii: Manuscript Context, The Theme of Obedience, and a Diplomatic Transcription Edition” (PhD diss., Georgia State University, 2012);

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mistake to assume these anthologies presented a coherent set of messages about ethical values, it may well be that a reader seeking advice such as “Consyder the mete & the drynke of thy bestys, for though they hungyr, they aske not” (“Consider the food and the drink of your animals, for though they might be hungry, they don’t ask you [for food]”) would not be inclined to brush off the loss of a highly valued, expensive warhorse as easily as Lybeaus does.17 While his disinterest might speak to a general suspension of disbelief when it comes to romances, it also aligns with a violent disregard for more “courteous” chivalric norms that his further interactions with steeds and other animals continue to emphasize.

The Second Steed: Objectification of Animals, Mistreatment of Women Lybeaus Desconus does not remain without a horse for long. Violet’s father Earl Anctour, in gratitude for Violet’s rescue, gives him another steed: The Erle, for his gode dede, Yave him full riche mede: Shelde and armes bryght, And also a noble stede That was gode at nede In turnament and in fyght. (lines 718–23) William Fahrenbach, “Rereading Clement in Thomas Chestre’s Octavian and in BL Cotton Caligula A. II,” Essays in Medieval Studies 26 (2010), 85–99; Rory G. Critten, “Bourgeois Ethics Again: The Conduct Texts and the Romances in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61,” The Chaucer Review 50.1 (2015), 108–33; Shuffelton, ed., Codex Ashmole 61; Simon Horobin and Alison Wiggins, “Reconsidering Lincoln’s Inn MS 150,” Medium Ævum 77.1 (2008), 30–53; and James Weldon, “The Naples Manuscript and the Case for a Female Readership,” Neophilologus 93 (2009), 703–22. 17 “The Doctrynall Princyples and Proverbys Yconomie or Howsholde Kepynge sent from Saynt Bernarde,” from Lambeth Palace MS 306, ff. 64r–65r, Political, Religious, and Love Poems from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lambeth MS No. 306, and Other Sources, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, Original Series, 15 (London: Trübner, 1866), 29. See Critten, “Bourgeois Ethics Again,” for an exploration of the tension between chivalric romances and conduct literature in Ashmole 61. Conduct literature and romances could, however, mutually reinforce messages about proper behavior; Amy N. Vines, for example, in her examination of the romance Emaré in London, British Library MS Cotton Caligula A.ii, argues that “Emaré works in tandem with the didactic material that accompanies it, making these texts more efficacious because their central lessons are shown to be potentially heroic in a romance setting” making the manuscript as a whole a useful teaching tool. See “‘Who-so wylle of nurtur lere’: Domestic Foundations for Social Success in the Middle English Emaré,” The Chaucer Review 53.1 (2018), 86. Although Lybeaus Desconus presents a different perspective on education, its juxtaposition with texts like “The Doctrynall Princyples” would similarly reinforce ethical lessons for readers.

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(The earl, for his good deed, gave him a very rich reward: shield and shining weapons, and also a noble steed that was good in battle, in tournaments and in a fight.)

Much like the first, this steed’s placement in a catalog of gifts from an older, more experienced knight functions on two levels. On one level, the horse is treated as a piece of knightly equipment, on par with “shelde and armes bryght”; on another, he is treated as something of an individual agent experienced in chivalric combat, being “gode at nede” in a fight. This steed, however, receives no more affection or respect from Lybeaus than the first, and in fact, his role in the hero’s combat exhibits Lybeaus’s reckless violence and willingness to use both animals and women as tools to obtain renown, on which the romance’s other characters comment disapprovingly. The first conflict begins with an episode seemingly inspired by Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide, in which Lybeaus decides to enter a contest whose prize is a white gerfalcon: as his companion Ellene explains, Jeffron le Freudous is passionately in love with his lady and has declared that if anyone can bring forth a more beautiful maiden, he shall have the gerfalcon. Conversely, a challenger whose lover is not as beautiful as Jeffron’s will have to fight him. Although Lybeaus does not have a lover and Theodeley advises him against fighting Jeffron, he recruits Ellene to dress herself in beautiful clothes and test her beauty against that of Jeffron’s lady. She loses, prompting a physical fight between Jeffron and Lybeaus from which Lybeaus emerges victorious. Arthur’s praise when Lybeaus sends him the gerfalcon might imply a validation of the hero’s behavior, and certainly his physical prowess is on full display here. Yet the poem hints that his actions are not unambiguously praiseworthy. When Theodeley learns of Lybeaus’s plan, he exclaims, “Thow doste a savage dede, / For any man i-borne!” (lines 850–51) (“You are doing a savage deed for any man alive!”) While his earlier concerns that Lybeaus would put himself in danger fighting Jeffron are rebutted by the fight’s outcome, this critique, which recalls the worries of Lybeaus’s mother about his “savage” behavior, is less easily dispelled. As Eve Salisbury and James Weldon comment, “Using ladies as tournament prizes undermines the central tenets of chivalry, that is, to honor ladies and fight on their behalf, and to champion their causes, especially if they involve unlawful captivity.”18 Lybeaus’s behavior toward Ellene, based not on affection but on his desire to win the gerfalcon, 18

Salisbury and Weldon, Lybeaus Desconus, note to line 850.

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disregards the well-being and dignity of both by transforming them into mere signifiers of his knightly status and suggests that, if he has mastered the martial skills required to be a competent knight, his attitudes toward both women and animals still show little sign of courtesy. This suggestion is heightened by Ellene’s humiliating loss in the contest: the townspeople judging the contest declare that, in comparison with Jeffron’s lady, “Ellyne the messangere / Ne were but a lawnder” (lines 930–31) (“Ellene the messenger was nothing but a laundress”). Commenting on the scene, George Shuffelton suggests that Ellene’s beauty “is downplayed here so that Lybeaus’s attempt to win the falcon seems all the more rash.”19 The consequences of this rashness are illustrated by the brutality of the battle – Jeffron and his horse are both thrown to the ground, which results in Jeffron’s breaking his back and the arousal of public pity for him – and in the reminder as Lybeaus proceeds to the battle that he is once again putting the gifts of others at risk. Before the “stede ganne to stride” (“steed began to stride”), Lybeaus arms himself “In that noble armwre / That Er Aunctours was” (lines 784–86) (“in that noble armor that was Earl Anctour’s before”). If this recalls the hero’s courteousness in rescuing Violet to audiences, it might also recall the value of the steed and the dangers to Ellene, to Theodeley, to the quest of the Lady of Synadoun, and to the horse that Lybeaus risks in his efforts to prove his valor in battle yet again. Similarly, the note from Jeffron’s perspective as he sees Lybeaus “come prickande with pryde” (line 794) (“come galloping with pride”) to challenge him connects the ego that drives Lybeaus’s actions in this conflict with his exploitation of the steed, here being spurred into a battle that serves no one’s ends but Lybeaus’s. This same tendency of the hero to appropriate both Ellene and attractive animals as status symbols is on display in his second fight riding Sir Anctour’s steed, his joust with Otys de Lyle. Upon seeing an attractive multicolored hound, Ellene wants it, and in a concession to her wishes, Lybeaus catches it and gives it to her. Before long, however, they meet Otys de Lyle. From his opening description, it is clear that Otys is part of a multispecies hunting team: A knyght iclothed in jende Uppon a baye destré; His bugill canne he to blowe For houndis shulde him knowe In whate stede that he were. (lines 1069–73) 19

Shuffelton, Ashmole 61, note to line 953.

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(A knight dressed in indigo, upon a bay destrier; he began to blow his bugle so that his hounds would know where he was.)

In apparent contrast to Lybeaus, who as we have seen seems largely unattached to animals except as status symbols, Otys is introduced engaging in an act of communication with his hunting dogs; through the agreed-upon sign of blowing his bugle, he tells them where he is. The suggestion that Otys values his animals is reiterated when he recognizes as his own the greyhound Ellene is holding despite the fact that, as he claims, it has been missing for eight years. In a phrasing that again emphasizes the agency of the animal, he requests, “Frendis, lettes him goo!” (line 1077) (“Friends, let him go!”). Unsurprisingly, Lybeaus refuses; Ellene may have originally wanted the dog, and Lybeaus uses his gift of it to her to explain his refusal, but she does not speak to Otys, serving once again as a silent symbol of Lybeaus’s knighthood. When Otys tells him he is behaving unwisely, Lybeaus calls him a churl, and the conflict turns violent. Otys recruits his indignant friends and hangers-on to get revenge for the theft and the insult, but their ambush quickly goes awry, thanks to the aggression of Lybeaus’s horse: Syr Lybeous stede ranne And bare downe hors and man, For nothinge wolde he spare. All men sayde than, “This is the devyll Satan, That mankynde will forfare.” (lines 1149–54) (Sir Lybeaus’s steed ran and bore down horse and man; he would stop for nothing. All men said then, “This is the devil Satan, who will destroy mankind.”)

Ilan Mitchell-Smith rightly notes that this fight is not presented as a legitimate use of knightly violence: our hero has essentially stolen a dog and been unnecessarily rude to another knight, sparking the conflict. More importantly, his behavior demonstrates a lack of self-control that leads him to kill three men and three horses and almost leads him to kill the retreating Otys. The comparison to Satan in this passage suggests that, in contrast to the more legitimate use of force against the monstrous giants earlier, here “Libeaus is out of control to the point of having become a monster himself.”20 20

Ilan Mitchell-Smith, “Defining Violence in Middle English Romances: ‘Sir Gowther’ and ‘Libeaus Desconus,’” Fifteenth-Century Studies 34 (2009), 151.

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A point that has gone largely without comment in previous readings, however, is that Sir Lybeaus’s steed, not the knight himself, is the subject of the verbs “ranne” and “bare downe hors and man.” This blurring of agency, much like the earlier uses of the same language to refer to knights and steeds, suggests that animals and humans cannot be strictly divided into categories. One implication that follows is that the contrast between chivalric and non-chivalric combatants – between the “legitimate” violence of heroic knights and the “illegitimate” violence of bestial giants and sorcerers – is not as stark as might initially appear. Viewed through this lens, Lybeaus’s reintegration into the masculine chivalric realm of his father is hardly a positive ethical development. This skepticism is visible early in the “giantis ladys” attempts to contain her son’s “savage” behavior in the woods, a savagery that is later given full rein only as Lybeaus becomes a knight. Lybeaus Desconus thus illustrates a deep ambivalence about its protagonist’s “nature.” As Peggy McCracken notes in her discussion of the medieval “wild man” tradition, the late medieval period offered competing conceptions of “wildness,” one figuring wildness as a degeneration from desirable, sovereign humanity to the subject status of beasts, but the other figuring wildness as an idealized state of innocence, outside of “human society as a corruption of nature’s perfection.”21 In its constant slippage between violent men and violent animals, Lybeaus Desconus might initially seem to illustrate the first model of ‘wildness’ as something that its protagonist must work to shed, but in fact, this model seems to coexist in the romance with the model of civilization, and particularly chivalry, as a corrupting force that reproduces its own kinds of savagery. Another implication of the slippage between animals and humans is that chivalry, which depends on relationships to horses and women in order to define the “knightly,” can easily lead to the commodification of both animals and women, exposing both to violence and exploitation. The importance of this concern to the author of Lybeaus Desconus is apparent not only in Ellene’s humiliation in the contest for the gerfalcon or the ways in which Lybeaus converts her desire for the dog into yet another excuse for violence, but also in the plight of the Lady of Synadoun. If her transformation into a woman-faced snake draws on a resonant misogynist association of women with snakes rendered both mysterious and literal through magic, the motives behind this transformation are decidedly prosaic. As Lambert explains, 21

Peggy McCracken, In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 130.

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This Mabon and Yrayne Have sworne her othe certayne To dethe they will hir dight, But she graunte hem tyll To do Mabones will And geven him hir right. (lines 1779–84) (This Mabon and Irain have sworn their certain oaths that they will condemn her to death unless she agrees to do Mabon’s will and grant him her birthright.)

In other words, as Salisbury and Weldon conclude in their commentary, the sorcerers wield both magic and force to compel the Lady into marriage to gain access to her inheritance. In rendering her an animal for the sake of economic gain, Irain and Mabon are engaging in a more fantastical version of the raptus of heiresses, a practice that had decreased in frequency in the later Middle Ages but would nonetheless have been familiar to readers.22 This transformation also lays bare the ways in which medieval definitions of animals and humans, men and women, facilitated domination of both animals and women by men – beginning with Adam’s sovereignty over both Eve and the animals of Eden.23 The violence that this domination enables may be mystified in the case of the Lady and her transformation, but it is certainly not concealed in the text’s illustration of violence against horses. Lybeaus’s second steed meets the same fate as his first, this time with even more detail and the retaliatory death of his opponent’s horse in his fight against yet another giant, Maugis: Maugis was qweynt and qwede And smote Lybeous stede on the hede And dasshid oute the brayne; The stede fell downe dede, Syr Lebeous nought sayde 22

See Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England: Rape, Abduction, and Adultery, 1100–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), especially chapter three; S. J. Payling, “The Economics of Marriage in Late Medieval England: The Marriage of Heiresses,” Economic History Review 54.3 (2001), 413–29; and, more generally, R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), especially chapter seven. 23 For medieval connections between animals and women, see McCracken, In the Skin of a Beast, chapter four, and Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, second edn (London: Routledge, 2011), especially chapter six. For an overview of modern attempts by feminism to confront or manage this connection, see the introduction to Animals & Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, ed. Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 1–8.

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But stertt hym up agayne, And an ax hent ybowne That henge by his arsowne And stroke to hym with mayne Through Maugis stede swyre: He forkarve bone and lyre That the hede fell in the playne. (lines 1377–88) (Maugis was cunning and cruel and hit Lybeaus’s steed on the head and struck out his brain; the steed fell down dead, and Sir Lybeaus said nothing but jumped up again and quickly seized an ax that hung by his saddle and struck strongly through Maugis’s steed’s neck; he cut through bone and flesh so that the head fell on the field.)

The gruesome detail of this moment emphasizes the hero’s turn to retaliatory violence rather than grief or reflection. If after the loss of the first steed, Lybeaus more explicitly seeks “To quyte the gyaunte his mede” (line 657) (“To repay the giant his reward”), here this eye-for-an-eye justice is more graphically depicted in Lybeaus’s attack on Maugis’s horse, which is later echoed by his decapitation of Maugis himself. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the violence against Lybeaus’s horses always seems to be instigated by villains, who, like the giants, are depicted as animalistic themselves or are otherwise presented as unchivalrous and unworthy of knightly courtesies. Despite the text’s ambivalence about its hero and the notion of chivalry as a means of legitimating force, the text holds out the suggestion that chivalry can involve a more equitable or affectionate relationship with horses (if not women) and that, in order to fully live up to his paternal inheritance, Lybeaus must cultivate the maturity needed for such a bond.

The Third Steed: The Gawain Tradition and Interspecies Attachment The second steed, much like the first, is forgotten in the aftermath of his death, and much as the text elides the question of which horse Lybeaus Desconus rides to meet Earl Anctour, it also elides Lybeaus’s acquisition of his third steed. Unlike the first two, which are given in the context of knightly friendship along with other weapons, the third steed may be a gift from the seductive Dame Amoure. After Lybeaus’s fight with Maugis, Dame Amoure offers him thanks in the form of beautiful clothes, sovereignty of her castle, and a twelve-month distraction from his quest while he stares at “paradise” in her face. When Ellene finally shames him into re-embarking on his rescue mission, we are told that

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he “toke with hym his stede, / His shelde, his iren wede” (lines 1515–16) (“took with him his steed, his shield, his iron armor”) with no indication of the steed’s origins. The lack of a gifting scene also means a lack of description for this horse, unlike the previous two steeds. We might regard this absence as a suggestion that, as Lybeaus has matured as a knight, he no longer needs the experienced aid of a veteran warhorse to link him to the world of chivalry. Narratively, however, his biggest challenge, the rescue of the Lady of Synadoun, is yet to come, and despite the apparent lack of characterization of the third steed, his fate does appear to signal a change in Lybeaus’s character. As he prepares to face the sorcerers, Lybeaus travels alone except for his horse: he “toke with hym his stede, / That halpe him in his fyght” (lines 1843–44) (“took with him his steed, that helped him in his fight”). This decision reflects a recognition of the horse’s value as a partner, and in that sense already demonstrates a more thoughtful relationship than that between Lybeaus and his two previous steeds. Moreover, this steed is the only one who lives: in a scene that recalls Lybeaus’s decapitation of Maugis’s steed, an enraged Yran strikes down with his blade “Byfor his forther arsowne, / Lybeous stedys swyre” (lines 1969–70) (“Lybeaus’s steed’s neck in front of the saddle”). Unlike the unlucky horses of that battle, however, this steed survives – after Lybeaus dismounts to finish his fight on foot, Mabon breaks his sword in two and Lybeaus laments: Tho was Lybeous asshamed And in his harte sore agramed, For he had lorne his swerde, And his stede was lamed And he shulde be defamed To Arthur kynge his lorde. (lines 1989–94) (Then Lybeaus was ashamed, and in his heart sorely enraged, for he had lost his sword, and his horse was injured, and he would be dishonored to King Arthur, his lord.)

The horse has survived, but is too wounded for Lybeaus to continue riding him. It would be easy to read this scene as yet another in which the horse is viewed as merely another piece of knightly equipment, or an extension of the hero’s chivalric identity; after all, the steed’s wounding is paralleled with the breaking of the sword, and the “lamed”/ “defamed” rhyme connects the wounded horse to Lybeaus’s reputation in the Arthurian court. And yet, this very connection, and words like

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“asshamed” and “agramed,” represent a more complex and self-reflective emotional response to the wounding of a horse than Lybeaus has heretofore demonstrated. It is important not to overstate the significance of this moment in Lybeaus’s character development: the horse’s wound is later forgotten when Lybeaus happily mounts it to ride with the Lady of Synadoun to her castle. And yet, the protagonist’s shame, fear, and despair throughout his final battle, which culminates with the fier baiser that will reveal Lybeaus’s lineage (only Gawain or a close relative can break the Lady of Synadoun’s magical transformation with a kiss), intimate a possible if incomplete remedy for chivalry’s tendency to motivate violence while ostensibly containing it. Emotional vulnerability prompting affective attachment between knight and horse may also be the basis of the compassion and mutual respect between humans so necessary to the courteous aspects of chivalry. To see what such an affective chivalric ethics might look like, we can turn to the literary legacy of Sir Gawain, whose kinship with Lybeaus Desconus perpetually hovers in the background of his growth as a knight. This spectral Gawain is influenced by a history with horses which, if not univocal, is certainly suggestive. Gawain’s status as the pinnacle of knighthood might be compromised at times by his own commitments to knightly glory and erotic fulfilment, but his relationship to horses in Middle English romance signals emotional attachment, compassion, and responsibility that set him apart from other knights. The most obvious example of this is Gringalet, one of the few horses to be named in the Arthurian tradition: appearing in texts ranging from the French L’Atre Périlleux to the Dutch Roman van Walewein to the English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gringalet is Gawain’s constant companion.24 Gawain’s commitment to the ethical treatment of horses extends beyond Gringalet, however; his depiction in Middle English romance is rife with examples of positive equine interactions. In Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, a Middle English poem from around 1400, for example, Gawain’s kind treatment of the brutish Carle’s “lyttyll folle” (“little foal”) sets him apart from his companions, Bishop Baldwin and Sir Kay, and forms a part of the “personal or even domestic chivalry” that helps reconcile the

24

See Marjolein Hogenbirk, “Gringalet as an Epic Character,” in The European Dimensions of Arthurian Literature, ed. Bart Besamusca and Frank Brandsma, Arthurian Literature 24 (2007), 65–78, for a comparative consideration of how Arthurian romance traditions depict this relationship.

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Carle with the Arthurian community.25 While the Carle’s tests of chivalry escalate over the course of the romance, I agree with Raluca L. Radulescu that “it is telling that this [first] test involves manners and behavior towards an ancillary to chivalry: the horse.”26 First Baldwin, then Kay, go outside to check on their horses at the monstrous Carle’s castle. Both, seeing the small foal eating alongside the knights’ horses, shoo it away (the perennially boorish Kay, in fact, drives it violently out of the stables). In both cases, the Carle responds to this shoddy treatment of the foal with force, threatening ominously to teach the “evyll-taught knyghttus… sum of my corttessye” (lines 328–30) (“illtaught knights… some of my courtesy”) before they depart.27 It is only Gawain’s visit to the stables that suggests what a properly taught knight’s attitude is toward a small animal. Following his companions, Gawain goes to the stable to check on the horses. By now it is storming, and the foal, having been expelled by Kay, is now standing outside the stable door, thoroughly wet. The sight prompts compassion in Gawain, or at least a sense of obligation toward his host; as he covers the foal with his own coat and encourages it to eat, he describes his actions in terms of respect for the Carle’s generosity: Then keveryd he hym, Sir Gawene, Wytt his manttell of grene: “Stond upe, fooll, and eette thy mette; We spend her that thy master dothe gett, Whyll that we her byne.” (lines 346–51) (Then Sir Gawain covered him with his green coat: “Stand up, foal, and eat your food; we are using here what your master provides, while we are here.”)

In response, the Carle thanks Gawain courteously, his own bestial nature apparently softened by Gawain’s generosity. The implication of the episode is that perfect chivalry, as the peerless Gawain practices it, necessarily considers the fair treatment of animals (particularly horses) as part of knightly etiquette. There are of course practical reasons for this: horses are expensive, and, as Gawain’s remark to the foal suggests, improper treatment of another knight’s horse represents financial exploitation as 25

Thomas Hahn, “Introduction: Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, ” in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. Hahn (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005). 26 Raluca L. Radulescu, “Extreme Emotions: Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle and the Danger from Within,” Arthuriana 29.4 (2019), 66. 27 Quotations from Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle and The Awntyrs off Arthur come from Hahn, ed., Sir Gawain, and are cited parenthetically by line number.

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well as rudeness. The treatment of animals is thus enmeshed in a broader web of social relationships constitutive of courtesy.28 Other texts, however, imply that Gawain’s attitude toward horses is driven not only by economic prudence or courtesy to other knights, nor even by their use value in chivalric combat, but by personal affection. In the fourteenth-century The Awntyrs off Arthur, the handsome Galeron, who claims to be the greatest knight in Scotland, faces off against Gawain, “grathest [most accomplished] of all” (line 439). We thus apparently have a fight between two paragons of chivalry. The parallels between the two, however, fall apart during the actual combat after Galeron beheads Gawain’s horse, Grissell, as their responses to the slaughter reveal a profound difference between them. Galeron’s pragmatic response – to just give Gawain another horse to complete the fight – is juxtaposed with Gawain’s intense grief and identification of Grissell as an individual: “Grissell,” quod Gawayn, “gon is, God wote! He was the burlokest blonke that ever bote brede. By Him that in Bedeleem was borne ever to ben our bote, I shall venge the today, if I con right rede.” “Go fecche me my freson, fairest on fote; He may stonde the in stoure in as mekle stede.” “No more for the faire fole then for a risshrote. But for doel of the dombe best that thus shuld be dede, I mourne for no montur, for I may gete mare.” Als he stode by his stede, That was so goode at nede, Ner Gawayn wax wede, So wepputte he sare. (lines 547–59) (“Grissell,” said Gawain, “is gone, God knows! He was the hardiest horse that ever took food. By he that was born in Bethlehem to be our aid forever, I will take vengeance on you today, if I can carry it out.” “Go fetch my Frisian horse, fairest afoot; he may serve you in combat just as well.” “I care no more for the fair horse than for a weed. Except for grief that the dumb beast should die this way, I’m not mourning for the mount, for I can get more.” As he stood by his steed, who was so good in battle, Gawain nearly went mad, he wept so sorely.)

If Galeron’s attitude is consonant with traditional chivalric ethics – his offer of a horse that is “fairest on fote” demonstrates both his generosity and his commitment to making sure the fight between the combatants is 28

See Sarah Lindsay, “The Courteous Monster: Chivalry, Violence, and Social Control in The Carl of Carlisle,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 114.3 (2015), 401–18.

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fair – this ethics is rejected wholesale by the mourning Gawain. Grissell here is treated as irreplaceable: if Gawain can always get another mount, he cannot get another Grissell. Grissell may be a “dombe best,” but he is also “the burlokest blonke that ever bote brede,” and Gawain’s angry and grief-stricken response to Galeron’s actions demonstrates not only compassion for the dead horse but also a deep personal attachment to Grissell. These examples demonstrate more than Gawain’s penchant in the Middle English tradition for regarding horses not as valuable equipment or signs of knightly status but as living creatures, individuals, and even companions or friends. Rather, this regard is accompanied by demonstrations of pity or emotional vulnerability that also influence his relationships with humans, offering a vision of elite chivalry in which emotional attachment to horses enhances courtesy even as it offers yet another justification for violence by proposing that horses might be avenged. By contrast, Lybeaus Desconus’s perfunctory treatment of his own “stedes” indicates an investment in knightly status that precludes this vulnerability and thus any sympathetic union with other people or with animals, prompting violence motivated by pride and innate savagery. If the poem never explicitly resolves this failure in its hero or the contradictions in Gawain’s violent literary legacy, it does suggest a means by which Lybeaus’s chivalry might be revised. In juxtaposing the steed’s wounding with descriptions of Lybeaus as “of blysse all bare” (line 2060) (“bereft of happiness”) and of Mabon fighting “As hit were a lyoune” (line 2002) (“as if he were a lion”), the poem engages in a role reversal that shows how easily knightly ferocity can become monstrous. Lybeaus’s final victory requires not lion-like belligerence but a willingness to endure shame, uncertainty, and fear to kiss the serpent. This dramatic scene of nonviolent animal-human contact resulting in a woman’s liberation underscores the text’s inchoate suggestion that, if chivalry is to transcend its role as mere justification for brutal violence, it must be through a recognition of shared vulnerability between knights, women, and animals.

Conclusion: Lybeaus Desconus and Corporal Compassion It is, of course, possible to read Lybeaus Deconus’s detachment from his steeds, like his violence, as “a quality that the audience is expected to revel in rather than to censure”29 – that is, as reflective of the text’s lack of interest in the ethics either of chivalry or of animal-human relations. 29

Critten, “Bourgeous Ethics Again,” 125.

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The readerly pleasures of excessive violence in the romance may well have offered the same appeal to medieval audiences that ultraviolent action films offer contemporary filmgoers. But the text’s continual return to horses and to the connection between human behavior and animals creates a more thoughtful context for the text’s violent interactions between human and inhuman agents, even if it is unable to reconcile its skepticism about knightly violence with its vision of integration into the masculine knightly world. Specifically, the wounding and death suffered by both men and horses are represented as worthy of emotional response – pity, anger, shame – and thus, the text promotes a kind of ethical concern for animal suffering and exploitation available not only to knights but to audiences more broadly.30 Such a concern is grounded both in a view of animals as an extension of human ego, prowess, or masculinity, a view clearly attested both in the text’s depiction of chivalry and constructions of chivalric masculinity more generally, and in a recognition that equine and human bodies are equally vulnerable to corporal suffering. “By virtue of our flesh, we can sense and be sensed by others and by ourselves,” Kelly Oliver remarks in her commentary on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of embodied subjectivity and their implications for ethical responsibility.31 Such “responseability,” to use her term, makes possible the communication between horse and rider so necessary for a successful chivalric partnership; it also means that the suffering of horses often results in the suffering of knights, and vice versa. Understanding this is a precursor for the loyal bonds between, for example, Arundel and Bevis of Hampton, or Grissell and Gawain. In emphasizing horses’ and riders’ suffering alongside the lack of loyalty exhibited by either the narrator or the hero, Lybeaus Desconus perhaps suggests to its readers that chivalry without what Ralph R. Acampora calls “symphysis” – “cross-species compassion… mediated by somatic experiences”32 – will motivate rather than restrain violence. An ethical consideration for the bodily well-being of animals thus has more than pragmatic and economic benefits for a medieval middle-class 30

For a discussion of these concerns in John Lydgate’s “Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep,” which also appears in Lambeth Palace MS 306, see Jeremy Withers, “The Ecology of Late Medieval Warfare in Lydgate’s Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18.1 (2011), 104–22. 31 Kelly Oliver, “Beyond Recognition: Merleau-Ponty and an Ethics of Vision,” in Intertwinings: Interdisciplinary Encounters with Merleau-Ponty, ed. Gail Weiss (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008), 131–52. 32 Ralph R. Acampora, Corporal Compassion: Animal Ethics and Philosophy of Body (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 23.

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readership who cannot supply horses endlessly. It is also necessary for the peaceful coexistence of different classes of animals and human beings. The disappearance of the wounded steed from the ending of Lybeaus Desconus suggests its author still subordinates its animal characters and any critique of chivalric violence to a celebration of its hero and Arthur’s court. Yet in connecting the physical and emotional kinship of knights and horses to the smooth reintegration of the wild man into human society, the text still offers the tantalizing implication that the ethical standing of humans is inextricably linked with our ability to recognize the vulnerabilities that connect us to other forms of life.

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Malory’s Ethical Dinadan: Moderate Masculinity in a Crisis of Hypermasculine Chivalry

MATTHEW D. O’DONNELL

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Introduction: From Chivalric Ethos to Heteronormative Ethic

homas Malory portrays knighthood in the Morte Darthur (hereafter, Morte) as an institution at odds with itself. With few exceptions, the major knights of the Morte have character flaws and ethical failings that extend directly from their pursuit of hypermasculine displays of chivalric excess. Neither Sir Tristram nor Sir Lancelot can reconcile their adulterous love affairs with their duty to their lord; Sir Gawain cannot retract his blood feud with Lancelot even though it will tear his inheritance to pieces. Knights fail in the Grail Quest because of their involvement with women; and after the Grail Quest, Arthur’s court revives the lethal kinship feuds and bellicose politics that existed before the Quest started. The reason for this turmoil in the community of knighthood stems from the original compact between Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, the Pentecostal Oath. Early in the Morte, Arthur makes all the knights of the Round Table swear that they will never: Do outerage nothir mourthir, and allwayes to fle treson, and to gyff mercy unto hym that askith mercy, uppon payne of forfiture of their worship and lordship of kynge Arthure for evirmore; and allwayes to do ladyes, damesels, and jantilwomen and wydowes socour: strengthe hem in hir ryghtes, and never to enforce them, upon payne of dethe. Also, that no man take no batayles in a wrongfull quarell for no love ne no worldis goodis. So unto thys were all knyghtis sworne of the Table Rounde, both olde and younge, and every yere so were they sworne at the hyghe feste of Pentecoste.1

1

Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, ed. P. J. C. Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), III. 15. Caxton’s chapter divisions will be used for ease of reference.

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(Neither to commit outrage or murder, always to flee treason, and to give mercy to those who asked for mercy, upon pain of death. Also, that no man takes up a battle in a wrongful quarrel for either love or worldly goods. Unto this were all knights of the Round Table sworn, both old and young, and every year they were so sworn at the high feast of Pentecost.)2

Armstrong points out that Malory’s inclusion of the Pentecostal Oath in his narrative requires knights to swear an oath of fealty not to a king but to an identity, a gendering of behavior where male knights are required to support and defend ladies who by “virtue” of their gender are not allowed to participate in jousts and other contests of prowess to direct their own agency in society. This unstable set of gender identities requires knights to continually reinforce a fragile sense of masculinity that can be shattered with any imputation of femininity, cowardice, or even a sense of self-preservation in the face of overwhelming odds against survival in direct combat. As a result, from the time a knight steps onto the tournament ground or field of battle, he is always at risk of losing his identity and his status in the community of his peers and never in a position of stable gender or social identity unless he fights other men for dominance over objectified women. Thus, Sir Dinadan is a unique character on the Arthurian battleground of chivalric excess, poking fun at the esteem of prowess-blind knights and mocking men led astray by their desire to exert control over ladies. Thomas Hanks unpacks the possibilities contributed by the presence of such a unique knight: Malory piques us with Dinadan and his attitude; Malory wants us to find ourselves momentarily forced to ask, ‘Is it really all that sensible to joust with a stranger simply because that’s what is done? Is jousting the be-all, the end-all of even a chivalric existence? Moreover, since love always seems to cause extra pain in this book (as it does to Palomydes), might one not sensibly avoid it?’3

Dinadan’s comedic discourse represents a transition from the hypermasculine pursuit of prowess consuming the Arthurian worthies of the Morte towards a less destructive version of chivalric masculinity. Dinadan’s mockery of peerless worthies like Lancelot and Tristram while 2



I am indebted in my translation to Dorsey Armstrong, ed., Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur: A New Modern English Translation Based on the Winchester Manuscript (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2009). 3 Thomas Hanks, “Characterization or Jumble? Sir Dinadan in Malory,” Medieval Perspectives 2.1 (1987), 174.

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still being a successful knight shows how successful knighthood does not inherently rely on hypermasculinity to survive, and in fact how excessive pursuit of martial prowess can lead knights not to renown but to ruin. The reason why Dinadan can mock other knights’ anxious displays of prowess and also be a “good knight” is because he gleefully embodies the marginalized position of a non-heteronormative moderate masculinity, forcing other knights’ anxieties to the surface in his own jests and jousts rather than allowing those anxieties to become subsumed into a normative structure for society. In response to Dinadan’s self-marginalization, hypermasculine worthies like Lancelot have no method to engage with his ideas other than to follow the same behaviors that form the core problem of knightly masculinity in the Morte: Lancelot and his cohort perpetrate a public performance of queer-bashing by beating Dinadan on the tournament field and then forcing him to wear women’s clothes and be laughed at by the entire court. Dinadan’s refusal to be silenced by his own humiliation, however, makes a moral out of cowardice and transforms the degrading spectacle into an object lesson about knightly ethics, showing up knights twice his strength and social standing for the anxiety-ridden bullies they are. Dinadan’s unrepentant rejection of the core tenets of the chivalric ethos of hypermasculine violence forces us to reinterpret Arthurian chivalry through a new lens that accommodates his critiques of the excesses of knightly masculinity. Dinadan scoffs not at knighthood itself but at the inherent instability of the hypermasculine enterprise corrupting knighthood from within. Although he is a minor knight in Malory’s Morte, Dinadan’s critique of the unstable ethic of martial and marital prowess in knighthood deserves a broader critical awareness for the foresight it provides readers into Camelot’s crumbling ethical foundations. According to Joyce Coleman, The inversions that [Dinadan] offers in jest will be reiterated as the perversions of the evil or disaffected knights who bring about Arthur’s fall. The internalized or privatized conversations he initiates through tact help ease us into a world where words represent and negotiate individual realities, not communal values… His Dinadan exposes not the superficial silliness of courtly ritual but the inevitably destructive consequences of human instability.4

Coleman here points out that Dinadan has been crafted by Malory to call into question the communal values of chivalry emblematic of romance, 4

Joyce Coleman, “Fooling with Language: Sir Dinadan in Malory’s Morte Darthur,” Arthurian Literature 23 (2006), 44–45.

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not to uphold them as unqualified goods. Instead of recapitulating previous Fair Unknown stories like his brother Brunor le Noir/la Cote Male Taile, Dinadan’s influence in the text exposes the anxieties and the fragility at the heart of the destructive hypermasculine ethic perpetrated by the Round Table’s worthiest knights. Gergely Nagy points out that Dinadan’s japes form a “sub-discourse” that avoids simply opposing knighthood by using humor to affirm a new ethic, what Nagy calls shared values among listeners to the text: Dinadan professes to be what he should not be, and in fact is not – something which everybody knows. It is he himself who creates the comic discrepancy; or rather, it is Malory who lets him, and uses the sub-discourse this sets up to ‘remind the hearers of a shared valuesystem which is beyond [such] lay analysis.’5

Yet what are these shared values, and why is Dinadan the only knight to embody them openly? Although Nagy foreshortens his analysis of Dinadan’s japery to claim that Dinadan is ultimately just “a good knight fooling around sometimes,” here I push further on what Nagy’s “subdiscourse” might mean for Dinadan’s attitude towards the extremes of martial behavior amongst his fellow knights and how those extremes pull Arthurian society apart at the seams.

Coward and “Cowherde”: Dinadan’s Intentional Self-Marginalization As society changed during the later Middle Ages, the landed aristocracy of Malory’s England was supplanted by politicized knightly orders anxious to promote the outward appearance of idealized knightly virtue from romances. As Richard Barber points out, this literary ideal of knighthood was heavily favored as a way to connect modern-day knighthood to a valorized and semi-fictional past.6 Knighthood during Malory’s time more resembled a tournament-focused spectacle of publicly performed chivalry, as well as being colored by the gentry politics and mercenary orders that exacerbated civil war and conflict during the Wars of the Roses. However, rather than paper over the changing status of knighthood, it is my argument that Malory’s Morte emphasized the uncomfortable similarity between the changing institution of chivalry in 5

Gergely Nagy, “A Fool of a Knight, a Knight of a Fool: Malory’s Comic Knights,” Arthuriana 14.4 (2004), 69–70. 6 In “Chivalry and the Morte Darthur,” in A Companion to Malory, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), 19–35.

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later medieval England and the repeated, anxious attempts to achieve an unrealistic standard of knighthood that consume the major knights in Malory’s work. Dinadan knowingly critiques this anxious knightly masculinity, offering a much more realistic, embodied experience of knighthood that serves as comedic and ironic contrast to the artifice of adventuring championed by Lancelot and Tristram. Through the japery of Dinadan, Thomas Malory provides a subversively moderate counterpoint to the hypermasculine prowess and objectification of women endemic to knights in the Morte Darthur. Armstrong calls him a “nontraditional knight,” focusing her attention on Dinadan’s unique attitude towards chivalry: Dinadan offers a new possibility for knightly identity than that which we have hitherto seen in the Morte d’Arthur. Lancelot, Tristram, Gareth, La Cote Male Tayle, and Alexander – to name just the most obvious examples – all demonstrate how repetitive acts of service to ladies involving a display of martial skills form and consolidate knightly identity. In his very existence, the character of Dinadan seems to ask if there might not be another possibility.7

I extend this analysis further by examining the effects of Dinadan’s refusal to abide by the hypermasculine strictures for knights while still remaining a worthy knight in the text. It is my contention that the “new possibility” that Dinadan represents is a rejection of traditional hypermasculine gender identities, an acceptance of marginalization and gender-based ridicule, and the replacement of hypermasculinity with a queering of the heteronormative chivalric ethic. Readers of the Morte can recognize in Dinadan’s mocking of martial prowess the danger of these knights’ destructive behavior that will ultimately doom the entire cast of the Morte. In order to disrupt the hypermasculine ethic from within his privileged position as a Round Table knight, Dinadan fearlessly becomes what other knights fear, turning cowardice into a virtue and transforming his own gender-based humiliation into a call for moderation that sees in the violence of hypermasculine achievement its own ethical discontent and internecine conflict.8 Dinadan’s presence in the narrative as a “great scoffer and japer” gives other knights under the restrictive code of knighthood permission to 7

Dorsey Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2003), 142. 8 Echoing the language of Tison Pugh’s Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1.

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laugh away their own fears and self-doubts by knowingly marginalizing himself, casting himself as a cowardly knight who by virtue of his lesser status can “punch upwards” at his greater fellows. Early on in his adventures with Tristram, the two hear about an ambush laid for Lancelot by Queen Morgan le Fay. Wanting the trap to fall upon them two instead, Tristram demands to be brought to the place where Lancelot is to be ambushed. Dinadan, however, balks at Tristram’s demands: Than seyde Sir Dynadan, ‘What woll ye do? Hit ys nat for us to fyght with thirty knyghtes, and wyte you well I woll nat thereoff! As to macche o knyght, too, or thre is inow and they be men, but for us to matche fyftene knyghtes, that I woll never undirtake.’ ‘Fy for shame!’ seyde Sir Trystram, ‘do but youre parte!’ ‘Nay,’ sayde Sir Dynadan, ‘I woll nat thereoff but iff ye oll lende me your shylde. For ye bere a shylde of Cornwayle, and for the cowardyse that ys named to the knyghtes of Cornwayle by youre shyldys ye bene ever forborne.’9 (Then Sir Dinadan said, ‘What will you do? It is not for us to fight with thirty knights, and know well, I will not do so! As for matching one knight, or two, or three is enough if they are men, but for us to match fifteen knights, that I will never undertake.’ ‘Fie for shame!’ said Sir Tristram, ‘just do your part!’ ‘Nay,’ said Sir Dinadan, ‘I will not do it unless you will lend me your shield. For you bear a shield of Cornwall, and due to the cowardly reputation of the knights of Cornwall you have often been passed over because of your shield.’)

This haggling over the call to adventure is comical, but also makes a subtle argument. When Dinadan hears of a mighty knight’s potential ambush, he complains about the daunting numbers of enemies instead of rushing headlong into the fight like the combative Tristram. Yet he goes one step further to throw a jape at Tristram’s expense by asking to hold the Cornish shield in the hopes that the ambushers think he is Cornish and therefore a coward, and so avoid him. This moment shines a light on Dinadan’s relationship with Tristram by showing that from Dinadan’s viewpoint, Cornwall is still a borderland kingdom with no knights of prowess save for Tristram, a jibe to deflate Tristram’s ego. Yet Dinadan asks to take the jibe on himself, to be both the margins and the marginalization, to bear the humiliation of his own insult about 9

Malory, Le Morte Darthur, IX. 23.

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Cornish cowardice while transforming it into a literal and metaphorical shield against any accusation of insufficient chivalric manhood. While Tristram seeks out publicly performed conflict in order to legitimize his preeminence through violence, Dinadan prefers to be underestimated and thus seem to overperform. Dinadan’s cowardice acts like a shield all its own, and his cutting jibes are his sword to modulate his own friend’s ambitions. As Thomas Hanks has pointed out, the harsh anti-chivalric attitudes the French Dinadan possesses do not carry over in Malory’s retelling. Hanks goes into detail about the characterization of Dinadan as a foil to Tristram: I suggest that Malory, finding a scoffing Dinadan in the prose Tristan, realized he had found a character who indeed, as Vinaver suggests, questions the basic assumptions of chivalry. Malory chose to soften this character’s questioning, but to keep it. The result, I suggest, is to produce a Dinadan who serves as a foil to Tristram, and who, moreover, foreshadows the eventually tragic events at the close of the Morte Darthur.10

If Dinadan is a foil to Tristram, perhaps Tristram in his own adventures serves as a foil and foreshadow of Lancelot in the later books of the Morte. While Tristram is considered second only in prowess to Lancelot, his adventures take place in a comparatively consequence-free environment prior to the downfall of Camelot. Tristram, Isode, and Mark all serve the same function in the narrative as their counterparts Lancelot, Guinevere, and Arthur. But where the consequences for adultery and courtly intrigue are deadly serious for the latter trio and tragically cause the downfall of the entire kingdom, Tristram, Isode, and Mark are able to love, play, fight, and crucially argue about the merits of their behaviors when the stakes for those behaviors are low. Malory reworks the tragic ending of Tristram and Isode’s story and recasts many of their adventures in more humorous and non-threatening ways, such as reducing the importance of the love potion to their relationship. What remains in these stories, then, is an instructive mirror for Lancelot and Guinevere’s adultery that crucially allows for Dinadan’s presence as a philosophical counterpoint to Tristram’s excessive pursuit of prowess, throwing cold water on 10

Hanks, “Sir Dinadan in Malory,” 173. While there are numerous extant versions of the Prose Tristan, the source text Malory used for his Tristram narrative has still not been identified. Although Hanks and other scholars provide contextual examples of differences between the French and English characterizations of Dinadan, a more complete investigation of the various manuscript versions and their correlation to Malory is beyond the scope of this essay.

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Tristram’s ambitions in ways that the later narrative does not do for Lancelot. Thus, Dinadan’s role in questioning the basic assumptions of chivalric excess in fighting and loving provides a subtle but memorable counterpoint to the internal strife of the Arthurian world in a context that starts as comic relief during the relatively low-stakes adventures of Tristram, only to gain in seriousness and importance through the tragic events of the later text. The ethics of Dinadan’s criticisms are transformed by the regime-shattering consequences of Lancelot’s and Guinevere’s actions, showing how wrong-headed the members of his own community have become. Dinadan’s attitude towards hypermasculine achievement singles him out as one of the few knights in Camelot who consciously resists the destructive model of prowess required of knights. When Dinadan and Tristram must each fight two knights at once in order to lodge at a castle for the knight, Dinadan initially refuses. Tristram berates him, saying, “‘Fye for shame… . are ye nat a Knyght of the Table Rounde? Wherefore ye may nat with your worship reffuse your lodgynge.’”11 (“‘Fie for shame… are you not a Knight of the Round Table? If so, you may not with your worship refuse your lodging.’”) True to his training, Dinadan defeats both his adversaries, showing that he can ride and fight in the same league as the major knights of the realm. However, instead of continuing along the same path of violent valor as Tristram, Dinadan grouses and groans about the injuries adventuring causes: But ye fare… as a man that were oute of hys mynde, that wold caste hymselff away. And I may curse the tyme that ever I sye you, for in all the worlde ar nat such too knyghtes that ar so wood as ys Sir Launcelot and ye Sir Tristram! For onys I felle in the felyshyp of Sir Launcelot as I have done now with you, and he sette me to a-worke that a quarter of a yere I kept my bedde. Jesu deffende me… frome such too knyghtys, and especially frome youre felyshyp.12 (But you fare… as a man that was out of his mind, that would cast himself away. And I may curse the time that ever I saw you, for there are not in all the world two such knights that are so berserk as Sir Lancelot and you, Sir Tristram! For once I fell in the fellowship of Sir Lancelot as I have done now with you, and he set me to such work that I was recuperating in bed for a quarter of a year. Jesus defend me… from two such knights, and especially from your fellowship.) 11 12

Malory, Le Morte Darthur, IX. 23. Ibid., IX. 23–24 (emphasis added).

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The notion that Tristram and Lancelot seem to be insane with a lust for battle forms the first part of Dinadan’s criticism of knighthood: instead of taking advantage of the opportunities for worship that adventuring with Tristram and Lancelot would bring, Dinadan decries the “wood” or berserk behavior of the two knights that is more likely to leave Dinadan with lingering injuries than lasting worship. Dinadan’s scoffing devaluation of the chivalric ethic into a catalog of injuries subverts our expectations of knightly adventure that becomes the default rule under the Pentecostal Oath, where only the most excessive behavior is praiseworthy and competition for prowess becomes the only ethic that matters. Dinadan, by contrast, embraces the outward appearance of cowardice and thus is freed from dishonor, while antagonizing King Mark for hiding his cowardice behind a façade of strength. Dinadan mocks King Mark mercilessly for his dishonorable actions, which reflect more in Dinadan’s view on the interior worth of the man than his outward ability to fight. For instance, Dinadan goads King Mark into fighting the obviously superior Sir Lamorak, even when Dinadan himself refuses to fight the superior knight. He explains why it is that Mark earns shame for his actions of trying and failing to fight a stronger opponent, while Dinadan is not ashamed for refusing to even try: Nay, sir, hit is ever worshyp to a knyght to refuse that thynge that he may nat attayne. Therefore your worshyp had bene muche more to have refused hym as I ded, for I warne you playnly he is able to beate suche fyve as ye ar and I be: for ye knyghtis of Cornwayle ar no men of worshyp, ye hate all men of worship, for never in your contrey was bredde such a knyght as sir Trystram.13 (Nay, sir, it is ever worshipful for a knight to refuse that which he may not attain. Therefore, your worship would have been much greater to have refused him as I did, for I warn you plainly that he is able to beat five like you and me; for you knights of Cornwall are no men of worship, you hate all men of worship, for never in your country was bred another knight like Sir Tristram.)

Dinadan’s criticism of hypermasculine chivalry reveals the pursuit of prowess as more trouble than it is worth. Dinadan simply refuses the game of gaining worship and yet is still considered a worthy knight who loves the companionship of other worthy knights. Dinadan’s willingness to be marginalized and thus be free of the responsibility to keep up the system of prowess is an important and useful contrast to the destructive hypermasculine knighthood represented by Tristram and Lancelot. 13

Ibid., X. 9.

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Another contrast to the system of excess that Dinadan rejects is that he respects honesty even over cowardliness – self-serving cowardice such as that practiced by King Mark is cowardice covered up by pretensions to strength. Dinadan defends the lieutenant of Sir Tor’s castle, Sir Berluse, in order to expose King Mark’s manipulation of honor for personal gain. Mark does not want his own name revealed at Tor’s court because of his attempt to murder Berluse, so Dinadan excoriates Mark for his refusal to be held publicly and politically accountable: ‘Hit is shame to you,’ seyde Sir Dynadan, ‘that ye governe you so shamfully, for I se by you ye ar full of cowardyse, and ye ar also a murtherar, and that is the grettyst shame that ony knyght may have, for nevir had knyght murtherer worshyp, nother never shall have. For I saw but late thorow my forse ye wolde have slayne Sir Berluse, a bettir knyght than ever ye were or ever shall be, and more of proues.’14 (‘It is a shame to you,’ said Sir Dinadan, ‘that you govern so shamefully, for I see that you are full of cowardice, and you are also a murderer, and that is the greatest shame that any knight may have, for never has a murderer-knight had worship, nor ever shall have. For I saw that but for my might you would have slain Sir Berluse, a better knight than you ever were or ever shall be, and of greater prowess.’)

Dinadan is aware that knightly prowess comes not only in deeds of arms, but also in honesty of self-representation, even if that representation makes one out to be an honest coward. Dinadan purposefully cuts through the games of traditional hypermasculine posturing. As a result, he is able to simultaneously take part in and critique the institutions of identity surrounding knighthood and the public performance of heteronormative identity while also refusing to be bound by its constraints. Dinadan argues against the very faults that will doom the rest of Arthur’s kingdom to failure and self-destruction by linguistically unraveling the contradictory restrictions placed upon him. As Joyce Coleman explains in her article examining Dinadan’s subtle language use, Malory’s Dinadan always acts and speaks from the most orthodox of chivalric motives: to amuse or to protect the good knights he loves. But each manipulation of discourse adds a new layer of nuance, obliquity, ambiguity, and, ultimately, unreliability to the function of language… The long-term effect of Dinadan’s entirely loyal and

14

Ibid., X. 11.

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well-meant words is, repeatedly, to undermine not the boundaries but – more frighteningly – the very core of Arthurian society.15

Coleman calls Dinadan’s double-voiced japes a “disjunctive energy” that undermines Arthurian chivalry, yet “not so much by challenging the institution of personal combat itself as, rather, by undermining the linguistic ethos that has served to define the chivalric worldview.”16 For the same purpose by which chiding damsels like Dame Lyonet upbraid knights for their own good, Dinadan interrupts certain scenes to chide the negative behaviors of knights who have become emotionally unbalanced or unethical. Dinadan thus becomes a tactful tactician targeting the vulnerabilities of the destructive chivalric ethic defining the fellow knights with whom he interacts in order to undermine the flawed value system they have been conditioned to accept. Rebecca Reynolds analyzes Dinadan’s subtle language cues as a key to his morals when he tries to solve a dispute between Tristram and Palomides. As Reynolds explains, Malory repeatedly calls Tristram “wroth” in his vengeance against Palomides for striking Tristram unawares and toppling him over.17 Clearly, Tristram’s emotional balance is overcome just as quickly as his physical balance, so Dinadan uses calm reasoning and ethical argumentation to protect the lesser knight Palomides from the enraged and unstable Tristram: So with that cam sir Dynadan, and whan he saw sir Trystram wroth he lyste nat to jape, but seyde, ‘Lo, sir Trystram, here may a man preve, be he never so good yet may he have a falle; and he was never so wyse but he might be oversayne, and he rydyth well that never felle.’18 (So with that came Sir Dinadan, and when he saw Sir Tristram wrathful he felt it best not to jape, but said, ‘Lo, Sir Tristram, here may a man show that never was there one so good that he could not have a fall, and never was there one so wise that he could not be mistaken, and never was there one who rides well who has never fallen.’)

Dinadan is not just comic relief here; he understands the importance of when to prick and goad the tempestuous Tristram and when to deescalate the threat of violence. In this case, Tristram ignores Dinadan’s 15

Coleman, “Fooling With Language,” 35. Ibid., 34. 17 Rebecca L. Reynolds, “Sir Dinadan’s Knightly Language,” Medieval Perspectives 27 (2012), 140. 18 Malory, Le Morte Darthur, IX. 28. 16

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message because he “was passing wroth” (“completely berserk”), which is the fourth time the phrase is used, but Palomides is saved by the arrival of Lancelot.19 While the prowess of Lancelot and Tristram at their height is impossible to ignore, it is also inherently destabilizing: Tristram could easily kill the lesser knight Palomides and in fact does fly into a rage later on at a young knight who sent a love letter to Isolde and to whom she sent a tactfully negative reply – not realizing of course the irony of being lethally possessive of another man’s wife. Similarly, Lancelot is so powerful in the saddle that just the sight of his armor can scare off competitors, but that same prowess also puts Dinadan into the position of navigating the two most lethally dangerous and politically dominant knights of his time. The elements of martial and marital prowess that Dinadan has to negotiate are powder kegs of political, social, and sexual instability. Nevertheless, his language use shows that he is trying to find a balancing point between inefficacy and danger. Rather than trying to defeat hypermasculinity at its own game of dominance, Dinadan opposes chivalric excess by moderating his speech to douse the fires of his fellow knights’ hypermasculine fury. When Dinadan marks other characters’ actions as shameful, it signals how he moderates his expectations of other knights’ behaviors. For example, Dinadan does not consider refusing to fight a greater knight shameful, but he excoriates the incognito Tristram’s play-act of cowardice for refusing to fight when Dinadan can tell that he is obviously one of the biggest and most powerful men Dinadan has ever seen. Reynolds notes that Dinadan’s pronouns shift from the disrespectful thou to the more respectful you when Tristram’s “cowherde knyght”20 refuses to use his clearly visible strength and prowess to defend others: Tristram’s true wrong is not his refusal to tell his name or even his refusal to fight; it is the fact that he is such a large and obviously skilled knight, who carries large weapons but refuses to use them, even to help a fellow knight. As McCarthy points out, “A knight’s worship is his honour, his reputation, his good name… and the worship he wins is part of his own individual reputation.” As long as Tristram ignores the need to gain worship, Dinadan continues to use the subordinate thou since, as Dinadan states, his behavior shames all knights, including himself. It is only when Tristram behaves

19 20

Ibid., IX. 28. A play on “coward” and “cowherde,” meaning cow-herder.

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knightly and defends another knight that Dinadan recognizes him, thereafter switching back to the more respectful you.21

Dinadan’s criticism about the dominance hierarchy of late-medieval masculine culture encapsulates the major problem that Malory exposes in hypermasculine knighthood as a normative ethic: the knights at the top of the hierarchy have too much to lose by critiquing or refusing to participate in that hierarchy. Thus, it falls to a lesser knight like Dinadan to be willing to “lose” his privileged position in the pecking order to say what needs to be said when those major knights are going wrong. Dinadan takes on the role of the marginalized coward within the Arthurian hierarchy in order to critique that hierarchy from within, advancing a critique of hypermasculinity that is all the more convincing because it comes from a masculine knight, yet is still plausibly deniable by the rest of the Arthurian hierarchy for being said by a japer and a “mad talker.” Although the other knights disregard Dinadan’s pointed jibes, it is important that Dinadan still provides the counterpoint to knightly hypermasculinity in such a way that the audience listening to the Morte could both see the value of his points and still make light of his portrayal. It is all the more tragic that Dinadan’s protestations against excessive martial and marital prowess ultimately cannot forestall the breakdown in Arthur’s court at the end of the Morte. Dinadan’s criticisms are not just for his fellow knights’ ears; it also provides the audience with a window into the social pressures put upon men by their own patriarchal society. For example, when King Mark believes King Arthur and Guinevere are plotting with Tristram to take Isolde away from him, Mark replies to their letters by impugning Guinevere’s fidelity: And to begyn, the kyngis lettir spake wondirly shorte unto Kynge Arthure, and bade hym entermete with hymself and wyth hys wyff, and of his knyghtes, for he was able to rule his wyff and his knyghtes.22 (And to begin, the king’s letter to King Arthur was surprisingly blunt, and bade him to concern himself with his own wife and his own knights, for he (Mark) was able to rule his wife and his knights.)

King Mark is correctly pointing out the obvious cuckolding going on in Arthur’s court, but Arthur seemingly does not connect the obvious implications. 21 22

Reynolds, “Sir Dinadan’s Knightly Language,” 143. Malory, Le Morte Darthur, X. 26.

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He mused of many thynges, and thought of his systyrs wordys, Quene Morgan le Fay, that she had seyde betwyxte Quene Gwenyvere and Sir Launcelot, and in this thought he studyed a grete whyle.23 (He mused on many things, and thought of his sister’s words, Queen Morgan le Fay, what she had said concerning Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot, and he thought about this a great while.)

Guinevere, upon reading the letter, understands the imputation of adultery and is “wrothe out of mesure” (“irrationally angry”), sending the letter to her co-conspirator Lancelot. Dinadan secretly reads the letter and convinces Lancelot to tell him the truth of the matter: I pray you, discover your harte to me, for, pardé, ye know well that I wolde you but well, for I am a poore knyghte and a servyture unto you and to all good knyghtes. For though I be nat of worship myself, I love all tho that bene of worship.24 (I pray you, reveal your heart to me, for, by God, you know that I wish you nothing but good, for I am a poor knight and a servant to you and all good knights. For though I am not myself worshipful, I love all those that are worshipful.)

When Lancelot reveals his problems, Dinadan composes a lay for King Mark, “the worste lay that ever harper songe with harpe or with ony other instrument”25 (“the worst lay that ever a harper sung with harp or any other instrument”), teaching it to a harper named Elyot who taught other harpers all across England with the assistance of Lancelot and King Arthur, a literal smear campaign for King Mark “whyche spake the moste vylany by Kynge Marke and of his treson that ever man herde”26 (“which spoke of the worst villainy of King Mark and his treason that ever men heard”). When Tristram hears the lay, he cries out, saying “O Lord Jesu! That Sir Dynadan can make wondirly well and yll, there he sholde make evyll!”27 (“O Lord Jesus! That Sir Dinadan can write wonderfully well, even where he is writing ill!”). Although Mark’s point about Lancelot and Guinevere is still technically valid, his “treason” of wanting to get rid of his own champion Tristram is more dangerous to the chivalric community than either wife’s infidelity. Dinadan is still Lancelot’s liegeman and Arthur is still his king, 23

Ibid., X. 26. Ibid., X. 26. 25 Ibid., X. 27. 26 Ibid., X. 30. 27 Ibid., X. 30. 24

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so Dinadan uses his words rather than his might to reframe the entire matter to focus on King Mark’s own anti-chivalric actions. Paul Rovang notes the irony that Dinadan, “as the homme honnête (honest man) of Arthur’s court, uncomprehendingly defends the pair that is pushing it toward disaster, for his loving of good knights and ladies means believing the best about them.”28 While I agree with Rovang that Dinadan believes the best about his fellows in Arthur’s court, I believe he knows what he is doing is threading a very fine political and social distinction, and so proceeds carefully with his own agenda to preserve and defend the knightly community. In following Coleman’s discussion, Rovang posits an alternative idea that Dinadan is operating by tact rather than tactics “to preserve the social surface” of Arthurian society by contrasting it with the clearly corrupt Cornish king. However, the strategy behind Dinadan’s tact is both artful and cutting: by painting Mark as a treasonous fox and spreading a lay of the most poisonous evils that he can devise, Dinadan simultaneously upholds the important part of the Pentecostal Oath to defend ladies while also participating verbally in the traditional trope of a ‘flyting,’ a publicly performed verbal humiliation, threatening Mark’s identity through bad press so as to keep the actual infidelity from causing Camelot to implode, as it later will when Guinevere’s adultery is brought to light. Dinadan knows when it is important to fight to preserve his honor and the honor of his court; that is why he is continually referred to as a worshipful knight in Malory’s Morte rather than an anti-chivalric character like in the Prose Tristan. Dinadan’s exhortation that it is ever worshipful to refuse that which one cannot attain fundamentally undercuts the core exercise of Arthurian chivalry, which is to repeatedly, anxiously attempt to achieve that which it cannot attain – whether political unity through violent combat or social legitimacy through controlling ladies even when it undercuts the legitimacy of the patriarchal system. The tragedy of Dinadan’s role is that, although he makes a convincing case for abandoning the tenets of hypermasculinity, his fellow worthies have no way to respond in kind when he so clearly lays out the faults with the system of excessive prowess in which they all participate. As a result, they end up marginalizing and antagonizing one of the few knights who has the right idea about how to get out of the double-bind in which they have placed themselves.

28

Paul R. Rovang, Malory’s Anatomy of Chivalry: Characterization in the Morte Darthur (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015), 106.

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Dinadan in Drag: Forced Cross-Dressing and Discontented Masculinity Malory often places his minor chivalric characters physically at odds with the hypermasculine chivalric contest exemplified by his major characters. Because chivalric excess ultimately undermines any sense of individual agency or moderate behavior in the Morte, minor knights are tested and crushed by the standards of the destructive hypermasculine contest, while the major characters ironically “succeed” at propping up the system to its catastrophic endpoint and destroy the entire Arthurian enterprise in the process. Dinadan is the most intriguing of these divergent minor knights for his unique response to hypermasculine attempts to goad him into greater excess: he subverts the anxieties and expectations of his assigned category, turning them from weaknesses into strengths using his words rather than his sword. The gender-bending body of his criticisms are emblematic of a different ethic of knighthood based not around excess, but around moderation. Dinadan is the only knight in the entire Morte Darthur who openly critiques the chivalric ethic’s reliance on martial and marital prowess as flawed measurements that underscore the hypermasculine anxieties that animate them. Dinadan rejects seeking worship through fighting – yet crucially he continues being a worshipful knight on par with his fellows. He is positioned against the Arthurian community’s preference for violent conquerors like Tristram and Lancelot who fight one another for dominance at the other’s expense. Thus, the Arthurian establishment’s reaction to Dinadan’s behavior becomes all the more telling: Lancelot puts women’s clothes over his armor to trounce Dinadan at a tournament, then dresses Dinadan up in women’s clothes to humiliate him in front of the assembled Arthurian community, forcing him into a gendered submission to the chivalric hypermasculine ideal and ironically manifesting the inequality that the Pentecostal Oath encodes. Tison Pugh points out that heteronormativity in the Middle Ages is not something that comes from societal definitions, but through the individual acts done by and often to the individuals being made to seem “queer” or against the norm: In this book, my interests lie with those who have queerness thrust upon ’em – the male agents and actors who, through their interactions and affinities with others, become marked with and/ or compelled to embody queerness before being identified as normatively (hetero)sexual males. The construction of normative masculinity depends upon the possibility of the queer, as queerness

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provides the Binary Other that normativity hierarchically opposes. Rather than flip sides of the same coin, queerness and normativity oscillate in respect to each other in the construction of sexual and ideological subjects. In this manner, queerness often constitutes a necessary tactic in disciplining certain male subjects into the prevailing ideological order.29

Dinadan’s forced cross-dressing is a moment for embodied enforced queerness, but it is my argument that it does not fully do its job of silencing or disciplining Dinadan away from his subversive behavior. Instead, it reaffirms the vapidity of the prevailing ideological order – Dinadan’s success as a knight and his critiques of knighthood cannot be answered in kind, so instead they are answered with violence, which is no real answer at all. The site of clothing and the social body underneath it is a useful landmark upon which to demarcate the boundaries separating chivalric hypermasculinity from Dinadan’s more moderate expression of medieval masculinity and expectations of identity. Lancelot’s very public humiliation of Dinadan exposes the radically conservative heteronormative ethic that Lancelot must enforce on other chivalric men, namely that femininity is the butt of a joke to denigrate masculine men rather than a legitimate influence to be allowed into the public sphere of court. From the perspective of the knights in Arthur’s court, Dinadan’s defeat on the tournament ground at Surluse by a jocular Lancelot wearing women’s clothes is seemingly a shame and a mockery that will put a subversive knight like Dinadan in his place. But Lancelot’s behavior does not silence Dinadan, nor does it settle the argument about what makes a knightly man; instead, Dinadan’s forced submission into the position of the feminine only proves how Lancelot and the rest of the court view femininity – as a weapon against men for silencing disruptive criticism of knightly hypermasculinity. The court’s jovial celebration of gender-based violence to silence one of their own worshipful knights says more about the precarious nature of knightly masculinity than any of Dinadan’s valid criticisms alone. The entire tournament at Surluse is emblematic of Arthurian chivalry’s flawed ethics. Guinevere attends the tournament alongside Galahalt the Haut Prince of Surluse instead of Arthur; the king cannot attend the opening ceremonies and instead gives Guinevere into Galahalt’s “governance,” highlighting the trafficking in women’s agency that will later drive Mordred to imprison Guinevere to legitimize his 29

Pugh, Sexuality and its Queer Discontents, 1.

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claim to the throne.30 Guinevere tellingly brings Lancelot and other knights with her to win renown in her name as “Guinevere’s knights” instead of Arthur’s knights, foreshadowing her destructive favoritism of Lancelot’s political affinity above her husband’s needs for political unity and in the face of growing concern over her relationship with Lancelot. Between the jousts where Dinadan fights with various worthies and wins renown, all the rivalries and blood feuds that will come to fruition in the final books of the Morte simmer beneath a tightly closed lid of propriety that threatens to bubble over. By the fifth day of tourneying, Dinadan has won worship on the field both for his martial prowess and for his scathing tongue, seamlessly melding physical fighting and verbal flyting into a jovial goad with whom all good knights respond positively: In cam Sir Dynadan and mette with Sir Geryne, a good knyght, and he threw hym downe over his horse croupen. And Sir Dynadan overthrew foure knyghtes mo, and there he dede grete dedis of armys, for he was a good knyght. But he was a grete skoffer and a japer, and the meryeste knyght among felyship that was that tyme lyvynge: and he loved every good knyght and every good knyght loved him.31 (In came Sir Dinadan and met with Sir Geryne, a good knight, and he threw him over his horse’s crupper. And Sir Dinadan overthrew four knights more, and there he did great deeds of arms, for he was a good knight. But he was a great scoffer and a japer, and the merriest knight among fellowship that was living at that time: and he loved every good knight and every good knight loved him.)

Dinadan is so successful at the tournament that he even manages to unhorse Galehalt the Haut Prince (High Prince). Upset at being bested by Dinadan and being chided for losing to a “lesser knight,” Galahalt conspires with Lancelot to humiliate Dinadan by defeating him and dragging him before Queen Guinevere. Lancelot raises the stakes of Dinadan’s humiliation by not just defeating him but disarming him of his weapons, denuding Dinadan of his main masculine chivalric tool for exercising prowess: [Lancelot] smote adowne Sir Dynadan and made his men to unarme hym, and so brought hym to the quene and to the Haute Prynce, and they lowghe at Sir Dynadan that they myght nat stonde. ‘Well,’

30 31

Malory, Le Morte Darthur, X. 40. Ibid., X. 46–47.

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seyde Sir Dynadan, ‘yet have I no shame, for the olde shrew Sir Launcelot smote me downe.’32 (Lancelot smote Sir Dinadan down and made his men to disarm him, and so brought him to the queen and to the High Prince, and they laughed at Sir Dinadan so much that they could not stand. ‘Well,’ said Sir Dinadan, ‘I have no shame though, for the old shrew Sir Lancelot smote me down.’)

The OED lists “shrew” as “A wicked, evil-disposed, or malignant man; a mischievous or vexatious person; a rascal, villain.”33 As is often the case with Dinadan’s japes, they are operating on multiple levels.34 At issue is Dinadan’s core message that he does not need to be ashamed of not being the best knight, especially if it means being bested by the greatest knight in the realm. But when Lancelot then adds insult to Dinadan’s injury by deceiving and then disarming his own fellow Round Table knight, Lancelot exposes his own excesses in a way that would be humiliating otherwise (e.g., Tristram forbidding Palomides from bearing arms for a year). Calling the best knight in the kingdom a malignant reprobate puts Lancelot down in social status amongst villains, devils, and scolders – not coincidentally, down alongside Dinadan. Unlike Dinadan, whose reputation for scolding and cowardice is well-known and no cause for shame, Lancelot’s reputation relies upon the notion that he is peerless, upholding the most ideal interpretation of chivalry possible through the Pentecostal Oath. Dinadan repays Lancelot’s daunting physical prowess and humiliating treatment with verbal jousts that strike right at the heart of Lancelot’s publicly performed hypermasculinity, revealing it to be nothing more than the licit use of violence for domination of weaker opponents. 32

Ibid., X. 47. “Shrew, n2, 1a, 3a.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. 34 Although the modern day meaning of “shrew” has a more explicitly gendered meaning that the OED presents (“A person, esp. (now only) a woman given to railing or scolding or other perverse or malignant behaviour; frequently a scolding or turbulent wife”), the medieval meanings of “shrew” were more equally divided between the definitions of villainy and scolding wife; the OED remarks upon the lack of references to the shrew as an animal before the seventeenth century: 33

The absence of evidence for the word between the Old English period and the 16th century is remarkable; its place may have been supplied locally in Middle English by erdshrew (i.e. earth-shrew), though this, with its apparent corruptions hard-shrew, hardishrew n., harvest-shrew, nossro, nursrow (with prefixed N 3), is not recorded before the 17th century.

Because of the relative lack of animal references, it is more reasonable to infer that Malory intended Dinadan’s insult to be a slight to Lancelot’s falseness, his deviousness and devilish nature.

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Galahalt and Lancelot conspire to play one more trick on Dinadan during the last day of the tournament. After being previously disarmed, Dinadan does not consider jousting with Lancelot sporting because he knows he cannot win: ‘Well, well,’ seyde Sir Dynadan to Sir Launcelot, ‘what devyll do ye in this contrey? For here may no meane knyghtes wynne no worship for the. I ensure the,’ Sir Dynadan seyde to Sir Launcelot, ‘I shall no more mete with the nother with thy grete speare, for I may nat sytte in my sadyll whan thy speare hittyth me. And I be happy, I shall beware of thy boysteous body that thou beryst.’35 (‘Well, well,’ said Sir Dinadan to Sir Lancelot, ‘what devilry do you do in this country? For here middling knights will win no worship for you. I assure you,’ Sir Dinadan said to Sir Lancelot, ‘I will not joust with you or your great spear anymore, for I cannot stay in my saddle when your spear hits me. If I want to be happy, I shall beware the boisterous body you bear.’)

Dinadan’s words foreshadow Lancelot’s trap when he says that he will beware Lancelot’s “boysterous body,” as Lancelot will use a body double in order to attack Dinadan unawares. The next day, Lancelot sneaks away after helping Dinadan ready himself for the day’s jousting, leaving an imposter sitting as a judge in his armor while he disguises himself yet again: Sir Launcelot disgysed hymselff and put uppon his armour a maydyns garmente freysshely attyred. Than Sir Launcelot made Sir Galyhodyn to lede hym thorow the raunge, and all men had wondir what damesell was that.36 (Sir Lancelot disguised himself and put over his armor a freshly attired maiden’s garment. Then Sir Lancelot made Sir Galyhodyn lead him through the rows, and all the men wondered who the damsel was.)

Armstrong notes that though cross-dressing was a regular part of tournament spectacle, Lancelot’s obviously armored damsel operates as a “play” of transvestism: “Lancelot’s assumption of the ‘socially coherent’ markers of femininity in order to play a joke on Dinadan works as a joke precisely to the extent that tournament spectators see through the dress to the armor underneath it.”37 Pugh takes this “play” of transvestism 35

Malory, Le Morte Darthur, X. 48. Ibid., X. 48–49. 37 Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, 138. 36

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one step further, noting that the seeming heteronormative standard only exists on a foundation of queering and of normalizing certain gender constraints by force and coercion: When queerness is attached to heterosexuality, when queerness enables heterosexuality, the façade of heterosexual superiority is revealed as an agent of ideological control not merely of homosexual men but of many heterosexual men as well. Such queerness compels ostensibly masculine and normative subjects to inhabit sexual otherness, to abandon normativity, and to confront the failures of masculinity in order to be reconscripted into proper ideological and culturally normative manhood. Given the potential for normative masculinities to undergo duress when conflicting ideological pressures converge, a man and his masculinity are often broken down in a crucible of queerness to then form again in response to normativity.38

Lancelot’s privileged position as the peerless fighter gives him license to dress up in mock feminine garb because it is clear with his armor on underneath his dress that he is playing at being a lady rather than crossdressing or bending gender categories. Knights engaging in this sort of mock-transvestism are upholding stereotypes of feminine behavior as well as masculine stereotypes, contributing to rather than breaking down the hierarchical gender categories in Arthur’s kingdom. Something fundamentally different happens when Lancelot beats Dinadan in combat and then strips him of his armor and places women’s clothes upon him to be led around court and laughed at. Lancelot’s treatment of Dinadan at the tournament in Surluse, first by defeating the lesser knight while in women’s clothes himself and then by dressing Dinadan in women’s clothes to humiliate him further, only highlights Lancelot’s knightly misogyny in an attempt to shut Dinadan’s critical mouth. On the tournament field, Dinadan worries that he might meet Lancelot, but “allwayes he loked up thereas Sir Launcelot was, and than he sawe one sytte in the stede of Sir Launcelot armed”39 (“always he looked up in the place where Sir Lancelot was, and he saw one sitting armed in Lancelot’s place”). Dinadan mistakes the armor for the body of Lancelot, tricked by the very status symbol that constitutes Lancelot’s publicly performed identity. Dinadan is unprepared as the disguised Lancelot-maiden takes up Galyhodyn’s lance and knocks Dinadan over his horse’s croup and has his men drag Dinadan off into the woods. This 38 39

Pugh, Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents, 12. Malory, Le Morte Darthur, X. 48.

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time Lancelot takes the cruel joke to its extreme, humiliating Dinadan by removing his masculine armor and replacing it with feminine clothing, then parading him in front of the tournament-going audience as a laughing-stock: And anone grete coystrons gate Sir Dynadan into the foreyste there besyde, and there they dispoyled hym unto his sherte and put uppon hym a womans garmente and so brought hym into the fylde…. And than was Sir Dinadan brought in amonge them all, and whan Quene Gwenyvere sawe Sir Dynadan ibrought in so amonge them all, than she lowghe that she fell downe, and so dede all that there was. ‘Well,’ seyde Sir Dynadan, ‘Sir Launcelot, thou arte so false that I can never beware of the.’40 (And shortly several big serving men took Sir Dinadan into the nearby forest, and there they despoiled him down to his shirt and put upon him a woman’s garment and brought him into the field…. And then Sir Dinadan was brought in amongst them all, and when Queen Guinevere saw Sir Dinadan as he was brought in amongst them all, she laughed so hard that she fell down, and so did all that were there. ‘Well,’ said Sir Dinadan, ‘Sir Lancelot, you are so deceitful that I can never be certain of you!’)

Unlike Lancelot’s obvious pantomime of wearing a dress over his armor, Dorsey Armstrong notes that Dinadan’s cross-dressed presentation to the assembled tournament participants “represents much more insistently than Lancelot’s similar performance the tenuous contingency of gender construction” because he is the one being undressed as a man and redressed as a woman, then being paraded against his will for the enjoyment of the assembled host of chivalric worthies and ladies of degree.41 While I agree with Armstrong that Guinevere’s laugh is a strategic deployment of humor that aims to defuse the threat of Dinadan’s gender-bending outfit, I see Lancelot’s behavior as the core demonstration of the performative hypermasculine reaction to Dinadan’s constant criticism of knightly excess, and Guinevere’s uproarious participation as an unfortunate by-product of the tightly gendered situation that she is also navigating in her adultery with Lancelot. Lancelot and Galahalt, like the rest of Arthurian society, fear Dinadan’s ability to rebuke hypermasculine excess and not lose status, because having a more moderate stance on prowess has been demonized as a weakness all knights should fear. Inasmuch as Lancelot’s status as a 40 41

Ibid., X. 49. Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, 139.

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peerless chivalric man is “stable,” it relies upon the shared apprehension of and antagonism towards non-excessive behavior, as such would make violence a less reasonable option than other more constructive ways to model proper knightly behavior. The only way Lancelot can understand a nonviolent perspective is to put it in a dress, treating moderation as if it were anathema to masculine prowess. It is important to remember that in order to humiliate Dinadan, Lancelot put a woman’s dress on over his armor, while once in the forest the bondsmen “despoil” Dinadan of his armor like a defeated opponent, before bringing the feminized knight before Guinevere to be laughed at. Lancelot’s punishment of Dinadan is a spectacle of humiliation that attempts to encode a “binary but unreciprocal division that constrains femininity to masculine terms.”42 Pugh points out that this unreciprocal division does not actually fulfill the purpose of normalizing heterosexual masculinity, but instead creates a “compulsory queerness” that is the byproduct of discontented, separated gender identities in a hierarchy: Compulsory queerness paradoxically serves as a stage in the construction of (hetero)normative masculinity, although such an ostensibly normative masculinity may not be what the man desired in the first place. Whereas [Adrienne] Rich exposes the ways in which compulsory heterosexuality creates discontent among lesbians, compulsory queerness functions in a paradoxically similar manner to create discontented heterosexuals.43

It is important to note that Dinadan is not the only knight who is forcibly “queered” in order to provide him a pathway to greater knightly renown; Katherine Gubbels points out that Gareth’s yearlong stint as a kitchen boy in his tale at Kay’s behest ironically assists Gareth in “dissociating himself from normative chivalric masculinity and aligning himself with the more queered roles of the lower class, women, children, and animals.”44 Dinadan similarly has his agency taken away from him, his day of victory on the jousting field replaced by a seemingly humiliating feminized display – but rather than seeing the insult as a truly grave moment requiring lethal violence to reassert his masculinity, Dinadan instead leans into the performance and comically insists that Lancelot

42

E. Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 136. 43 Pugh, Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents, 12. 44 Katherine Gubbels, “The Fair (and Queer) Unknown in Malory’s ‘The Tale of Sir Gareth,” Enarratio 20 (2016), 100.

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is so “false” that he can “never beware” his peer’s devious tricks.45 Rather than being a site for the powerful knight to prove his mastery over the japer by stuffing him into women’s clothes, Dinadan remains an unrepentant scoffer and japer throughout the rest of his narrative, and is later described as being murdered by Mordred and Aggravain out of spite for his unruly tongue. Much as cuckolds were forced to publicly wear horns or dishonorable wives were placed into the stocks with their feet exposed as punishment, Dinadan is forcibly placed in the far more transgressive category of enforced queerness, literally being turned from a masculine knight into a feminized scolding figure that fits more cleanly into the social structure that benefits the hierarchical gender stereotypes. Carolyn Dinshaw points out a similar moment in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales where the hypermasculine threat of the Host Harry Bailey towards the Pardoner bursts forth in direct response to the transgressive potential of the Pardoner’s non-normative gender performance: The Pardoner continues on the pilgrimage with them, with the immediate threat of his queerness diffused by that careful kiss of peace. But if that queerness is silenced in a reimposition of heterosexual order, it is nonetheless still around and, moreover, contagious: just as John/Elanor Rykener’s interrogation has suggested the indeterminacy of male and female, at least in certain acts, and has rendered dissenters, orthodox, and London authorities interchangeable when it comes to specific anticlerical social agendas, so has the Pardoner involved the Host in vividly engaging on the level of the body – ‘exactly what the Pardoner stands accused of.’ The Pardoner still walks by the side of the other pilgrims, still goes where they go; the ‘dilemma of reading that the Pardoner poses for the other 45

Lancelot, by contrast, responds in VI. 5 with instant lethality when he awakens next to Sir Belleus, mistakes the knight for a lady, and the two begin kissing each other until Lancelot realizes he is kissing someone with a beard: Than within an owre there com that knyght that ought the pavylyon. He wente that his lemman had layne in that bed, and so he leyde hym adowne by Sir Launcelot and toke hym in his armys and began to kysse hym. And whan Sir Launcelot felte a rough berde kyssyng hym he sterte oute of the bedde lightly, and the other knyght after hym. And eythir of hem gate theire swerdys in their hondis, and oute at the pavylyon dore wente the knyght of the pavylyon, and Sir Launcelot folowed hym. And there by a lytyll slade Sir Launcelot wounded hym sore, nygh unto the deth. (Then within an hour the knight that owned the pavilion arrived. He supposed that his lover had lain down in bed, so he lay himself down by Sir Lancelot and took him in his arms and began to kiss him. And when Sir Lancelot felt a rough beard kissing him, he jumped out of the bed nimbly, and the other knight after him. And they both got their swords in their hands, and out the door of the pavilion went the knight of the pavilion, and Sir Lancelot followed him. And there by a little creek Sir Lancelot wounded him severely, nigh unto death.)

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pilgrims is never solved,’ as Kruger argues, and the Pardoner’s very person remains an unwelcome but insistent reminder of normative heterosexual unnaturalness.46

Instead of reaffirming the benefits of knightly masculinity, Lancelot’s cruelty and the whole court’s performance of falling over laughing along with Guinevere takes on a new significance, reminiscent of the forced kiss-of-peace required by the Knight to mollify the Host and Pardoner’s quarrel. Dinadan, however, remains undaunted through the rest of his time in the narrative, a welcome and yet also insistent reminder of non-normative knightly queerness. William Burgwinkle calls this threatened category of manhood in French romance “hegemonic heroic masculinity,” which relies on the “systematic exclusion and denigration of the feminine… and enhanced competitiveness between males for power and prestige.”47 Instead of reasserting a sense of masculine control and feminine humiliation, Lancelot’s hazing exposes the underlying misogyny of the chivalric community as they seek to silence Dinadan by shaming him through gendered clothing and public humiliation. Indeed, it seems that Dinadan’s rebellious moderation remains constant within the tight constraints of knightly masculinity and the Pentecostal Oath, such that making fun of chivalric excess serves as one of the few means to confront it directly.

Conclusion: Rebellious Moderation and Compulsory Queerness This intentional gender-shaming for insufficiently masculine knighthood points to the larger problem of the Pentecostal Oath’s explicit separation of knightly behavior into masculine subject roles of fighter and protector, contrasted with feminine roles of protected and pursued objects. Molly Martin discusses how using this gender disparity against Dinadan might play into his japing about gender rather than eliminating it: While cross-dressing in this time period necessarily invites critical attention to masculine and feminine identities, it seems that as much as gender is at stake here, so is visibility. Dynadan’s refusal to participate in the court’s visual matrix hints at the possibility that gender might not need to be produced and reproduced before an audience, but this episode seems to quell suspicions raised by such hints.48 46

Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 136. 47 William Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 201. 48 Molly Martin, Vision and Gender in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 92.

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Martin sees Dinadan’s attempts at mocking the Pentecostal Oath’s requirements for knights and their ladies as ultimately withering in the “widespread laughter on the part of the audience” when Dinadan is paraded around in women’s clothing.49 However, Dinadan is not silenced; in fact, he takes the joke played at his expense right on the chin, reminding Lancelot and the court and us readers that Lancelot is so “false” that Dinadan cannot ever be certain of him again. As a result, Lancelot’s joke is not on one simple knight but on the “falseness” of knightly hypermasculinity in general, that it would be so fragile as to be destroyed simply by being forced to wear women’s clothing. Lancelot ironically recapitulates the very violence that traditional patriarchal masculinity encodes – Lancelot has to denigrate femininity to alleviate the risk that Dinadan’s moderation poses to the excessively violent and heteronormative ethic that the Pentecostal Oath has inculcated. By placing key criticisms of traditional hypermasculine chivalry in Dinadan’s mouth while also allowing the Arthurian community the opportunity to laugh off his incisive japes, Malory subtly shifts the discourse of hypermasculine prowess by giving one of the lesser worthies of Arthur’s Round Table the chance to call the entire enterprise of prowess itself into question. Dinadan’s ability to critique lethally dangerous knights for their excessive, violent, and troubling behaviors looks to those knights like femininity, like an unwillingness to simply take the punishing environment of hypermasculinity “like a man,” to accept the chivalric ethic and its dominance hierarchy as is. As a result, the excessively violent knight Lancelot proves Dinadan’s point for him by marginalizing him, dressing him up in feminine garments to try and prove his power over the lesser knight’s words. In a text brimming with powerful men who destroy each other over excessively patriarchal hierarchies of male influence, Dinadan’s humorous and critical language is transformed into a warning of the social ills that will doom his fellow knights in the later sections of the Morte. Dinadan’s chiding refusal to toe the line of gendered social stratification and the punishment he receives as a result serve only to highlight his moderate alternative to the destructive hypermasculine hegemony that extends throughout the Morte Darthur and even into our own present day.

49

Ibid., 92–93.

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Virtus, Vertues, and Gender: Cultivating a Chivalric Habitus in Thomas Malory’s Tale of Sir Gareth

HOLLY A. CROCKER

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lthough Caxton’s “Preface” has long provided insights into Malory’s Morte, it is also a masterful ethical dodge: by attributing motivation for this sprawling imprint to “many noble and dyvers gentylmen” (“many noble and diverse gentlemen”), Caxton avoids responsibility for the ideals circulating within the vast domain of Arthur’s court.1 This association, though, is also an impressive moral pitch: by suggesting his hand was moved by elite audiences, Caxton elevates the violence of Arthur’s knights, rendering what might otherwise be a petty conflict between powerful men into a tragic struggle over chivalric values. Those “sayd noble jentylmen” (“said noble gentlemen”) take themselves to be the historical inheritors of Arthurian ethics, even if, as Caxton enigmatically muses, “dyvers men holde oppynyon that there was no suche Arthur” (“said noble gentlemen… diverse men hold opinion that there was no such Arthur,” p. cxliv). As scholars generally agree, Malory establishes a powerful fiction of chivalric identity, one that relies on individual and collective excellence, as well as horizontal and vertical bonds between knights.2 This form of masculinity, as the genealogy of worthies provided 1



William Caxton, “Caxton’s Preface,” in Sir Thomas Malory, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugene Vinaver, rev. P. J. C. Field, third edn, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), cxliii. All citations of Malory, hereafter cited parenthetically, are to this edition. See S. Carole Weinberg, whose article, “Caxton, Anthony Woodville, and the Prologue to the Morte Darthur,” Studies in Philology 102.1 (2005), 45–65 is to my knowledge the only scholarly consideration of Caxton’s productions of Malory and the Book of the Knight of the Tower in relation to one another; her work focuses on patronage, but it is crucial to my argument that Malory seeks to construct an ethical habitus that instills different ideals of virtue for men and women through his Tale of Gareth. 2 Richard Barber, “Chivalry and the Morte Darthur,” in A Companion to Malory, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), 19–35; Joanna Bellis and Megan G. Leitch, “Chivalric Literature,” in Companion to Chivalry,

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by Caxton’s preface affirms, at least purports to inherit an earlier model of heroic excellence, or virtus. And while Malory develops this ideal using decidedly medieval concepts – most notably chivalry – Caxton’s preface is here again telling, for he iterates the excellences that might accrue by reading his expensive production: “For herein may be seen noble chyvalry, cortosye, humanyté, friendlynesse, hardynesse, love, friendshyp, cowardyse, murdre, hate, vertue, and synne” (cxlvi) (“For herein can be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin”). In doing so, he makes only passing reference to classical or Christian ideals; the very term “vertue” is bundled together with a host of other qualities, then mobilized to offer a prescriptive parting address to prospective audiences: “But al is wryton for our doctryne, and for to beware that we falle not to vyce ne synne, but t’exersyse and folowe vertue…” (cxlvi) (“But all is written for our doctrine, and in order to warn us so that we do not falle into vice nor sin, but rather to exercise and follow virtue”). Given the established relationship between virtue and courtesy, Caxton’s emphasis on “humanyté, gentylnesse, and chyvalryes” (cxlvi) (“humanity, gentleness, and chivalries”) delineates a broader system of virtue ethics emanating from Arthur’s Round Table).3 Yet elsewhere Caxton is much more invested in an explicit rhetoric of virtue. Notable for my purposes, in the preface to the Book of the Knight of the Tower, Caxton repeatedly promises that his conduct book for women contains “Alle virtuous doctrine & techynge” (“all virtuous doctrine and teaching”).4 Once again, he claims this work was translated and printed to satisfy a patron, “by the request & desire of a noble lady which hath brouȝt forth many noble & fayr douȝters which ben virtuously nourished & lerned” (“at the request and desire of a noble lady who had brought forth many noble





ed. Robert W. Jones and Peter Coss (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2019), 241–62; Kenneth Hodges, Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Beverly Kennedy, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur. second edn (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992). 3 Also see, Jonathan Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy: Medieval Courtesy Books and the Gawain Poet (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), who makes an important argument that courtesy was a way of combining spiritual and social forms of virtue in the late Middle Ages. Misty Schieberle, “Gower’s Aristotelian Legacy: Reading Responsibility in the Confessio Amantis and Litel Bibell of Knyghthod,” in Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Literature and Culture: Essays on Language, Difference, and Reading Practices, ed. Kara McShane and Valerie Johnson (New York and Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), establishes a link between Aristotelian ethics, Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea, and mid-fifteenth-century translations of her chivalric guide. 4 William Caxton, “Preface,” in Book of the Knight of the Tower, ed. M. Y. Offord, Early English Text Society [hereafter, EETS], supplementary series 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 3.

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and fair daughters who had been virtuously nurtured and educated”).5 Yet the difference between what an elite woman might gather from The Book of the Knight of the Tower and what a powerful man might glean from Malory’s Morte is significant. Whereas Malory’s text features narratives that distill and promote lauded qualities, the Knight of the Tower’s stories impart instructions about how to enact very explicitly defined behaviors, “by which al yong gentyl wymen specially may lerne to bihaue them self vertuously” (“by which all young gentlewomen especially may learn to behave themselves virtuously”).6 We might suppose this difference is due to genre, given that readers are meant to take very different things from heroic romance versus a conduct book. Yet the boundary between these literatures is not distinct, since in his Book of the Order of Chivalry (1484), Caxton recommends “the noble volumes of saynt graal of lancelot, of galaad, of Trystram, of perse forest, of percyual, of gawayn, & many mo” (“the noble volumes of the Sangreal, of Lancelot, of Galahad, of Tristan, of Perceforest, of Percival, of Gawain, and many more”).7 Stories of Arthur’s knights are meant to instill specific excellences; reading in this context, according to Caxton, is part of an ethical process. As the preface from the Book of the Knight of the Tower demonstrates, and as the rest of this essay shall argue, this ethical habituation is carefully gendered, and ultimately a disaster for the Arthurian community. As feminist scholars have recognized, Malory’s Morte insists that men and women have different virtues.8 The Tale of Gareth, more explicitly than any other episode, seeks to install two forms of virtue, a heroic model for men, and what Kristin Bovaird-Abbo has identified as a 5

Ibid., 3. Ibid., 3. 7 William Caxton, “Epilogue,” in Ramon Llull, Book of the Ordre of Chiualry (1484), trans. William Caxton, ed. A. T. P. Byles, EETS, original series 168 (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 122. 8 Geraldine Heng, “Enchanted Ground: The Feminine Subtext in Malory,” in Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990), 283–300: 283–5, argues women occupy a supportive, subsidiary position; Janet Jesmok, “Guiding Lights: Feminine Judgment and Wisdom in Malory’s Morte Darthur,” Arthuriana 19.3 (2009): 34–42, suggests Malory’s women judge masculine achievements, and thereby attain an independent noble identity; more recently, Siobhán Mary Wyatt, Women of Words in Le Morte Darthur: The Autonomy of Speech in Malory’s Female Characters (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 1–2, argues that women’s powers are designed to augment knights’ development; and Amy S. Kaufman, “Malory and Gender,” in A New Companion to Malory, ed. Megan G. Leitch and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), 164–76, makes the revolutionary argument that Malory’s women might evince different forms of subjectivity. Building on these claims, I argue that the failure to admit the viability of women’s virtues as part an alternative form of ethical subjectivity prompts the failure of Arthur’s Round Table community.

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“helpmeet” model for women.9 Indeed, much of Malory’s most original tale is concerned to demonstrate how such virtues are engendered. In other words, it details the process by which knights become virtuous, and the conditions through which women become supports for an ethical life that is avowedly masculinist in perspective. Through Gareth’s many adventures, Malory seeks to establish a chivalric ethical habitus, a set of bodily, affective, and spiritual alignments that join members of this Arthurian community. By the end of Gareth, the hero is established in part through his marriage to a beautiful heiress, Lyones, whose life and lands are included among her husband’s many heroic endowments. The group wedding at the narrative’s conclusion, moreover, sees Lynet, the maiden whose interventions compose and protect Gareth’s chivalric virtues across the narrative, married to Gaheris in a fashion that enacts as much as suggests her ethical containment.10 Yet this episode’s controlled structure belies a broader crisis, for as Gareth’s exploits affirm, it is impossible to construct a heroic model of virtus without a concomitant recognition of women’s independent ethical powers, including the ways they mobilize mercy, forbearance, and even love within the chivalric community. Ultimately, the effort to diminish women’s ethical capacities renders the project of forming a chivalric habitus a failure, not just for Gareth, but for the entire Arthurian community.

Chivalric Virtus, and the Crisis of Habit in The Tale of Sir Gareth Malory’s Arthurian universe is meant to connect a particular model of masculinity with a distinct ethical ideal. But heroic stories do not produce knightly virtus in any seamless or uncomplicated fashion.11 That is 9

Kristin Bovaird-Abbo, “Tough Talk or Tough Love: Lynet and the Construction of Feminine Identity in Thomas Malory’s ‘Tale of Sir Gareth,’” Arthuriana 24 (2014), 126–57, uses the term “helpmeet” to describe Lynet. Also see Heng, “Enchanted Ground,” passim, who argues for women’s supporting role in Malory, with particular emphasis on Nyneve and Morgan le Fay. Dorsey Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003), 36, emphasizes that women are needed for chivalry, but argues the feminine must remain subjugated for heroic masculinity to flourish. My analysis is influenced by all these characterizations, though I am concerned to show how the tale trains women – socially as well as affectively – to take up a position that guarantees men’s ethical centrality. 10 Bovaird-Abbo, “Tough Talk or Tough Love,” 142–44: 146. 11 This happens in part via exemplarity, which, as Elizabeth Allen, False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2005), and Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) have detailed, was a vital component of late medieval vernacular literatures in England. For arguments that associate Malory with this larger creative movement, see Weinberg,

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because, by almost any standard, virtue requires action. Aristotle made the link between virtue and action central when he claimed “Moral or ethical virtue is the product of habit.… We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”12 In ancient accounts, accordingly, the process of cultivating virtue relies on models of action associated with heroic masculinity.13 And, while Katharine Breen has studied how late medieval monastic communities developed a clerical ethical habitus, her work also provides a relevant history of the translation of Aristotle into the vernacular, and its reception in secular, elite circles. As she explains, Nicolas Oresme’s Le livre d’ethiques d’Aristote furnished a “clerical habitus of virtue [for] elite laymen’’ by teaching them “a new way of reading.”14 This model of self-translation required readers to assume the virtues they read about, and was certainly current in the chivalric literary climate associated with the composition, production, and circulation of Malory’s Morte. Not only does Malory evince fluency with a number of chivalric manuals, but Edward IV’s 1473 decree specifying the education of the Prince of Wales also indicate that he was to read “noble storyes as behoveth to a prynce to understand” (“noble stories, as it behooves a prince to understand”).15 Emerging around the same time as Malory’s Morte, this model of ethical cultivation encouraged readers to imagine virtues as they might be enacted in elite everyday life. As Malory’s Arthurian narrative demonstrates in a way that mirrors its social context, cultivating chivalric virtus in a domain of warring factions is nearly impossible. Yet, as I shall detail, it is the fundamental ethical division produced by gender, not war, that ultimately causes the failure of Arthurian ethics in Malory. Although there is critical consensus that Malory unites his cited above, and also J. S. Goodman, “Malory and Caxton’s Chivalric Series, 1481– 85,” in Studies in Malory, ed. James W. Spisak (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1985), 257–74, and Felicity Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 30–139, who trace the association of Arthurian literatures with exemplary narratives used for educational purposes. 12 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), Book II.1, 70–3. 13 See Holly Crocker, The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 6–12, for a discussion of virtue ethics and women’s foreclosure from this formulation of ethics from the ancient to the medieval period. 14 Katharine Breen, “Discipline and Doctrine: Inculcating Moral Habits in Le livre de éthiques d’Aristote,” New Medieval Literatures 12 (2010), 209–50: 213. 15 Qtd in Nicholas Orme, “The Education of Edward V,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 57, 136 (1984), 119–230: 217. See Weinburg, “Caxton, Anthony Woodville, and the Prologue to the Morte Darthur,” 49–52, for analysis of Anthony Woodville’s role in the education of the Black Prince, as well as his potential involvement in Caxton’s production of Malory.

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knights through a common set of behaviors meant to express a shared group of values, this code of conduct and its associated values ultimately disintegrates. That is because, as Breen argues more broadly, the cultivation of an ethical habitus for lay audiences precipitates a crisis in late medieval England.16 Without an elaborate system of moral training – that which might be said to be provided by religious rule for members of the clerisy – there is no way to guarantee that any behavior really amounts to virtue. Outward action, in other words, says nothing about inward condition. This rift between outward presentation and inward disposition is a persistent ethical challenge in Malory, whose knights frequently ride incognito, or borrow each other’s arms, across their many martial challenges. But as Caxton’s “Preface” indicates, the qualities these narratives extol might become part of a chivalric habitus cultivated by elite readers. Scholars from Beverly Kennedy to Karen Cherewatuk have established Malory’s fluency with and relevance to late fifteenth-century chivalric manuals.17 Even for the most noble audiences, moral conduct was not sufficient to establish an ethical habitus. Furthermore, reading about knights, or even acting in accordance with certain chivalric ideals, could neither construct nor verify a reader’s virtue. The Tale of Sir Gareth suggests the cultivation of knightly virtue is part of a long process, one that involves body, affect, mind, and spirit. As this essay details, Gareth’s long training shows the fraught process of achieving virtue, both for knights and for ladies. Felicity Riddy helpfully details the connections between Malory’s Morte and late medieval conduct literatures; elsewhere, her work affirms that non-elite women were also taught to behave in accordance with particular prescriptive ideals of gendered behavior in late medieval society.18 When Susan Crane suggests romances provided scripts for noble behavior, we should assume that these stories served this function for women as well as men.19 In Gareth it becomes clear that women must be trained to assume 16

Katharine Breen, Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 16–42. 17 Kennedy, Knighthood; Karen Cherewatuk, “‘Gentyl Audiences’ and ‘Grete Bookes’: Chivalric Manuals and the Morte Darthur,” Arthurian Literature 15 (1997), 205–16. In particular, Cherewatuk, “Sir Thomas Malory’s ‘Grete Booke,’” in The Social and Literary Contexts of Malory’s Morte Darthur, ed. D. Thomas Hanks, Jr and Jessica G. Brogdon (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 42–67, argues the entirety of Malory’s Morte is a chivalric guide, and identifies Gareth with the tradition of knightly ethics. 18 Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory, 30–139. Also see her “Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text,” Speculum 71 (1996), 66–86, for Riddy’s detailed analysis of women’s conduct literatures. 19 Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 177–82; also,

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a chivalric identity with very specific ethical contours; Malory’s ultimate refusal to cede authority to this identity, I maintain, is due to a gender bias that all but guarantees this community’s disintegration. Across Malory, women show their capacity for virtues – including explicitly gendered forms of excellence including pity and forgiveness – but when these are ignored or discarded, Gareth affirms, the masculine virtus privileged by chivalric literatures is also diminished and destroyed. Although Gareth’s virtue is not fully perfected, he is well on his way to a chivalric habitus when he arrives at Arthur’s court. His approach to Arthur, “he fared as he myght nat go nothir bere hymself but yf he lened uppon their shuldyrs” (I(VII).293.32-3) (“he appeared as if he might not walk, nor bear his own weight, unless he leaned upon their shoulders”), is clearly a feint designed to amplify his stature, for when he stands, his height, his beauty, and his bearing impress the entire court. Yet his mistaken request to Arthur is not just a test of Round Table values. Rather, when he asks “that ye woll geff me mete and drynke suffyciauntly for this twelve-month” (I(VII).294.14–15) (“that you will provide me food and drink sufficient for this coming year”), it is the first acknowledgment that chivalric training takes place at a more fundamental, alimentary domain (the moniker Kay assigns – Beaumains [fair hands] – equally affirms that Gareth’s chivalric identity arises from the intersection of qualities that are bodily and aesthetic, spiritual and skilled). Kay faults his request, assuming Gareth must be “vylayn borne” (I(VII).294.36) (“villein born; low born”), but Kay’s faulty assessment reveals his own lack of virtue, as Gareth later remarks: “I know you well for an unjantyll knyght of the courte, and therefore beware of me!” (I(VII).298.14–15) (“I know you well as an ungentle [uncourteous] knight of the court, and therefore, I advise you to beware of me!”). As scholars have detailed, Gareth’s kitchen assignment is a belittling status insult, given that kitchen hands across romance are depicted as rough, brutish, and menacing.20 Melissa Raine’s crucial analysis of consumption in Gareth shows how food and feasting see Roberta Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Amy Vines, “Whoso wylle of nurtur lere’: Domestic Capabilities in the Middle English Emaré,” The Chaucer Review 53 (2018), 82–101, who show how romance was used for instruction in household miscellanies. 20 Helen Phillips, “Bewmaynes: The Threat from the Kitchen,” Arthurian Literature 28 (2011), 39–55; Sarah Gordon, “Kitchen Knights in Medieval French and English Narrative: Rainouart, Lancelot, Gareth,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 16 (2005), 189–212; and Faye J. Ringel, “Pluto’s Kitchen: The Initiation of Sir Gareth,” Arthurian Interpretations 1 (1987), 29–38, for analysis of the kitchen’s contribution to Gareth’s development.

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become part of a complex articulation of nobility.21 Gareth’s service in the kitchens, because it establishes his willing obedience to Arthur’s authority – even when it is unreasonable or ungentle – offers the first element of the chivalric habitus that Malory constructs through this tale. It also furnishes the first contrast between a knightly, heroic virtus and the ethical roles that women are supposed to adopt, or at least accept, in chivalric culture. When Lynet presents her petition, she does not receive her due, despite her conformity to prevailing Arthurian norms: she makes her request at the feast of Pentecost, and she frames her plea directly in accordance with the oath Malory uses to found Arthur’s court: “and allwayes to do ladyes, damesels, and jantilwomen and wydowes socour: strengthe hem in hir ryghtes, and never to enforce them, upon payne of dethe” (I(III).120.20–23) (“[they should] always give help to ladies, gentlewomen, damsels, and widows; endow them with strength in their rights/claims, and never use force against them, upon pain of death”).22 Arthur’s demand to know her identity – beyond her assurance that she speaks on behalf of her sister, “a lady of grete worshyp” (I(VII). 296.20) (“lady of great worship”) – is certainly a temporizing expansion upon, and arguably a violation of, the “ladies’ clause” of the oath that binds this community of heroic men.23 Lynet becomes angry, and protests her treatment: “‘Fy on the,’ seyde the damesell, ‘shall I have none but one that is your kychen knave?’” (I(VII).297.21–22) (“‘Fie on thee,’ said the damsel, ‘shall I have no [champion] except for one who is your kitchen servant?’”). Her indictment of Arthur’s community is in all points correct, but, as the remainder of the tale endeavors to demonstrate, it flouts the gendered standards of chivalric ethics instilled within this domain.

Lynet’s Anger and Women’s “Vertue” Lynet’s anger, her refusal to accept what Arthur proffers, violates the standard of humility that Gareth practices through his service in the kitchen. Her protest, moreover, indicates a sense of entitlement even the most privileged members of Arthur’s court must endeavor to obscure. When Gareth accepts his belittling appointment, in other words, he 21

Melissa Raine, “‘Full Knyghtly He Ete His Mete’: Consumption and Social Prowess in Malory’s Tale of Gareth,” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 43 (2012), 323–38. 22 Armstrong suggests this oath sets forth unifying principles, which are then tested in subsequent episodes. Gender and the Chivalric Community, 7. While I agree that these principles frame the chivalric community, I suggest the following tales seek to engender these values – they are by no means fully formed. 23 This terminology comes from Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, 20 et passim.

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internalizes his commitment to Arthur’s authority with a gesture of humility that is at once physical and social, affective and ethical. His deference stands in marked contrast to Kay’s presumption, but also to Lynet’s anger. She breaches more than decorum when she points out Arthur’s failure to provide her with a sufficient champion; her complaint indicates her own deficiency within the ethical arena that Arthur’s court represents. Despite the fact that she is wise, and turns out to be a powerful enchantress, the tale repeatedly marks her failure to understand Gareth’s emerging excellence. And while scholars have always – and quite rightly – viewed her as a means to cultivate Gareth’s chivalric virtus, Lynet takes her own ethical journey in this narrative.24 Along the way, the expectations that shape women’s role as supports for knightly excellence are carefully detailed. Even so, in working to make Lynet into a character who ensures Gareth’s ethical centrality, this narrative reveals the moral impoverishment of this masculinist domain. Lynet’s anger, like Gareth’s acceptance, makes visible the chivalric habitus that knits knights together in Arthur’s court.25 Every martial encounter involves a formal surrender, and the knights who pledge themselves to Gareth, over and again, affirm that gestures of humility solidify bonds between men who were trying to kill each other only seconds before. When he fights the red knight, Gareth clinches victory when his opponent cries “Mercy, noble knight, sle me nat” (I(VII).310.1) (“Mercy, noble knight, do not slay me”). As these repetitive scenes of surrender affirm, humility is not just a spiritual value, nor is it simply a social performance: it combines the two in an affective recalibration of emotion as well as disposition, action as well as outlook. The men who surrender become allies instead of enemies, because their anger is transformed into loyalty through their formal vows of humility. After his defeat, the green knight exclaims, “Fayre knyght’… ‘save my lyfe and I woll forgyff the the deth of my brothir, and for ever to becom thy man, and thirty knyghtes that hold of me for ever shall do you servyse” (I(VII).306.22–25) (“Fair knight… save my life and I will forgive the death of my brother, and forever become your man, and thirty knights who are beholden to me shall forever be in your service”).26 For a wronged 24

See Kristen Bovaird-Abbo and Miriam Rheingold Fuller, “Method in Her Malice: A Reconsideration of Lynet in Malory’s Tale of Sir Gareth,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 25 (2000), 253–67, who view Lynet’s attacks in positive terms. 25 Molly Martin, Vision and Gender in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 27–49 offers an invaluable account of the connections between visual display and chivalric masculinity in Gareth. 26 Ryan Naughton, “Peace, Justice, and Retinue-Building in Malory’s ‘The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney,’” Arthurian Literature 29 (2012), 143–60, argues this tale is

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woman such as Lynet, her anger is not so easy to dislodge. This is not, it is important to acknowledge, because Malory’s tale circulates medieval misogynist adages about women’s unreasonable anger.27 Instead, this episode presents Lynet’s anger as perfectly understandable in the context of this chivalric occasion. She does everything according to Arthur’s avowed code, yet she is denied satisfaction. What the tale goes on to affirm, however, is that Arthur elaborates the terms under which the chivalric code is enacted. And as Gareth’s story affirms, Arthur treats the appeals he receives differently: while he accepts Gareth’s refusal to identify himself, he requires Lynet to disclose her sister’s name. Arthur’s differential treatment reveals the ethical inconsistencies in this chivalric community, yet the king’s responses are neither spontaneous nor capricious. Rather, I submit, he enacts a systemic program – a chivalric habitus – that works to install different virtues in men and women. The misfire of Gareth’s request requires increased agency, or his ongoing cultivation of submission and self-control. By contrast, the failure of Lynet’s petition results from excess agency, or from her assured expectation that she meets the conditions required to petition Arthur successfully. Gareth’s ability to take up a humble stance comes from a position of confidence; Lynet’s failure to secure a champion arises from a gesture of overconfidence. By refusing to furnish specific details regarding her sister’s plight, Lynet refuses to be dependent enough on the chivalric community of knights whose aid she seeks. Arthur declines Lynet’s request because she lacks the chivalric habitus – a particular tuning of body and affect – specified for women who belong to this community. As other maidens demonstrate, Lynet needs to be vulnerable, and perhaps emotionally desperate, to warrant a champion’s service. As Dorsey Armstrong argues, “the cultural definition of femininity depicted within these texts [suggests that] ladies are helpless, needy, and rape-able…”28 As I argue, Lyones complicates this notion of feminine helplessness, but it takes little argument to demonstrate that a political exemplum that demonstrates how to gain allegiances – and to curb knightly unruliness – in a factional political domain. 27 See Siobhán Mary Wyatt, “‘Gyff me goodly langage, and than my care is paste’: Reproach and Recognition in Malory’s Tale of Sir Gareth,” Arthuriana 25 (2015), 129–42, who compares Lynet’s harsh words to medieval cases involving women’s scolding and argues that Malory’s Gareth shows the value of women’s sharp words for a knight’s development. In the “Death of Arthur,” Guinevere’s jealous wrath is an example of the sort of “unreasonable” anger that misogynist writers attributed to women. 28 Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, 20.

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Lynet does not present herself as needy when she invokes the elements of the Pentecostal oath. When she leaves Arthur’s court in disgust, she embarks on a quest to rid herself of Gareth’s service in a fashion that separates her from other maidens. If elite women in chivalric culture are defined by the demands they make of knights, then Lynet departs from this model because she seeks nothing from Gareth. Scholars are right, of course, that the tale uses her persistent scolding to train Gareth in knightly virtues;29 yet his reactions to her continuous criticism also work to fashion her according to the ethical disposition women were meant to assume in Arthurian culture.

Women’s Desires, Women’s Demands: Developing the Chivalric Habitus With her constant chiding, Lynet trains Gareth to develop patience, endurance, and loyalty. She tests his courage, belittling his ability in a way that spurs him to greater feats of prowess: “he was a lytyll ashamed of that stroke and of hir langage. And then he gaff hym suche a buffette uppon the helme that he felle on his kneis” (I(VII).306.6–8) (“He was a little ashamed by that blow and by her language. And so then he gave him such a buffet upon the helm that he [Gareth’s opponent] fell on his knees”). The story’s main focus, to be sure, is on the ways that Gareth develops manifold excellences as a result of repeated tests to his body and spirit. Through his different battles, Gareth meets progressively more difficult martial challenges, and he does so while maintaining a courteous regard for other knights. Perhaps his greatest challenge, as is widely recognized, is how to deal with Lynet’s relentless attacks. She issues a litany of complaints, from those as basic as his smell, to those as general as his appearance. She doubts his lineage, and tells his opponents he is not worth fighting: “this is but a kychyn knave that was fedde in kyng Arthurs kychyn for almys” (I(VII).303.14–15) (“this is only a kitchen servant who was fed in King Arthur’s kitchen for alms”). When he defeats 29

See Bonnie Wheeler, ‘“The Prowess of Hands’: The Psychology of Alchemy in Malory’s ‘Tale of Sir Gareth,”’ in Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend, ed. Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 180–95. Also see Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, 117–20; Elizabeth Edwards, The Genesis of Narrative in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 48–49; Andrew Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms: The Narrative of Combat in Le Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 15; 64–65; and Barbara Nolan, “The Tale of Sir Gareth and The Tale of Sir Lancelot,” in A Companion to Malory, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 153–81: 158 and 160.

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opponents, she attributes his victory to happenstance: “unhappyly he hath done this day thorow myssehappe; for I saw hym sle two knyghtes at the passage of the watir” (I (VII).303.21–3) (“unhappily he has done [mighty deeds] on this day through mischance; for I saw him slay two knights in the passage through the water”). In a domain where moral luck is all but foreclosed, she suggests Gareth’s success in fighting neither reflects his character nor demonstrates his prowess: “Alas–… that ever such a knave sholde by myssehappe sle so good a knyght as thou hast done! But all is thyne unhappynesse” (I(VII).304.27–9) (“Alas… that ever such a lowborn rascal should by mischance kill so good a knight as you have done! But all [these deeds] will accrue to your unhappiness [and ruin]”). As an expression of her disdain, she even cheers Gareth’s opponents, urging the red knight to find strength against his unworthy opponent, “Lette never a kychyn knave endure the so longe as he doth!” (I (VII).309.30–31) (“Never allow a kitchen servant withstand you as long as he does!”). On account of her overwhelming desire to be rid of Gareth, Lynet rejects a champion whose displayed mettle could obviously provide the kind of martial assistance she seeks on her sister’s behalf. Lynet’s attacks are not limited to the battlefield; importantly, they also upend crucial distinctions of rank and foreclose valued gestures of deference in courtly feasting scenes.30 Because Lynet refuses to be seated with Gareth, those knights who seek to show courtesy and loyalty after their defeat must rearrange their tables: “And ever this damesell rebuked Bewmaynes and wolde nat suffir hym to sitte at hir table, but as the Grene Knyght toke hym and sate with hym at a syde table” (I(VII).307.13–15) (“And always this damsel rebuked Beaumains and would not allow him to sit at her table, so therefore the Green Knight sat with him at a side table”). Lynet violates customary social arrangements, it is worth noting, because she objects to Gareth’s associations with base service: “Away, kychyn knave, out of the wynde, for the smelle of thy bawdy clothis grevyth me!” (I (VII).304.26–27) (“Away, kitchen servant, do not stand upwind, for the smell of your lowly clothes annoys me!”). Other knights are shocked at her treatment, so much so they offer comments that seek to moderate her complaints. When the green knight tells her “ye do grette wronge so to rebuke hym, for he shall do you ryght goode servyce,” (I(VII).307.19–21) (“you do great wrong to rebuke him so, for he shall do you very good service”), he articulates the ethical habitus Lynet is urged to assume over the course of the tale. In other words, her harangues are not just challenges for Gareth: they found the need for her training, for 30

Raine, “Full Knyghtly He Ete His Mete,” 324–27.

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the implementation of an ethical program that refigures her behavior and her disposition. In seeking to transform Lynet from skeptical opponent to committed ally, this narrative demonstrates how women are meant to offer support in order to amplify and enhance a knight’s virtus. When Gareth finally takes up his own cause, it is not just commentary; it is a solicitation, even a command, for Lynet to behave differently towards, but also for her to feel differently about, his heroic stature: “‘Damesell,’ seyde Bewmayns, ‘ye ar uncourteyse so to rebuke me as ye do, for mesemyth I have done you good servyse’” (I(VII).310.34–36) (“‘Damsel,’ said Beaumains, ‘you are uncourteous to rebuke me as you do, for it seems to me that I have done you good service’”). Her admission, “for it may never be other but that ye be come of gentle blood” (I(VII).312.30–31) (“for it must be that you come from gentle blood”), affirms that Gareth’s repeated victories – paired with his continued courtesy in the face of her scorn – prompt her to reconsider her hostile attitude and distanced bearing toward her would-be champion. Enduring Lynet’s scathing dismissals establishes Gareth’s nobility, as she ultimately admits when she begins to advise him, “I mervayle what thou art and of what kyn thou arte com; for boldely thou spekyst, and boldely thou haste done, that have I sene” (I(VII).312.10–12) (“I marvel what you are, and from whose kin you come; for you speak boldly, and you have done bold deeds, as I have seen”).31 As he does so, notably, he also gains the power to reshape Lynet’s outlook and position; he shapes her chivalric habitus in a fashion that is similar to that by which she affects his ethical virtus. After withstanding Lynet’s attacks across multiple battles, he offers his own blunt assessment of her conduct: “ye ar to blame so to rebuke me, for I had lever do fyve batayles than so to be rebuked. Lat hym com, and than lat hym doo his worste” (I(VII).312.7–9) (“you are to blame to rebuke me so, for I had rather face five battles than to be rebuked in this way. Let him come, and then let him do his worst”). Rather than rejecting her, Gareth extends a program of retraining 31

Kate McClune, “‘The Vengeaunce of My Brethirne’: Blood Ties in Malory’s Morte Darthur,” Arthurian Literature 28 (2011), 89–106, traces the importance of blood relations across Malory. Kristin Bovaird-Abbo, “‘He Is Com of Full Noble Bloode’: The Brotherly Love of Gareth and Gawain in Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur,” Enarratio: Publications of the Medieval Association of the Midwest 17 (2010), 91–105, works through the significance of the blood relation between Gareth and Gawain. And Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community, observes the importance of Gareth’s blood relations to Arthur in the “fair unknown” plot. I would simply note that Gareth acknowledges and rejects Gawain’s predilection for violence and vengeance. His reaction to the influence of blood, in sum, is to work to overcome its potentially negative influence via the development of an ethical habitus.

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to Lynet, one in which he requires her to practice those virtues valued for women in chivalric culture. After each victory over an opponent, he compels Lynet to ask for the defeated knight’s life: “All this avaylyth nat… but if my damesell pray me to save thy lyff” (I(VII).310.6–7) (“All this avails you not at all… unless my damsel asks me to save your life”). With this intervention, Gareth forces Lynet to assume a different petitionary posture than she did with Arthur: by compelling her to practice mercy and pity, qualities extolled for women in medieval society more generally, Gareth incorporates her within this chivalric community. In asking Lynet to practice these virtues, moreover, Gareth structures her ethical habitus so that it supports, or perhaps even founds, his own: if he is to show mercy for an opponent, she must ask him to assume this virtue. She must generate his ethical bearing, even as she relies on him for her safety and protection. When Gareth outsources central elements of chivalric ethics to Lynet, he establishes the symbiotic relationship between knight and lady, which is the bond of courtly love so familiar from medieval romance, including Malory. Elsewhere this relationship is mobilized by a desperate attachment, an affective bond that is also evident in this narrative. Gareth remains committed to Lyones when she dispatches him despite the fact that “[he] had no reste, but walowed and wrythed for the love of the lady of that castell” (I(VII).327.33–34) (“he had no rest, but wallowed and writhed out of love for the lady of that castle”). This structure of desire is so prominent that psychoanalysis has characterized it as foundational, and it is certainly the case that Guinevere and Lancelot’s relationship is illuminated by this theorization.32 For my purposes, the most important factor is that the lady makes demands: her reliance, her dependency and vulnerability, is produced but is also structured by her ability to require her knight to perform in particular ways. For Jacques Lacan, these demands are capricious, frequently random; the lady’s absolute power forecloses her ethical life: “The Lady is never characterized for any of her real, concrete virtues, for her wisdom, her prudence, or even her competence.”33 In Slavoj Žižek’s formulation, the lady is “a kind of automaton, a machine which utters meaningless

32

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Masoch/Lancelotism,” in Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 78–115, provides an invaluable reading of the connection between desire and suffering in Chrétien de Troyes, but his argument is relevant to Malory’s treatment as well. 33 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 7, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1997), 149–50.

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demands at random.”34 Here the ethical dimension of the demand is absent, or evacuated, by the force galvanizing the lady’s command. Like the lady herself, these demands are empty, issued simply to demonstrate the knight’s commitment to the power they represent and mobilize. In Gareth such commands have heinous results. Lynet prepares Gareth for the danger that awaits him: “whan the Rede Knyght of the Rede Launde had overcom [these knights] he put them to this shamefull deth withoute mercy and pyte” (I(VII).320.7–9) (“when the Red Knight of the Red Lands had overcome [these knights] he put them to this shameful death without mercy or pity”). The tableau of horror is so shocking, however, that Gareth is brought to a state of incomprehension when he sees “how there hynge full goodly armed knyghtes by the necke, and their shyldis aboute their neckys with their swerdis, and gylte sporys uppon their helys” (I(VII).319.35–37) (“how there hung all about very well armed knights by their necks, and their shields were hung around their necks, and they were armed with their swords, and wore gilt spurs upon their heels”). Gareth searches for some explanation, “What menyth this?” (I(VII).320.3) (“What could this mean?”), because the ruthless slaughter of quality knights is completely at odds with the values of chivalric society: “he may be well a good knyght, but he usyth shamefull customys…” (I(VII).320.20–21) (“he may well be a good night, but he practices shameful customs”). As the men prepare to fight, Gareth lays stress on his opponent’s corruption and depravity: ‘Fy for shame!’… ‘and thou mayste be sure there woll no lady love the that knowyth the and thy wykked customs. And now thou wenyste that the syght of tho honged knyghtes shulde feare me? Nay, truly, not so! That shamefull syght cawsyth me to have courrage and hardynesse ayenst thee muche more than I wolde have agaynste the and thou were a well-ruled knyght’ (I(VII).322.13–21, emphasis added). (‘Fie, for shame!’… you should rest assured that no lady will love you who knows about you and your wicked customs. And do you believe that the sight of those hanged knights might frighten me? No, truly, it does not! That shameful sight prompts me to have courage and hardiness [to fight] against you much more strongly than I would have against you if you were a well-ruled knight’)

The terms of dissolution, however, affirm that the conduct of all knights in this domain are governed by an ethical habitus of heroic virtus. In particular, Gareth’s concern with custom shows a familiarity with late 34

Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), 90.

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medieval ethics, in so far as custom (consuetudo) was regarded as a form of comportment that in itself does not achieve virtue, but which might lead the practitioner to form an ethical habitus if the knight’s spiritual orientation aligns with his performed actions.35 A degraded custom, on the other hand, might separate its practitioner from the virtuous organization of the self that arises from an internalization of chivalric ethics. The rote adherence to custom – just for its own sake – can become vicious.36 Because the Rede Knyght of the Rede Launde maintains a wicked, shameful custom, he fails to assume a chivalric habitus that aligns him with the Arthurian ethics forwarded by Malory’s narrative. Custom, whether virtuous or vicious, was central to the courtesy literatures Malory references throughout the tale of Gareth. In Caxton’s translation of the Book of the Order of Chivalry, the examiner of the squire must “enquire of his custommes and maners” (“ask about his customs and manners”).37 Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea is even more direct about the link between good conduct and spiritual outlook: “Therfore it is seide to the good knyghte that he schulde be like here, for lewde customes and lesinges be gretli to blame in a knyghte, for he schulde serve God and wurschip the temple, that is to seye, the chirche and the mynystres therof” (“Therefore, the good knight should follow this example, for lewd customs and lying is greatly to blame in a knight, since he should serve God and worship at the temple, that is to say, the Church and the ministers thereof”).38 In the fight to save Lyones, it becomes clear that a degraded custom might further the cultivation of an ethical habitus in a knight who seeks to achieve virtue. Gareth’s reaction against the wicked custom of the Rede Knyght of the Rede Launde, he announces, enables him to evince courage and practice fortitude. His judgment against his opponent, moreover, affirms that Gareth is a “well-ruled knight” who lives according to Arthurian ethical norms. Yet Gareth does not achieve these virtues wholly on his own; instead, Lynet’s request, paired with Lyones’s beauty, provide an important moral impetus for his actions. 35

See Breen, Imagining, 45–48, for this aspect of medieval ethics. The emphasis on practicing virtuous custom runs through fifteenth-century chivalric manuals, as I note below. 36 Modern moral philosopher Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 8–10; 52–54, argues that virtue is more than the rote performance of prescribed actions. This theme of spiritual and physical alignment – of practicing actions that cultivate virtues – is also present in chivalric literatures. 37 Llull, chapter 4, 60. 38 Christine de Pizan’s Advice for Princes in Middle English Translation: Stephen Scrope’s The Epistle of Othea and the Anonymous Litel Bibell of Knighthod, ed. Misty Schieberle (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 2020), chapter 32, lines 9–11.

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When a lady makes a vicious request, or commands her knight to perform in a way that undermines a chivalric habitus, it devastates the virtus of the entire chivalric community. After Gareth defeats the Rede Knyght of the Rede Launde, he comes to understand the grisly vigil kept by his opponent. Although the Rede Knyght yields, and asks for mercy in formal terms, Gareth prepares to kill him, “for the shamefull de[the]s that thou haste caused” (I(VII).324.29–30) (“for the shameful deaths that you have caused”). Yet when his defeated enemy tells him the story of the lady he loved, and her impossible, vengeful command, “she prayed me as I loved her hertely that I wolde make hir a promyse by the faythe of my knyghthode… all that I myght overcom, I sholde put them to vylans deth” (I(VII).325.4–5, 6) (“she asked me that if I loved her with all my heart that I would make her a promise by my faith in my knighthood… all those I might overcome, I should put them to a villainous death”), Gareth not only accepts this explanation, but declares to all “insomuche as that he dud was at a ladyes requeste I blame hym the lesse” (I(VII).325.24–25) (“because what he did was at a lady’s request, I blame him less”). In forcing the Rede Knyght to ask forgiveness from Lyones, Gareth affirms that particular virtues – mercy, pity, forgiveness – derive from women. Such an assignment is perfectly in keeping with courtesy literature, for as the Knight of the Tower makes clear, exercising such qualities is an imitation of the Virgin Mary.39 He and his wife differ, however, on the question of whether a woman should show pity to a would-be lover. While the Knight insists “the louer is the better therefore… and also the more encouraged to exercise hym self more ofte in armes” (“the lover is better therefore… and also more inspired to exercise himself more often in combat”), his wife warns, “they done it only for to enhaunce them self / and for to drawe vnto them the grace and vayne glorye of the world” (“they do it only to enhance themselves, and in order to draw unto themselves the grace and the vain glory of the world”).40 This exchange affirms that chivalric ethics promote men’s achievements, but it also recognizes women’s potential skepticism over such performances of knightly virtue. Even so, Gareth never doubts that Lyones will forgive the enemy who kept her imprisoned; because she is a lady who internalizes the virtues assigned to women in chivalric culture, her clemency hardly bears mention. In similar fashion, Lynet shows her adherence to a chivalric habitus: she takes up her role as healer because her adventures with 39 40

Book of the Knight, chapter C vij, chapter Cix, 145–47. 715 Book of the Knight, chapter C xxij, lines 30–31 (163); chapter C xxiij, lines 21–22.

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Gareth offer a repetitive form of instruction, a type of training that casts a lady in a supporting role for a knight’s heroic centrality. By repeatedly witnessing Gareth’s excellence, Lynet learns to make demands – she attaches her desire to his exploits – in a way that gives his martial deeds ethical as well as social significance. As they near the end of their journey together, she recognizes his nobility, both in terms of rank and spirit: “for so fowle and shamfully dud never woman revyle a knyght as I have done you, and ever curteysly ye have suffyrde me, and that com never but of jantyll bloode” (I(VII).312.31–34) (“for no woman has ever so harshly and shamefully reviled a knight as I have done to you, and always you courteously suffered my words, and that kind of conduct could never come from anything but gentle blood”). When she asks Gareth to forgive her for her preceding abuses, “forgyff me all that I have mysseseyde or done ayenste you” (I(VII).313.13–14) (“forgive me for all that I have mis-said or done against you”), she commits herself to him in a way that subsumes her ethical bearing within his. Her mercy, pity, and forgiveness, as well as her wisdom, prudence, and chastity, are mobilized on Gareth’s behalf. And while Lynet’s dedication to Gareth affirms that women’s ethical service towards heroic men need not be sexual, her work throughout the remainder of the tale is important to cultivating Gareth’s erotic life in an ethical fashion. Before they reach Lyones, Lynet must be taught to direct her desire according to a chivalric habitus; after Gareth falls in love with Lyones, he must be taught to do the same. It is not that Gareth is completely unprepared to dedicate himself in erotic service to a lady. He is unlike Chrétien’s Perceval, whose inexperience causes him to steal a maiden’s kisses and ring.41 Because he knows how knights are meant to conduct themselves with maidens, Gareth views the offering of Sir Persant of Inde, who sends his virgin daughter to Gareth’s bed, as a threat to his chivalric virtue: “I were a shamefull knyght and I wolde do youre fadir ony dysworshyp” (I(VII).315.15–16) (“I would be a shameful knight if I would do your father any dishonor”). Like Lynet, who shows her facility with courtly customs when she presents her petition to Arthur at the feast of Pentecost, Gareth demonstrates his familiarity with the knightly deference he is expected to show towards ladies in sexual situations. Nonetheless, when Lyones abruptly sends him away, instructing him “go and laboure in worshyp 41

Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval: The Story of the Grail, Arthurian Romances, ed. and trans. D. D. R. Owen (New York: Everyman, 1987), 381, 383. Quite famously, Perceval’s mother tells him to “serve ladies,” and avers that having kisses from them is a great achievement. Following this advice, the first maiden he meets, Perceval takes seven kisses and the maiden’s ring by force.

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this twelvemonthe” (I(VII).327.9–10) (“go and labor in honor for the next twelve months”), he is surprised and dismayed. Gareth accepts her command even as he issues a protest: “I have nat deserved that ye sholde shew me this straungenesse. And I hadde wente I sholde have had ryght good chere with you, and unto my power I have deserved thanke. And well I am sure I have bought your love with parte of the beste bloode within my body” (I(VII).327.12–15) (“I do not deserve this distance that you show to me. I would have thought I should have had welcoming cheer from you, and that given my deeds I might have deserved your thanks. And I’m very sure I have earned your love with part of the best blood within my body”). Lyones reassures him, telling him that “I consyder your grete laboure and your hardynesse, youre bounte and your goodnesse…” (I(VII).327.21–22) (“I recognize your great deeds, your hardiness, your bounty, and your goodness…”), but she also suggests the nascent virtues she observes are in need of further cultivation. Just as Lynet must render a set of conduct prescriptions into an ethical code, so too must Gareth demonstrate that virtuous actions amount to more than simple custom. Despite the tale’s emphasis on repetitive action, there is an equal insistence that these lessons are more than rote adherence to social prescriptions. With her increasingly active participation in Gareth’s heroic achievements, Lynet internalizes the values of chivalric culture expected of ladies who work to support knightly virtue. In the same fashion, Gareth must practice elements of erotic devotion before he can achieve sexual union with Lyones. More than a simple avowal of chastity, then, Gareth develops a form of erotic commitment needed to sustain an affectionate bond between lovers. We are told that Gareth burns with desire for Lyones, and that similarly, “she lovyth you as well as ye do hir and bettir, yf bettir may be” (I(VII).332.9–10) (“she loves you as much as you do her, and more, if more were possible”). In a pair of comical episodes, Gareth and Lyones seek to go to bed, but both nights they are subsequently attacked by a knight who prevents them from achieving intimacy. Although he ultimately destroys both assailants, Gareth is wounded in the first attack, and his thigh begins to bleed so that he is once again incapacitated during the second fight. As it happens, this marvel is Lynet’s work, but when Gareth complains, she avers “all that I have done I woll avowe hit, and all shall be for your worshyp and us all” (I(VII).334.32–34) (“all that I have done I will avow it, and all shall be for your worship, and for all our honor”). In her new, supportive role, Lynet is clear that Gareth must learn how to dedicate himself to a chivalric habitus that includes erotic love.

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And he is not alone. Earlier Lyones defers her acceptance of Gareth “unto the tyme that thou be called one of the numbir of the worthy knyghtes” (I(VII).327.8–9) (“until that time when you are called one of the number of the worthiest knights”). But after she learns of his noble lineage, she wholly devotes her affections to him. Lynet endorses her sister’s commitment, for as she observes, “well may he be a kyngys son, for he hath many good tacchis: for he is curtyese and mylde, and the most sufferynge man that I ever mette withall. For I dare sey there was never jantyllwoman revyled man in so foule a maner as I have rebuked hym. And at all tymes he gaff me goodly and meke answers agayne” (I(VII).330.4–9) (“I well believe he is a king’s son, for he has many good traits: he is courteous and mild, and the most patient man I ever met. For I dare say that there was never a gentlewoman who so reviled a man in such a foul manner as I have rebuked him. And at all times he gave me good and meek answers in reply”). Even so, Lyones’s passion overcomes the boundaries that chivalric culture would set for an elite lady. As Lynet’s subsequent magical intervention affirms, Lyones is too quick to yield to her beloved. Or, at the very least, neither partner practices the vigilant discretion required to keep such a courtly attachment secret, as the tale goes to some effort to explain: This counceyle was nat so prevyly kepte but hit was undirstonde; for they were but yonge bothe, and tendir of ayge, and had nat used suche craufftis toforne. Wherefore the damesell Lyonett was a lytyll dysplesed; and she thought hir sister dame Lyonesse was a lytyll overhasty that she myght nat abyde hir tyme of her maryage, and for savyng of hir worshyp she thought to abate their hoote lustis. And she lete ordeyne by hir subtyl craufftes that they had nat theire intentys neythir with othir as in her delytes, untyll they were maryed. (I(VII).333.4–13) (This counsel was not so privately kept, but it soon became well known; for they were both young, and of tender age, and had not used such crafts before. As a consequence, the damsel Lynet was a little displeased; she thought her sister dame Lyones was a little too hasty, given that she was unable to wait until she was married; so, to save her reputation, she devised a plan to abate their hot lusts. And she worked through her subtle crafts so that they could not achieve their desired delights with each other until they were married.)

Karen Cherewatuk is doubtless correct to observe this tale’s emphasis on married love; building on her argument, I propose the reason for this investment has to do with the threat clandestine affection poses to a

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chivalric habitus differentiated by gender.42 After the assault of the first magical knight, Gareth is left wounded in the thigh and Lyones is left in a bloodied bed. By representing this encounter as sexually scandalous for both partners, this scene underscores just how hard it is to keep a physical tryst between lovers a secret. Even if Gareth beheads the interloper knight, or, even if he hacks the intruder knight’s head to pieces, the principals are physically marked by their sexual contact. Lyones must perfect a different aspect of the same virtue as her sister: if Lynet must learn to accept a knight’s service, her sister must learn not to accept too much of a knight’s devotion. The tale presents a woman’s desire, its ethical orientation towards a knight’s heroic achievement, as a fine, delicate performance of restraint. Lyones and Gareth are already pledged to one another, and so technically married by the standards of Malory’s day; nevertheless, because elite marriage was a public ethical attachment, the tale does not endorse their clandestine promise. Rather, the remainder of the tale is occupied with uniting them within the full view of Arthur’s court. And while marriage is meant to recognize the virtue of both partners, the remainder of the narrative reveals that Gareth’s heroic virtus remains its ethical priority. Even Morgause’s entry into the narrative affirms that a woman’s virtue should lead to a man’s public excellence. Gareth’s mother fetches herself to court looking for her son; as she tells Arthur, she sent Gareth to his uncle fully provisioned and richly armed. Arthur recalls that, once the unknown young man took on Lynet’s adventure, he was inexplicably provided with good horse and rich arms, “Than we demed all that he was com of men of worshyp” (I(VII).340.12–13) (“Then we all understood that he was derived from men of honor”). With palpable maternal exasperation, Morgause muses upon the conduct of her disguised son, “ever sytthen he was growyn he was [mervaylously wytted…” (I(VII).340.15–16) (“ever since he was a boy he was marvelously witted”). As Gareth’s brothers ready themselves to seek him, the narrative reorganizes itself as an effort to bring his knightly identity into full public recognition. And while his relations might marvel at Gareth’s willingness to obscure his lineage and his prowess, the tale chronicles how virtues are perfected, even in those whose merits are already evident. In sum, had Gareth identified himself when he came to Arthur’s court, he would have acceded to a stature befitting his lineage and upbringing. 42

Karen Cherewatuk, Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 1–23, argues that the Gareth episode endorses a form of married love that would appeal to gentry audiences of Malory’s day.

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He has all the marks of virtue, leading some scholars to treat this tale’s use of the “fair unknown” motif as a simple staging mechanism designed to emphasize his already-established excellences.43 Yet as I have sought to demonstrate, this narrative formulates a chivalric habitus that insists virtue amounts to more than either birthright or behavior. Its ethical contours require long, repetitive training, an alignment of body and spirit that indicates a broader Arthurian project.44 Despite comic moments, then, I maintain the tale of Gareth is perfectionist in its efforts to elevate its hero by his practice of a chivalric habitus that ultimately achieves the manifold virtues Arthur’s court declares for itself. Gareth’s excellence in arms and love is established by the time Gawain and Gaheris ride out to seek him. Furthermore, the tale is careful to delineate and institute the virtues women should assume in order to promote men’s heroic virtus in courtly culture. By the time Arthur sends for Lyones, she and her sister have internalized the chivalric excellences expected for women in the domains of love and arms.

Masculinist Ethics, Arthurian Ethics, and Women’s Vertues Yet as the conclusion of the narrative equally indicates, Arthurian ethics are just that: they must be united, mediated, and officiated by the king. For a knight to be virtuous in this landscape means Arthur must recognize his excellences. The host of knights who present themselves as subjects and allies to the knight who defeated them as Beaumains, along with the backstory that Morgause provides about her son’s true identity, provides a fitting entry for Gareth to assume the mantle of virtue his deeds have earned. And yet, as the court prepares for a grand tournament, Gareth remains unable to fight. He languishes because the wound he received from Lynet’s magical knights will not heal, since, as the leeches explain, “the stroke [was caused] by enchauntemente” (I(VII).336.7) (“the blow [was caused] by enchantment”). Only Lynet 43

For analysis of similar tales, see Robert H. Wilson, “The ‘Fair Unknown’ in Malory,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 58 (1943), 1–21; more recent interpretations of this motif include Dhira B. Mahoney, “Malory’s Tale of Gareth and the Comedy of Class,” in The Arthurian Yearbook I, ed. Keith Busby (Routledge: Garland, 1991), 165–93; and Katherine Gubbels, “The Fair (and Queer) Unknown in Malory’s ‘The Tale of Sir Gareth.’” Enarratio: Publications of the Medieval Association of the Midwest 20 (2016), 92–115. 44 The process I describe is akin to that traced by Bonnie Wheeler, “The Prowess of Hands: Alchemical Psychology in Malory’s Tale of Sir Gareth,” 180–95, who uses alchemy to think through Gareth’s transformations. Thanks to Melissa Ridley Elmes for this reference.

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can restore Gareth so that he will be ready for his public reintegration into Arthur’s court (I(VII).342.16–21). Her magic, as scholars have noted, allies Lynet with other sorceresses who present at threat to the Arthurian community, including Morgause and Morgan.45 She perhaps most closely resembles the Lady of the Lake, who uses her powerful magic to protect and promote her husband, Pelleas. Yet as Kristin Bovaird-Abbo has also observed, Lynet’s marriage to Gaheris at the tale’s conclusion, along with her complete disappearance from the narrative, enacts her erasure from this chivalric world.46 Given that Lyones also aligns herself with enchantment – she gives Gareth a ring endowed with virtues that enhance its wearer – it is worth pausing to think about how this narrative ultimately presents women’s excellences in the Arthurian community.47 If men’s virtues must become public, then women’s excellences must take on a deliberate obscurity to count as ethical in Arthur’s court. Women’s chivalric habitus includes hiding their power, as Lyones almost nonchalantly admits when she explains the function of the ring to Gareth: “for that rynge encresyth my beawte muche more than hit is of myself” (I(VII).345.16–17) (“for that ring increases my beauty much more than that which is natural”).48 More than a cosmetic augmentation, she goes on to say “who that beryth this rynge shall lose no bloode” (I(VII).345.23) (“the person who wears this ring will lose no blood”). The ring performs as promised, changing Gareth’s appearance so that he rides unknown yet protected among the other knights at the tournament. Once his prowess is established, however, Gareth gives the ring to his dwarf, who “was glad the rynge was frome hym, for than he wyste well he sholde be knowyn” (I(VII).350.32–34) (“was glad he no longer wore the ring, for then he believed it was time for Gareth to be recognized”).49 It is not just that a knight’s virtues must be public; it is that these qualities must become public at the appropriate time, when these excellences can fully be appreciated. By contrast, Lynet keeps her powers of healing and enchantment almost completely hidden, though it is clear that she 45

Heng, “Enchanted Ground.” Also see Dorsey Armstrong, “Malory’s Morgause,” in On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst (Dallas, TX: Scriptorium Press, 2001), 149–60. 46 Bovaird-Abbo, “Tough Talk or Tough Love,” 128–29. 47 Heng, “Enchanted Ground,” 289–94, sees magic as one of the key ways women express their otherwise uncharted power. 48 Wheeler, “‘The Prowess of Hands’; and Kenneth J. Tiller, “The Rise of Sir Gareth and the Hermeneutics of Heraldry,” Arthuriana 17 (2007), 74–91, offer different elemental approaches to Gareth’s changing colors on the battlefield. 49 Emily Rebekah Huber, “‘Delyver Me My Dwarff!’: Gareth’s Dwarf and Chivalric Identity,” Arthuriana 16 (2006), 49–53, tracks the dwarf’s “feminized” role as a passive object that Gareth can use to enhance his own masculine stature.

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keeps vigil over Gareth, for when he fights Gawain, she rides from the forest “and there she cryed all on hygh, ‘Sir Gawayne! leve thy fyghtynge with thy brother, Sir Gareth!’” (I(VII).357.8–9) (“and then she cried out suddenly, ‘Sir Gawain! Leave off fighting with your brother, Sir Gareth!”’). She understands this combat in ways the knights cannot, and she restores both men to health and affection. Staging is also important to women’s virtues, but as Lyonet takes up her supporting role, it is clear that these powers should only rarely gain public recognition. Indeed, because virtues are powers in the late medieval imagination, women’s relation to ethical life in Arthur’s court remains fraught.50 Not only are women expected to use such powers to support knights’ heroic centrality, they are meant to obscure their contributions to the ethical excellences those knights achieve. If Gareth is Malory’s most successful construction of this ethical structure, it is also its most problematic. Despite the blissful closure this tale provides with its group wedding, the subsequent deaths of Gareth and Gaheris demonstrate the ultimate disaster that results from this distribution of gendered virtue. And while the broader structure of Malory’s Morte might insist that largely disappearing from Arthur’s domain is a signal of domestic amity, the ethical rift that results in the pointless slaughter of Gareth and Gaheris is evident even in this tale’s celebration of Gareth’s wedding. In describing the fellowship that Gareth enjoys with Lancelot, who knighted Gareth as part of the latter’s request for three gifts, the story signals the division that will ultimately destroy the Round Table community: Lorde, the grete chere that Sir Launcelot made of sir Gareth and he of him! For there was no knyght that sir Gareth loved so well as he dud sir Launcelot; and ever for the moste part he wolde ever be in sir Lancelottis company. For evir aftir sir Gareth had aspyed sir Gawaynes conducions, he wythdrewe hymself fro his brother sir Gawaynes felyshyp, for he was evir vengeable, and where he hated he wolde be avenged with murther; and that hated sir Gareth. (I(VII).360.28–36) (Lord, the great cheer that Lancelot made of Sir Gareth and he of him! For there was no knight that Sir Gareth loved so well as he did Sir Lancelot; and always, for the most part, he would be in Sir Lancelot’s company.

50

Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “vertu(e)” 8a: “An inherent quality of a substance which gives it power.”

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And then as Sir Gareth came to understand Gawain’s character, he withdrew himself from his brother Sir Gawain’s fellowship, for Gawain was always vengeful, and against those he hated he would be avenged with murder; and Sir Gareth hated that conduct.)

Here the tale references the murder of Sir Lamorak by Gawain and his brothers (including Gaheris), a treachery Gareth later condemns in the tale of Sir Tristram. Yet this bit of foreshadowing also reveals the fundamental divide that will destroy Arthur’s fellowship, or the conflict between Lancelot and Gawain. Important for my purposes, this rift is presented as ethical, suggesting that virtue is as much about disposition as it is behavior. Later, Gawain’s “vengeable” character prevents Arthur from finding a truce with Lancelot. Moreover, it also demonstrates the public character of this masculinist model of virtus: because Gareth and Gaheris refuse to arm themselves against Lancelot, they are cut down because they are unrecognizable on the battlefield.51 Not only are their deaths senseless, but they also harden Gawain, who declares to a mournful Lancelot, “I woll never forgyff the my brothirs deth, and in especiall the deth of my brothir sir Gareth” (I(XX).696.30–31) (“I will never forgive you for my brothers’ death, and especially the death of my brother Sir Gareth”). Through this fatal division, the chivalric habitus established in Gareth comes undone. Clandestine murder and anonymous slaughter presage the filial rebellion that ultimately destroys Arthur. And yet, across the final movements of this narrative it is the public suppression of women’s virtues that does the most damage to this courtly community. Guinevere’s contributions to ethical life are increasingly met with suspicion; those knights who do not believe she is responsible for the poisoned apple act as if this is something she might have done, in so far as they refuse to take up her defense in the public arena.52 Most obviously, of course, her connection to Lancelot, which was treated as chaste devotion in earlier episodes, is characterized as shameful adultery. Gawain cautions Agravain not to make this affair 51

Kathleen Coyne Kelly, “Malory’s Body Chivalric,” Arthuriana 6 (1996), 52–71, notes that armor “both exaggerates and obscures the lineaments of the male body enclosed within it,” 54. 52 See Amy S. Kaufman, “Guenevere Burning,” Arthuriana 20 (2010), 76–94, for groundbreaking analysis of the skepticism with which Guenevere is treated in the final episodes of Malory’s Morte; Melissa Ridley Elmes, “Treason and the Feast in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur,” in Treason: Medieval and Early Modern Adultery, Betrayal, and Shame, ed. Larissa Tracy (Boston, MA and Leiden: Brill, 2019), 320–39, suggests the skepticism directed towards Guenevere in this episode is part of a larger concern with treason throughout the Morte.

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public; when he does, it uncovers the ultimate failure of the Arthurian ethics that has sustained this community. Vengeance, adultery, and rebellion result from a faulty ethical system. It is not just a violation of fidelity, however, or a refusal of mercy that undermines the chivalric habitus of Arthur’s court. Rather, it is the suppression of women’s virtues, particularly the failure to grant them public authority, that destroys the ethical virtus of this heroic community. As the final conflict affirms, constancy, pity, loyalty – and especially forbearance and forgiveness – are in short supply. The absence of these virtues derives from their association with women, and with women’s visible erasure from this narrative. In other words, Malory’s Morte constructs an ethical habitus that differentiates virtues by gender; it associates ideals including fidelity, pity, and forgiveness with women. When women’s virtues are sidelined, publicly condemned and formally contained, these qualities are no longer available to the knights who rely on them. The poem’s ethical logic needs women to furnish those powers that heal and sustain the men whose martial strengths distinguish this community. Yet this narrative’s insistence upon the deliberate obscurity of women’s contributions to ethical life means these qualities are ultimately hard to locate. When women’s ethical powers are publicly denied, when Guinevere’s hospitality is reframed as poisonous, and when her affection is represented as adulterous, the virtues she engendered are lost to the fellowship of the Round Table. This preoccupation with men’s ethical centrality is present throughout the Morte; yet in chronicling Gareth’s rise and fall, this faulty logic receives its most concise treatment. Gareth’s unseemly death results from the suppression of women’s virtues in the constitution of an ethical habitus. Although Gareth expresses loyalty to Lancelot, there is no Lynet to help or heal, and there is no Lyones to sustain or reward. The Tale of Gareth should, therefore, serve as a warning: the failure to acknowledge women’s virtues as a vital part of chivalric ethics results in the destruction of Arthur’s community. This essay closes, then, with a brief return to where it began: as Caxton seems to recognize, without deliberate attention to the cultivation of women’s ethical excellences, the virtues of Arthur’s court are not worthy of mention.

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Kingly Disguise and (Im)Perception in Three Fifteenth-Century English Romances

MIKAYLA HUNTER

D

isguise, in romance literature, is a paradoxical motif: a character’s behavior whilst in disguise often reveals more about his or her true nature than the behavior he exhibits openly. Kings in medieval romances are in a unique position because the strict pervasive ideology surrounding their political role shapes their public personas and actions. To be a good king is to place the interests of the realm ahead of one’s own desires. Thus it is through depicting kings in non-kingly disguise that authors are able to highlight their individual personalities and private desires – and the problems that can arise when a king’s public and private identities are discordant (though, of course, kings can and do adopt disguises for other reasons, such as personal safety). Moreover, an effective king must be shrewd and powerful, able to “prevent sedition amongst his magnates” as well as among “royal officials whose interests were pitted against the interests of the great landholders.”1 It was imperative to the safety and well-being of the realm that a king be impervious to flattery and not be duped by false friends. He needed to be able to see beyond the metaphorical masks that self-serving counselors, subjects, and seeming allies could present to him. However, while the ideology of kingship provided a model of ethical behavior for English kings that, in theory, should result in a peaceful and politically stable realm, in practice their subjects frequently found themselves faced with absent, incompetent, unpopular, or self 1

Giles of Rome, “De regimine principum,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. 350–1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 484–85; John Gillingham, The Angevin Empire (London: Oxford University Press, 2001), 68.

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serving leaders. Concerns about the king’s public and private behavior, his perspicacity, and his whereabouts were at stake for the people commissioning, writing, and consuming romances. Disguise narratives – both of the king incognito and of kings duped by disguised individuals – grappled with these concerns. The fifteenth century was a time of great political upheaval in England. The reign of Henry VI provoked anxieties that the king was heavily influenced by shrewd, dominating magnates who induced violent power struggles within his court.2 Moreover, the mental health issues and general incompetency of Henry VI and the late fourteenthcentury tyrannical grip of Richard II raised questions about what authority a bad king should wield and whether or not deposition was, in extreme circumstances, a moral action.3 Could egregiously unethical behavior nullify divine right? Should a king’s barons – that is, the laity – be permitted to determine whether the sacrament of kingship was null based on the monarch’s immorality or incompetence, and could a deposition be, in extreme circumstances, an ethical action for the greater good of the kingdom? During the deposition of Richard II and the reign of Henry IV, and through the tumultuous era of the Wars of the Roses, when succession disputes and greed for the crown threw the kingdom into civil war, debates about what constituted a legitimate and appropriate king affected the entire realm. King-in-disguise narratives produced in the fifteenth century played more to audience anxieties about the (un)ethical behavior and shrewdness of individual kings than, for example, the thirteenthcentury English king-in-disguise narratives like Havelok the Dane and King Horn, which focused on proof of majesty, and popular Scottish king-and-subject narratives such as Rauf Coilyear, which thematized the king’s omnipresence.4 This chapter looks at three mid- to late fifteenthcentury Middle English Arthurian romances which take very different approaches to the ethics of kingly disguise and kings’ ability – or more 2



John Gillingham, The Wars of the Roses: Peace and Conflict in Fifteenth-Century England (London: Phoenix Press, 1981), 59–63. 3 On Henry VI: Gillingham, Wars of the Roses, 59 and 75; on Richard II: The Making of England to 1399, ed. C. Warren Hollister, Robert C. Stacey, and Robin Chapman Stacey (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 352–57. See also Cory James Rushton, “The King’s Stupor: Dealing with Royal Paralysis in Late Medieval England,” in Madness in Medieval Law and Custom, ed. Wendy J. Turner (Boston, MA and Leiden: Brill, 2010), 147–76: 151–52. 4 Rachel Snell, “The Undercover King,” in Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, ed. Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows, and Morgan Dickson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 133–54: 135; Elizabeth Walsh, “The King in Disguise,” Folklore 86.1 (1975), 3–24.

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often, inability – to perceive disguise: the burlesque romance King Arthur and King Cornwall, the chivalric romance Le Morte Darthur, and the English Prose Merlin, a translation of the French Vulgate Estoire de Merlin. While the Estoire de Merlin was composed in the twelfth or thirteenth century, the translator of the Prose Merlin into English makes key edits to disguise motifs in the text.5 As with many aspects of their political and social roles, kings operate under a different ethos than knights when it comes to adopting disguises. Due to kings’ unique political roles, the circumstances under which a king may ethically attempt to deceive others – especially his social peers (other monarchs) and his subjects – are more restrictive than those circumstances and motivations which permit knights to fight and quest incognito or under false names and yet maintain, and even increase, their honor. And, when the tables are turned and kings are the target of disguises, themes of disguise-blindness indirectly play off of audience anxieties about the king falling prey to unscrupulous, deceitful individuals. Fears of the king, and, by extension, kingdom, toppling under the machinations of unethical individuals pervade narratives of disguise-blind kings, and these fears seem to be of particular interest to the translator of the Prose Merlin. More than this, the Prose Merlin also treats kingly perspicacity as a reflection of a king’s own ethical nature. Kingly shrewdness is a quality necessary to the stability and prosperity of a kingdom; to be a good king requires a certain level of suspicion in others, a belief that they may well act unethically. However, to readily suspect one’s subjects of deceitful behavior and to be able to quickly recognize a disguise plot suggests that a king is overly familiar with unethical practices himself; that when it comes to dishonest individuals, it takes one to know one.

Kings in Disguise John Gillingham rightly asserts that “the most important component of Angevin government was the king himself. His personal character still counted for more than any other single factor – as is obvious from the contrast between the reigns of Richard and John.”6 It is a truism that is applicable to every medieval English reign, not just those of the Angevin era. The philosophy of the king’s two bodies, discussed by Ernst 5



This chapter has been adapted from part of the author’s unpublished doctoral thesis. Mikayla Hunter, “Disguise, Transformation, and Revelation in Middle English Romances and Outlaw Ballads” (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 2019), 25–36; 40–47; 62–76. 6 Gillingham, Angevin Empire, 67.

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Kantorowicz, helped both to account and allow for incongruities between the king’s personal behavior and the political role he was expected to perform. The philosophy of the king’s two bodies, in brief, maintained that the king was viewed as possessing two consubstantial identities, or bodies: his body natural and body politic. The body natural refers to the king’s personal, individual self, which has desires, can make wrong choices, and which is fallible; the body politic refers to the king’s state position, “his royal Estate and Dignity” which persists after the death of his body natural and is assumed by the new king when he ascends the throne.7 The closer the desires and actions of a king’s personal self match the behavior required of his political self, the better ruler he is, the fewer wrong choices he is likely to make, and the more likely it is that the realm will prosper. The adoption of disguise is a method by which an author may most clearly show a king separating his personal identity from his political one, due to his position as a highly public figure. Disguise offers the king escape, an opportunity to pursue his own desires rather than remaining confined to the actions and motivations required of his political role. Paradoxically, it is through temporarily abandoning his official position that a good king demonstrates the qualities that make him a good king – or demonstrates that he lacks those qualities. Thus, it is through disguise that truth is revealed. It also affords the author the opportunity to show that the king embodies those qualities of ideal ethical rulership by continuing to exhibit them whilst in disguise or by his choosing only a temporary release and willing return to his political role and the confines of strictly honest and upright behavior. Or an author may undermine the king’s authority and the audience’s respect for him by proving that he does not in fact inherently adhere to a kingly ethos: that he is not a man apart, chosen by God, but rather no better than a common crook, ready and willing to deceive honest folk. With these possibilities in mind, I examine below the motif of kings assuming disguises in three romances, the burlesque King Arthur and King Cornwall, the chivalric Le Morte Darthur, and the English Prose Merlin, in light of medieval English philosophies concerned with kingship and social (dis)order. 7

Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), quotation used by Kantorowicz, 9, originally from Edmund Plowden, “A Report of the Opinions of divers of the Judges and others learned in the Law…,” in The commentaries, or reports of Edmund Plowden… (London: Catherine Lintot and Samuel Richardson, 1761), 213. Though critiqued by many for some of the methodology and its implication of a clear concept of a nation-state in the medieval era, with respect to depictions of kingly behavior in romance literature, Kantorowicz’s broad argument for a medieval concept of kings’ distinct yet consubstantial political and personal identities still holds true.

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Disguise in King Arthur and King Cornwall As a burlesque heroic romance, King Arthur and King Cornwall, on the surface at least, takes a light-hearted approach to the king-in-disguise motif. However, it also demonstrates great censure of the adventuring king, one who prefers partaking in actions befitting a knight to being bound by and responsibly performing the duties of his office. Drawing absolute conclusions about the author’s views of the acceptability of Arthur’s disguise adventure is somewhat difficult, due to the state of the manuscript. It survives in a unique, heavily damaged copy in the Percy Folio, though Thomas Hahn suggests a late fifteenth-century composition date.8 The seventeenth-century manuscript exists in fragments. However, enough of the romance remains that the content of the missing parts can be surmised. Arthur and Gawain, hearing that King Cornwall possesses “one of the fairest Round Tables/ that ever you see with your eye,” decide to take a few knights to infiltrate Cornwall’s castle “clad in palmers weede” (“clad in palmer’s clothing”) so that they may lay eyes upon the famed table.9 Cornwall, however, suspects their true identities, and in a game of cat-and-mouse, insults Arthur over dinner and brags of having an affair with Guinevere. The situation quickly escalates into a deadly fight in which Arthur and his knights kill King Cornwall and – presumably – escape back to Little Brittany with Cornwall’s magical treasures, his daughter, and his “sprite,” Burlow Beanie. While Arthur’s disguised expedition is ultimately successful, the air of frivolity the king and his knights assume clashes with the clear seriousness of the situation. The author uses disguise to show the king pursuing non-kingly pursuits, doing what he wants, not what he ought, to do. The actions he undertakes whilst in disguise are inappropriate to his kingly role and in fact threaten his reign and kingdom. He provokes and engages unnecessarily in military adventurism, risks his life when he has no heir, and comes back with a knowledge of Guinevere’s infidelity that anticipates the Arthurian corpus’s intertextual understanding of how his reign will eventually end. The author makes clear that the king’s place is in his kingdom, operating as a royal paterfamilias and not adventuring in foreign lands (in a way reminiscent of the Plantagenet kings and Henry V’s French campaigning). He does this firstly by providing verbal and physical evidence of Guinevere’s adultery. This is an act which other English Arthurian authors, by contrast, tend to shy away from discussing 8

“King Arthur and King Cornwall,” in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. Thomas Hahn (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 419–36: 420. 9 Ibid., lines 3–4, 28.

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explicitly, only alluding fleetingly to the sexual nature of her relationship with Lancelot or other knights. It is here first hinted at when Guinevere volunteers knowledge of Cornwall’s hall and possessions, challenging Arthur and Gawain by remarking “I know where a Round Table is, thou noble King,/ Is worth thy Round Table and other such three,” and then encouraging Arthur to leave the kingdom. Then her adulterous affair is revealed by King Cornwall, who boasts to Arthur of a seven-yearlong affair with the queen.10 Arthur’s cuckolding is finally verified by the appearance of Cornwall and Guinevere’s daughter, whose existence counterpoints Arthur’s own heirless state.11 While, by contrast, Edward’s disguised excursion in the Gest of Robyn Hode, another fifteenth-century comedic narrative, proves and indeed temporarily strengthens the questionable loyalty of his subjects, here Arthur’s excursion reveals treason within his own household, knowledge that perhaps he and the kingdom were better off without.12 Contemporary audiences would have been aware of the end of the Arthurian legend, that Arthur will be required to act on the publicized affair of Guinevere and Lancelot and the subsequent battles. The author uses the disguise narrative to comment on the danger of absenteeism, of a king too ready to leave his kingdom for adventure and not attentive enough to his affairs at home. Arthur’s decision to disguise himself and his knights as pilgrims and to travel to Cornwall’s land has a primary investigative purpose. Yet his venture into Cornwall retains a sense of festivity and holiday. Arthur assumes his disguise the moment he leaves his kingdom and the author does not mention him removing it throughout the duration of his adventures – he must remove it only when he returns to Little Britain to resume his duties of kingship. Moreover, Arthur’s expedition in this text is comically unnecessary. The motivation is to investigate the claim that someone else possesses the best Round Table. Hahn remarks that: Arthur’s founding of a Round Table in order to prevent squabbling among his knights about rank… is mentioned first in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History. Guenevere’s demur from Arthur’s claim to Gawain here is peculiarly ironic, since it initiates the plot of Cornwall by starting a squabble over the ranking of Round Tables themselves.13 10

Ibid., lines 7–8; 91–100. Ibid., line 93. 12 “A Gest of Robyn Hode,” in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994), 90– 168. See also Hunter, “Disguise, Transformation, and Revelation,” 36–40. 13 Hahn, “King Arthur and King Cornwall,” 422, note 3. 11

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The irony is no doubt intentional, humorously pointing out the irrelevancy and gratuitous nature of Arthur’s quest. Intertextually – and King Arthur and King Cornwall is no exception – Arthur is not uncritically portrayed as a great king, though Malory works hard to suppress that traditional aspect to his character. He is, more often than not, a do-nothing king (a roi fainéant, as Chrétien de Troyes so aptly illustrates in Le Chevalier de la Charrette when Arthur does little to prevent Meleagaunt kidnapping the queen). In King Arthur and King Cornwall, Arthur’s decision to go off on adventure is a marker of a broader state of affairs, of Arthur’s poor kingship and lack of masculinity and Cornwall’s abundance of both. He privileges adventures over his wife and fails to impregnate her. He brags to Gawain that he has “one of the fairest Round Tables/ That ever you see with your eye,” but his adventure itself is a search for a bigger round table than his own, which Cornwall is said to possess: a Freudian implication that Arthur’s manhood falls short of the mark.14 In parallel with the beginning of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Perlesvaus, even Arthur’s knights and queen grumble about the poor state of his court. In the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, Gaynor upbraids Arthur, telling him: “your court beginneth to spill/ Of doughty knightes all bydene;/ Sir, your honour beginnes to fall” (“your court begins to empty/ completely of valiant knights/ Sir, your honor begins to fall”), and counsels him to begin hosting tournaments to keep the knights engaged, for there is little to do at Arthur’s court.15 Similarly, in King Arthur and King Cornwall, Cornwall has the child that Arthur does not, and with Arthur’s queen, no less, when Arthur and Guinevere have no legitimate child of their own; in the sprite Burlow Beanie, Cornwall shows that his court holds marvels that Arthur’s cannot match. Even Cornwall’s horse can travel three times farther than Arthur’s, and there is a missing folio in which Cornwall boasts of more ways in which Arthur’s court falls short of his own.16 Furthermore, to ensure that Arthur’s deadly fight with Cornwall is understood as an unnecessary and avoidable danger, and is not excused by Cornwall’s affair with the queen or his insults to Arthur and his knights during the dinner, the author includes a key episode between Arthur’s departure from Little Brittany and his arrival in Cornwall that 14

Ibid., lines 3–4. “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” in King Arthur’s Death, ed. Larry D. Benson and Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994), 9–128, lines 23–25. 16 “King Arthur and King Cornwall,” lines 91–102; 105–16; missing folio between line 116 and line 117. 15

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is unfortunately badly damaged and missing a fragment. Arthur and his men, coming upon a battle between two parties, join in the fray despite not being (it appears from what remains of the manuscript) allied to or affiliated with either party. What remains to us of Arthur’s initial reaction when he first sees the battle – “‘Now, by my faith,’ saies noble King Arthur,/ ‘…well mett’” (“‘Now, by my faith,’ says noble King Arthur, ‘…well met’”) – indicates an eagerness to engage in any “battle new sett” (“battle newly started”) that promises martial excitement with little thought to the situation, the relative ethical position of the two opponents, or potential consequences.17 Arthur is too quick to engage in foreign battles and espionage, too ready to put the lives of his men and his own at risk. Thus, while the narrative (presumably) ends happily, with enemy vanquished and treasures amassed, the audience is left with a sense of a surface-level joy only temporarily sustained and ultimately undone by kingly folly. Arthur’s disregard for the kingly ethos (performing reconnaissance adventures as if he were a knight and not a king, and engaging over-hastily in foreign battles, rather than attending to his affairs at home; using deception rather than diplomacy to interact with the neighboring king) repeatedly puts himself, his household, and his kingdom at risk.18 It is as if the happy ending were the mask, and the inevitable tragedy of Arthur’s kingdom the festering truth of moral corruption behind it.

Disguise in Le Morte Darthur Sir Thomas Malory displays darker views of kings assuming disguise, and he treats king-in-disguise narratives with a decidedly less festive tone than the author of the burlesque King Arthur and King Cornwall, whose characterization of Arthur and his knights depicts them as lighthearted, fun-loving adventurers blithe to their own ethical follies – and the consequences of those follies. While disguise still marks the moment when a king sets aside his political role, his body politic, in favor of temporary release and pursuit of personal desires, Malory uses the kingin-disguise motif to demonstrate the questionable morality of those 17

Ibid., lines 36–37: 35. Sadly, at this point the manuscript is missing half a page, and with it these opponents’ motives for fighting; it is impossible to tell which party may have been in the right. 18 For further discussion on how Arthurian literature was used to censure kings in earlier centuries for what were deemed unethical, unnecessary invasions and plundering of (or distribution of plunder from) foreign lands, and particularly Edward I of England, see Christopher Michael Berard, Arthurianism in Early Plantagenet England: From Henry II to Edward I (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2019), 283–86.

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kings in employing deceitful practices, and to highlight the transgressive nature of a king choosing to pursue personal rather than politically appropriate aims. Uther’s resorting to disguise at the height of his consuming desire for Igraine has always been part of the Arthurian legend, but the figure of a king embroiling his people in civil war for his own personal desires seems to have struck a chord with those Arthurian authors writing in the later part of the Hundred Years’ War and during the Wars of the Roses; Arthur’s conception, involving Uther’s magically disguised encounter with Igraine, is not included in many earlier Arthurian romances.19 This disapproving position is especially marked in Malory, who writes critically of Uther as behaving “oute of mesure” (“out of measure”), as being “wonderly wrothe” (“incredibly angry”), and “seke for angre and for love of fayre Igrayne” (“sick for anger and for love of fair Igraine”).20 This contrasts with the translator of the Prose Merlin (discussed below), who, though acknowledging the gravity of the situation, speaks of Uther’s passion in less judgmental terms: as causing him “gref” (“grief”) and illness.21 Indeed, while not condoning the behavior, the translator 19

The authors of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthur both chose to set their narratives at the end of Arthur’s reign; the authors of the Gawain romances, e.g. Carle of Carlisle, Marriage of Sir Gawain, set their romances in the middle of Arthur’s reign, and do not refer back to Arthur’s conception. While these narratives do not need to include the circumstances of his conception, it is notable that these earlier authors preferred to write Arthurian works that did not warrant its inclusion. 20 Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1–2. All citations of this text from the P. J. C. Field edition (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017) and cited by page numbers. Kate McGrath has discussed the ethics of kingly anger in earlier Anglo-Norman texts, which can also be seen playing out here with Uther’s emotions. That is, anger can be ethical when it is felt on behalf of his people or the Church and spurs the king to fight to defend and protect his realm and subjects from others. However, anger was also connected to madness in eleventh- and twelfth-century Anglo-Norman texts, reflecting authors’ and audiences’ “concern that kings might become so consumed by their anger that they risked losing their reason and becoming mad, and, thereby, undermining the stability of law and order in their kingdoms” – a concern which seems to still be present in Malory’s late fifteenth-century text. Kate McGrath, “Royal Madness and the Law: The Role of Anger in Representations of Royal Authority in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Texts,” in Madness in Medieval Law and Custom, 123–46: 125; Cory James Rushton discusses how “madness seems to eat away at the link between the king’s two bodies” in both contemporary medieval writings about Henry IV and in medieval characterizations of Uther’s madness in Arthurian legend. Rushton, “The King’s Stupor,” 172. 21 Merlin, or, The Early History of King Arthur: A Prose Romance, ed. H. B. Wheatley, W. E. Mead, J. Stuart-Glennie, and D. W. Nash, Early English Text Society (hereafter, EETS) original series 10, 21, 36, 112 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1865), 75 (henceforth cited in short form as Prose Merlin), vol. 1, 75.

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of the Prose Merlin treats Uther in disguise acting upon his own “hertes desire” (“heart’s desire”) somewhat sympathetically, while Malory seems generally to have viewed the practice of kings donning disguises as unethical.22 By beginning his text at the kindling of Uther’s lust for Igraine, rather than with the conception of Merlin as in his Vulgate source material, Malory foregrounds the pursuit of personal desire (and lack of restraint in that pursuit) as an ethical breach which leads to civil strife as a main theme of the text.23 Uther’s deception has serious repercussions: while his temporary sexual satisfaction, made possible through disguise, coincides with the end of the civil war and the conception of Arthur, it comes at a disastrous price. Arthur’s legitimacy will be cast into doubt and the beginning of his reign is marked by mistrust and civil war as the local kings are divided over his right to rule. Uther’s decision to resort to visual deception to sleep with Igraine, allowing the urges of his body natural to supersede the concerns of the body politic, illustrates the height of his disregard for the restraint required in royal office and his lack of control over his personal desires: an ethical violation that results in civil wars both in and beyond his lifetime. The only king within Le Morte Darthur other than Uther who is shown willingly employing the art of disguise is the even more unsavory Mark. Whereas Uther demonstrates poor kingship by allowing his desires to overwhelm him at one crucial moment of his otherwise largely unnarrated kingship, Mark repeatedly displays total disregard of all the tenets of chivalry. For instance, angered at hearing of Tristan’s acceptance into the Round Table, he disguises himself as a plain knight and sets out for England to slay Tristan, and it is while wearing this disguise that he murders Bersules, who had been accompanying him. Bersules advises Mark on the best course of rational and honorable behavior as king and knight; Mark kills him in a passion when his personal ire and jealousy of Tristan overwhelm his judgment.24 Mark’s disguise functions rather to display the extent of his cowardice than to effect a temporary renunciation of his formal role in pursuit of personal desires, but then 22

Ibid., vol. 1, 75. Ralph Norris contends that Malory did have access to the Prose Merlin and the PostVulgate Suite du Merlin in addition to his Vulgate source material, and Malory’s decision to begin his narrative “at a point that corresponds to roughly two-thirds of the way into the standard edition of the Prose Merlin” was deliberate, and perhaps influenced by the mise-en-page of Hardyng’s Chronicle. Ralph Norris, Malory’s Library: The Sources of the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 13–17: 17. See also P. J. C. Field, Malory: Texts and Sources (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 107. 24 Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 454–70. 23

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one of the defining aspects of Mark’s character in Malory’s text is his clear inability to separate his emotional impulses from his royal actions. Moreover, the episode does not produce the effects of the release and restoration typical of the carnivalesque narrative: Malory never identifies the point at which Mark removes his disguise, and thus does not formally signal Mark’s resumption of his social identity, as if to denote that Mark never clearly and fully separates his two bodies and acts appropriately, out of concern for his kingdom rather than himself. There is no point at which Mark returns to behaving like a “proper” king; the last time he is mentioned is in the “Healing of Sir Urry,” when he has murdered Tristan. Thus it is evident that Malory regards disguise, when employed by kings, with opprobrium; it is a key motif in his repertoire for criticizing a bad king. It is evidence of the king unequivocally abandoning his duties, unethically prioritizing personal desires over the good of the realm – a faulty prioritization from which tragedy and civil strife inevitably ensue. Arthur, by contrast, is never depicted as willingly disguising himself, either to investigate the loyalty of his subjects, or for personal ends (like Uther), or on reconnaissance missions into other kings’ territories. He withholds his identity on occasion, as when he meets King Pellinore on his excursion to acquire Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, or when he is captured by Morgan le Fay and Sir Damas and forced to fight Sir Accolon, but he does not purposely alter his appearance with an intent to deceive. As in other Middle English romances like Sir Orfeo and King Horn, in Le Morte Darthur, accidental or unintentional disguise (that is, when a king is mistaken for a simple knight or for someone other than his royal self by another character, and who does not then announce his royal identity) and lying by omission and equivocation are ethically acceptable forms of deception for kings, while disguise and outright lying are treated with opprobrium. For example, Orfeo does not actively disguise his appearance upon returning from the Otherworld, aside from the pilgrim’s attire he dons prior to leaving his own kingdom; yet his steward, who knew of Orfeo’s pilgrim clothing, does not recognize him. His travels in the wilderness have changed his appearance, rather than his own efforts: “his here of his berd, blac and rowe,/ to his girdel-stede was growe” (“his beard, black and rough / had grown to his waist”).25 However, Orfeo quickly takes advantage of his steward’s confusion and intensifies the deception with his equivocation, intending to discover if his steward has been true to him. Orfeo’s method of maintaining his steward’s misidentification – 25

Sir Orfeo, ed. Alan Bliss (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), lines 265–66.

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namely, through verbal equivocation – proves him to be a man of nobility, morality, and cleverness, because he is able to test the honesty and integrity of his steward without undermining his own ethical integrity by lying to a loyal subject. The poets of Sir Orfeo, King Horn, Horn Childe, and A Gest of Robyn Hode all favor ambiguous phrasing as a mark of superior cleverness in a ruler and regard it as a more sympathetic form of verbal trickery as it is a less active attempt at deception. So, upon returning to his kingdom, Orfeo engages in ambiguous phrasing with his steward, introducing himself as “an harpour of hethenisse” (“a harper from heathen lands”), which is truthful, in the sense that he is a harper and has just come from the Otherworld, but his intent is to deceive.26 This exchange and the dialogue that follows it allows the sly cleverness of Orfeo and the simple honesty of the steward to throw each other’s qualities into relief.27 In both King Horn and Horn Childe, the respective poets use deceptively ambiguous phrasing to insinuate that a false or unworthy person would not possess the cunning indicative of Horn’s royal blood. In Horn Childe, infiltrating the court dressed in beggar’s array, Horn tells Wickard quite truthfully, “Of beggers mo þan sexti/ …maister am Y” (“I am master of more than sixty beggars”). Indeed, as rightful king, he is master of all the beggars in the kingdom.28 Wikard, the unworthy traitor, does not parse the true meaning of Horn’s statement, allowing Horn to infiltrate the castle and avenge himself upon Wikard. In King Horn, Horn is depicted using artful wording after infiltrating Fickenhild’s stronghold, making riddles about a horn cup to unobtrusively attract Rimenhild’s 26

Ibid., line 513. It is important to note Orfeo’s shift from ambiguous phrasing to outright lie in order to reinforce his disguise. Orfeo tells his steward he …founde in a dale with lyouns a man totorn smale, and wolves him frete with teth so scharp. Bi him y fond this ich harp; wele ten yere it is y – go. (…found in a dale a man torn apart by lions and wolves with sharp teeth. Next to him I found this harp; this was ten years ago.) This marks the first lie Orfeo has told his steward, following previous comments that were technically truthful but deliberately misleading. The deliberate falsehood proves the catalyst for his loyal steward’s emotional outburst that convinces Orfeo of the man’s integrity and moves Orfeo to abandon his ruse and admit his identity. The text’s climactic moment of truth is revealed through a reaction to its purest lie. 28 Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, line 937. 27

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attention.29 Fickenhild, as an unworthy suitor, is not clever enough to perceive Horn’s identity and the significance of his statements, and thus he is caught unaware when Horn signals his men to ambush the wedding party. In A Gest of Robyn Hode, King Edward is characterized by the honesty of his word, and his use of equivocation to maintain his disguise while infiltrating the outlaws’ circle showcases his integrity and wit while placing him in contrast to Robin, the greenwood’s lord of dishonesty and misrule. Similarly, in Le Morte Darthur, Arthur must rely on equivocation and suggestion to deceive others in order to maintain audience sympathy. While knights can go on adventures for personal or royally mandated reasons, and can give false names and false shields and maintain audience sympathy, kings operate under a different ethical model. Adventures should not be taken for purely personal reasons, but with the benefit of the realm in mind. A king may take advantage of mistaken identity, and may equivocate with the intent to deceive, but to be ethically sound, a king must not lie outright – physically or verbally. Uther and Mark lose audience sympathy when they breach these ethical boundaries; Arthur maintains that sympathy in Malory’s work because while he is willing to skirt the truth, he refuses to fabricate it.

Royal Perceptiveness in The English Prose Merlin For all their apparent familiarity with the art of disguise, kings in the romances are surprisingly blind to it in others. That the king should not perceive the adultery and other forms of treachery around him is central to many romance plots; the manifestation of this gullibility as almost literal blindness to the disguises of others is not narratively essential, and yet it happens frequently. Horn in Horn Childe cannot recognize his best friend Wiard in his rags; Apollonius in Apollonius of Tyre cannot recognize his wife though she knows him immediately. King Philip’s imperceptiveness in the Alexander romances is perhaps excusable, as Nectanebus is using enchantment to change his appearance into something non-human, but then the steward acting as king de facto in Orfeo’s absence in Sir Orfeo is taken in by Orfeo’s minstrel pose and wild appearance. The king’s inability to perceive such physical deceptions is representative of his inability to discern deceitful, treasonous, or otherwise unethical people and behaviors from honest ones. Two essential parts of the kingly ethos 29

“King Horn,” in Four Romances of England, ed. Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), 17–72, lines 1115–68.

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are to dispense justice fairly and to protect the royal household and kingdom. It is, then, an ethical imperative that a king be able to perceive false friends while not participating in deceitful behavior himself, and to maintain a balance between goodwill and innocence on one hand, and dangerous naïveté on the other. Particularly striking is the presence of this disguise-blindness motif in Arthurian, and particularly later Arthurian, romances. While myriad knights fail to recognize each other within their armor or behind their false devices or colors, the tendency to be thoroughly taken in by false appearances seems a particular problem for kings. Just like other knights, they are deceived by false devices and visage-shielding helmets, but they seem slower to penetrate non-chivalric disguises than their followers. The frequency with which the motif is employed by late-medieval English Arthurian authors suggests a complexity of purpose and significance, as the subtexts of these encounters become more apparent with comparison. This blindness seems to affect both Arthur and Mark – the good king and the ridiculous king – above other kings, while Uther and Cornwall (in King Arthur and King Cornwall) – the conniving and sinister kings, respectively – prove themselves to be shrewder and more perceptive than most of the text’s rulers. It is, I think, a motif that indirectly or semi-covertly plays with the late medieval anxiety about flatterers and false friends, particularly regarding political pragmatics. This anxiety becomes particularly pressing – and visible in literature – in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The person who is able to exert the most influence over the king is often the one who is most able to stroke his vanity: the counselor who appears to have the king’s best interests at heart and hides a secret, self-serving agenda. A good king must not only behave ethically – for example, with honesty, fairness, benevolence – himself; he must also guard against those who would behave unethically (that is, deceitfully and with self-serving interests) against him. The primary example would be Edward II’s favoritism towards Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser which caused violent rifts within the baronage, but powerful magnates struggling for undue control of the king and realm already scarred the reign of Henry III; and in the early thirteenth century, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Philip Augustus’ influences on Richard I, John, and their brothers led to wars in the reigns of Henry II and Richard I.30 John of Salisbury believed the 30

On Edward II: Hollister et al., The Making of England, 310–20; on Henry III: Gillingham, Angevin Empire, 108–15 and Hollister et al., The Making of England, 259–67, 274–8; on the Plantagenets: Gillingham, Angevin Empire, 12 and 16.

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dangers presented by kings falling prey to flatterers that he devotes nearly all the third book of Policraticus to warning kings against flatterers and of the need for wisdom and clear perception when continually surrounded by potentially deceitful courtiers.31 The dangers of false flattery are an enduring anxiety, but becomes especially visible in fourteenth- to sixteenth-century secular literature, from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” to John Skelton’s “Magnificence.”32 Pride goeth before the fall; for a king, literary or historical, this pride was often in his believed ability to inspire loyalty in others. And as late medieval English audiences were well aware from the civil wars tearing apart the kingdom, a king’s prideful belief that he had inspired absolute loyalty, and, by extension, his failure to perceive false flatterers and treachery, affected the safety and wellbeing of all of the subjects in his realm. Clear perception was an ethical matter. The English Prose Merlin is an especially good text for a case study of royal perception of false appearances. First, that it is a mid-fifteenthcentury English translation of a mid-thirteenth-century French text speaks to the enduring relevance of the text and its themes and motifs to medieval readers insofar as it reflects the interests of early as well as later authors, publishers, and readers; great editorial changes and adaptations were not required. Second, the text is rife with instances of kings and knights encountering a disguised figure; the disguise-blind king motif is integral to the text and provides a large number of similar narrative episodes. Thus patterns and deviations can be demonstrated, particularly regarding how each king’s relative perspicacity and readiness, or reticence, to suspect others of dishonest appearances is treated as a reflection of his own moral integrity. A king with no duplicity in his heart can struggle to perceive it in others; conversely, a talent for seeing past false appearances suggests a concerning familiarity with the art of deception. Third, in the English Prose Merlin, the disguised figures these kings and knights encounter are almost all the same character: Merlin. While Merlin’s semi-supernatural parentage could be argued to affect the ability of kings to recognize him, his disguises are easily detectable by ordinary men. The recurrence of one character cast as the deceiver in most of the disguise encounters reduces variables of characterization: 31

John of Salisbury, Ioannis Saresberiensis Episcopi Carnotensis Policratici; sive, De Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis Philosophorum, Libri VII, ed. Clemens C. I. Webb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909), III.ii–viii; x–xii. 32 Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 253–61; John Skelton, Magnificence, ed. Paula Neuss (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980).

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the relative perceptiveness of the characters is made the focus, and their (im)perceptiveness cannot be attributed to variations in the rank or personal character of the disguised. Lastly, the Prose Merlin’s narrative covers the reigns of four successive kings, from Merlin’s childhood under the rule of Vortigern through the volatile years of Arthur’s early rule. It also introduces several others as secondary and tertiary characters and involves a substantial interlude in which Merlin assists the emperor of Rome. The disguise encounters are presented as a number of similarly structured narrative episodes, and those narratives imitate those in other texts involving non-magical persons.33 This structure of variations on a theme made it ideal for a close examination of the comparative qualities and behaviors of characters depicted encountering a disguised figure. The theme of a lack of perceptive ability amongst kings comes across more strongly in the English Prose Merlin than it does in its French source, the Vulgate Estoire de Merlin, showing it to be a topic of particular interest to the translator. In comparing the two texts it is evident that, in an otherwise fairly faithful translation of the Vulgate Estoire, the English translator has made a number of small editorial changes to reduce the moments in which kings are shown discovering the disguised Merlin’s identity themselves. The translator increases the imagery of obscured vision and hidden items and heightens the presence of sensory language, demonstrating that the visual is inferior to the auditory in trustworthiness. The text thus exemplifies the particularly royal phenomenon of disguise-blindness in medieval English romance and ballads; rulers who are noticeably slower than other members of their court to perceive false appearances. In choosing to retain all of the moments in which Merlin assumes a disguise and yet at the same time noticeably deviating from a near-direct translation of his source with regard to perceptual phrasing and sensory language, the translator addresses the anxieties of an audience dependent on kings possessing shrewd perception for continued political stability. The Prose Merlin highlights both the necessity for cunning yet devoted counselors and the dangers rulers present to themselves and their kingdoms when their lack of guile is coupled with naïveté. At the 33

Literal disguise blindness affecting kings can be found in Generides, Apollonius of Tyre, and Alexander A, amongst others. Generydes, a Romance in Seven-Line Stanzas, ed. W. A. Wright, EETS original series 55, 70 (London: Trübner, 1973), lines 957–59; Die alt- und mittelenglischen Apollonius-Bruchstücke, Studien und Texte zur englischen Philologie, ed. J. Raith, 3 vols (Munich: M. Huber, 1956), III, 78–84, lines 35–6; “Alexander A,” in The Gests of King Alexander of Macedon: Two Middle-English Alliterative Fragments: Alexander A and Alexander B, ed. Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), 125–70, lines 725–70.

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same time, it criticizes the king whose shrewdness manifests itself as a willingness to beguile others. Two of the rare instances in which substantial material is omitted are moments when Merlin is presenting a disguised version of himself to kings. The first is when Merlin appears in two alternating semblances to young Prince Uther and his brother King Pendragon. The prince and king, speaking to each other of the serving boy and gentleman that each respectively met on the road, marvel at the boy’s and man’s knowledge and they attempt to introduce the disguised Merlin to each other. In the Vulgate, a comedic scene ensues in which Merlin switches back and forth between disguises as the brothers separately and repeatedly enter and exit the royal tent in which he is standing. Eventually the brothers find an opportunity to compare accounts, and ultimately reason out for themselves that the two figures must be one and the same person. By contrast, the English translator removes this conversation between Pendragon and Uther and the multiple entries and exits. Instead, he has Merlin reveal himself as the young men take a passive role of simply marveling. In doing so, the translator diminishes the young royals’ perceptive abilities, while amplifying Merlin’s magical prowess. The second moment of redaction occurs during what Rupert Pickens refers to as the “Merlin as a bird-catcher” scene: Arthur’s first encounter with Merlin in disguise.34 Unlike the Pendragon and Uther episode where the editorial changes enhance the perceptiveness of the two kings in relation to the source, here the translator retains the king’s bafflement at the counterfeit appearance. Thus in comparison with the source text, the English translator’s choices operate to emphasize the theme of false appearances and hidden truths. In this episode, kings Arthur, Ban, and Bors are out riding when they see a lowborn man hunting birds. The man asks Arthur to accept his birds as a gift, and then enters into dialogue with Arthur, reproaching the king for burying treasure instead of distributing that wealth amongst his subjects. The three kings express astonishment at the man’s knowledge of what they believed to be secret, and at the incongruity between his wise words and simple form, exclaiming “What devell! Who hath tolde this cherll?” (“What the devil! Who has told this peasant?”).35 Ulfin, overhearing the exchange, 34

The Story of Merlin, in Lancelot-Grail: the Old French Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation I, ed. Norris J. Lacy, trans. Rupert T. Pickens, 5 vols (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 165–424: 233; Estoire de Merlin, in The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances II, ed. H. Oskar Sommer, 7 vols (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1908–16), 122–25. 35 Prose Merlin, 169.

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recognizes Merlin immediately and draws him aside to speak with him.36 Bretel, who also recognizes Merlin, joins them, and together the two knights reveal Merlin’s identity to the three kings. Ulfin and Bretel’s instant recognition of Merlin in the bird-catcher episode, present in both French and English texts, throws the three kings’ lack of perception into relief. Their recognition proves that Merlin’s disguise is not impenetrable, nor is the ability to see past it only for those who have encountered him in disguised form before. Ulfin wonders aloud at the kings’ poor powers of perception, remarking: “I sey for that ye knowe hym not so wele as I wolde that ye dide. For ye se somme two tymes or thre, and yet ye ne knowe hym not, and therof I merveyle” (“I say that you do not know him as well as I thought you did, because you have seen him two or three times, and yet you do not know him, which surprises me”).37 Bretel, who has not participated in any of Merlin’s disguised adventures as Ulfin has, is equally quick to apprehend the truth of the bird-catcher’s identity, for “whan he [Bretel] hadde herde hem awhile speke, he perceyved that it was Merlin and began to lawgh undir his mantell right harde” (“when Bretel had heard him speak awhile, he perceived that it was Merlin and began to laugh quite hard under his mantle”).38 These editorial changes make it clear that the translator’s interest lies in kingly imperception, specifically: royal imperception is heightened, while knights – even those uninitiated to Merlin’s transformations – readily perceive the true nature of the people they encounter. In the Vulgate, the dialogue is entrenched in the language of economic exchange. By contrast, the English translator removes about half of Merlin’s admonition of Arthur for hoarding treasure rather than distributing it amongst his subjects. Moreover, he replaces Ulfin’s description of Merlin as “a man to whom wealth means very little” with “the man that hath hym [Arthur] tolde of the grete richesse unther the erthe” (“the man that had told Arthur of the great riches under the earth”), emphasizing Merlin’s knowledge rather than his disdain for worldly wealth.39 The effect is that the translator shifts the tone of the passage away from a lesson on the “hounor” and “preu” (“honor” and “valor/ gallantry”) accrued through displays of generosity and largesse, away from the ethics of the king-subject economic relationship, and instead 36

Ibid., 169. Ibid., 169. 38 Ibid., 169. 39 “Et sacies quil a hui a tel parle a qui il est moult petit de nul auoir tant soit ore grant de sor terre”. Estoire de Merlin, 123, lines 11–2; translation from Lancelot-Grail, 234; Prose Merlin, 169, emphasis mine. 37

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toward the ethics of concealment and perspicacity, accentuating the kings’ failed attempt at concealment of the treasure and their beguiling by and subsequent astonishment at Merlin assuming and successfully maintaining a false guise.40 The translator contemporizes his thirteenthcentury French source for a fifteenth-century English audience, one which is more anxious about the dangers presented by an imperceptive and foolish king, who is liable to be duped by the unethical behavior of others, than by an ungenerous one. Here, knowledge, wisdom, and transparency are the primary qualities of an ethical and effective king, supplanting the bravery, gallantry, and generosity more highly valued in a ruler by earlier audiences. In addition to these larger changes, the translator makes more frequent reference to the imagery of hidden things, a stylistic choice that promotes the idea that much of the world is not as it seems and that encourages the audience to look beyond the immediately visible in the text. For instance, in the bird-catcher episode, the kings and Merlin are speaking of buried treasure, and Bretel, who perceives the truth of Merlin’s disguise, is described as laughing “undir his mantell” (“under his mantle”).41 Incidentally, it is worth noting that the author replaces one of Merlin’s birds with a goose, an animal that, according to Isidore of Seville, was considered a bird of prudence, keeping watch at night and warning others of intruders with its noise, a more thematically appropriate gift than the Vulgate’s two ducks, a fowl noted for its constancy and believed to have poison-repelling properties.42 Elsewhere in the text, scenes are described from Gawain’s perspective as he peers out from behind foliage or fails to see a man shouting below from his position on the battlements; more hidden treasure is revealed, meetings are requested to take place in the thickest, darkest patches of forest, and Merlin twice is depicted disguising himself as a blind man. The text’s recurring themes of concealment, perception, and revelation exposes greater philosophical questions about the fallibility of human vision, and by extension ethical considerations regarding what ways such a fallibility in kings presents particular dangers to the stability of the realm. This sustained interest in concealment and perspicacity leads to a larger philosophical discussion of sight versus hearing in the Prose Merlin as (un)reliable modes of perception. The translator expands the sensory language used in the effective detection of false semblances, 40

Estoire de Merlin, 122, line 38. Prose Merlin, 169. 42 Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. S. Barney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), XII.vii.51. 41

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particularly regarding sound, both in this episode and throughout the text. The Prose Merlin privileges the credibility of auditory experiences and is quick to discredit sight as a tool of accurate perception. The knights shown as repeatedly and swiftly apprehending the underlying state of affairs, distinguishing counterfeit from true are very clearly portrayed as preferring hearing and verbal exchange to what their eyes perceive. This is how Ulfin and Bretel are able to determine the identity of the bird-catcher: while the kings are remarking on the churl’s rude appearance, it is Ulfin and Bretel’s attention to Merlin’s speech that betrays his true identity. We are told that “after Ulfin a while hadde listened… than he began to smyle and wiste wele it was Merlin” (“after Ulfin had listened awhile, then he began to smile and knew it was Merlin”), and Bretel “hadde wele herde that Merlin hadde seide, and also that Vlfin hadde seyde to hym, that better semed a cherll than eny that was in the worlde. And whan he hadde herde hem awhile speke, he perceyved that it was Merlin” (“Bretel had heard well that which Merlin had said, and also that which Ulfin had said to him. Merlin looked more like a peasant than anyone in the world. But when Bretel had heard him speak awhile, he perceived that it was Merlin”).43 Gawain, too, is shown on multiple occasions as relying upon sound over sight. In fact, Merlin’s last meeting with Gawain, and one of the last moments in the text, is a completely auditory experience. The air becomes filled with an obscuring mist, such that a double-layer of nonvisibility exists: Gawain can no longer see even the false dwarf semblance that has been forced upon him. All possibility of potentially misleading sight is removed, and Merlin’s final words speak repeatedly of “trouthe” (“truth”), a “trouthe” that is not complicated by visuality.44 The kings in the Prose Merlin frequently fail to corroborate what they see with what they hear. They place too much weight on the readily visible, the tangible, rather than on the aural. In fact, the only moment in this text in which a king detects a figure in disguise before a member of his court does is when he cannot see Merlin at all. Uther, listening to a bewildered Ulfin describe the unusual demands of “a man right olde and feble” (“a very old and feeble man”), smiles with the realization that the man in question is Merlin in disguise, a quick show of wit that Merlin later remarks upon, telling Ulfin with admiration “The kynge is sone 43 44

Prose Merlin, 168 and 169. Ibid., 692–94. For more on this moment in the narrative (which is translated fairly faithfully from the Vulgate edition) and its themes of misleading sight and auditory truth, see Mikayla Hunter, “Evadeam, Gawain, Merlin: Penitential Transformation and Unseen Truth in the ‘Dwarf Knight’ Section of the Vulgate Cycle,” Arthuriana 29.4 (2019), 44–56.

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perceiving” (“The king is quick to perceive”).45 This conforms to the text’s recurrent theme of obscured vision leading to greater understanding. This is a concept not altogether surprising to find in a text written for a medieval audience; its auditors would have been familiar with the philosophy of the temporality and seductive qualities of earthly, tangible things and the greater value of the spiritual, and used to listening attentively more frequently than processing the written word. In this text, kings regularly – and incorrectly – value the visible over the aural, readily accepting the temporal and tangible over the underlying, enduring truth. But when the truth is finally revealed to them, and Merlin drops his false guise, the duped king is usually quick to rectify any wrongs he may have committed under his limited or false understanding of the situation: rudeness toward Merlin, attempted concealment of treasure, and such. Moments when obscured vision leads to greater comprehension and redress for kings’ ethical breaches are not limited within this text to disguise encounters, though. King Leodegan, who has kept the wife of his forgiving and faithful steward Cleodalis locked in a tower for the past five years, is convinced that, given the opportunity, Cleodalis will turn against him. However, when the opportunity does arise – Cleodalis sees Leodegan knocked off his horse in battle – Cleodalis remains loyal to Leodegan despite his king’s trespasses and helps the king onto the steward’s own horse. Leodegan only “saugh the trouthe of his stiwarde” (“saw the truth of his steward”), that is, his loyalty, and recognizes his own actions as abhorrent when, having been knocked off his horse, his vision is literally obscured by the “derke nyght” (“dark night”), the thick forest, and his helm.46 This kingly inability to recognize a good subject when he sees him is echoed in Arthur’s failure to recognize the true worth of Avadain, a knight of great prowess trapped in a dwarf’s body.47 It is the inverse of what the author’s medieval audience would have known was to come, a foreshadowing of the Round Table’s intertextually inevitable end: Arthur failing to recognize a traitor who appears fair on the surface – whether Morgan le Fay, Lancelot, or Guinevere in different textual traditions. Cleodalis’s and Arthur’s readiness to accept a surfacelevel understanding of situations and subjects puts their persons and 45

Prose Merlin, 72–73. Doo of Cardoel, a minor character and not a king, similarly uncovers Merlin’s identity without ever setting eyes upon him. After listening to “tidinges [that] ronne vp and down” (“news that ran up and down”), Doo “thought well in his herte who this knyght myght be… Than thought doo a-noon what he was and gan to smylen” (“thought well in his heart who this knight might be… Then Doo soon realized who he was and began to smile”), 302. 46 Ibid., 347–48. 47 Cf. Hunter, “Evadeam, Gawain, Merlin,” 44–56.

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kingdoms in danger. For Cleodalis, he is too ready to suspect falsity and unethical behavior, and thus runs the risk of losing a loyal subject and creating treason where there is none. For Arthur, what could be considered an admirable, ethical quality – always believing the best in others; forgiving all trespasses against one’s person – in a king becomes an ethical failing: he refuses to learn from his encounters with deceitful or unscrupulous individuals, and so leaves his kingdom vulnerable to exploitation and corruption. Kings’ relationships with disguise in the text mostly seem to be founded on issues of wise action, a combination of maturity and virtue. Arthur is a good king, but the Prose Merlin is set at the point in his reign when he is still young and naïve. The knights and counselors who aid him in unveiling various deceits are almost all older, survivors from Uther’s reign, and worldly-wise, or, in the case of Gawain, exhibit a wisdom and suspicion of others beyond his years. Even kings Ban and Bors, older kings who are duped a few times themselves by Merlin’s false forms, are quicker than Arthur to catch on to Merlin’s penultimate disguise as a blind, crowned harper.48 It is an indication of Arthur entering a more mature phase of his reign that one of his final acts in the text is to adhere to the terms of the boon Arthur granted Merlin (to carry the king’s banner into battle) despite his messenger-boy appearance, and without need for another person to counsel him on the matter. Uther, in contrast, is a foil to Arthur, demonstrating the equal dangers of a knight who is too worldly. While he is taken in by Merlin’s disguises as an innocent child, as an adult, he displays great shrewdness, but fewer ethics. His quick cunning allows him to detect an interloper amongst the ranks of his foot soldiers, but his willingness to participate himself in a deceitful machination against one of his subjects is morally beyond the pale; his transgressions against Igraine and her husband throw the kingdom into civil war both during his reign and the reign of his son. A king needs to exercise a healthy degree of suspicion of those around him, or at the very least to surround himself with loyal men who possess some skepticism. In the Prose Merlin Arthur has surrounded himself with such men. In contrast to the heroic Lancelot-like figures glorified in other Arthurian romances, who seem trustingly to expect the same standard of chivalric behavior from others that they themselves practice, these men exhibit a continual state of suspicion that, unlike their too-trusting sovereign, indicate a preparedness for treachery from other knights. They are early companions in Arthur’s kingship, former retainers of Uther who 48

Prose Merlin, 622.

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are older and more experienced than their new king; or, like Gawain, young men who grew up observing the machinations and intrigues of a pre-Arthurian court. Because of their backgrounds, they exhibit a continued state of suspicion and wariness at the motives of other knights. This preparedness allows them, through the course of the text, to prevent or put an end to treacherous behavior before the consequences result in personal or political tragedy. For example, Gawain customarily wears a coat of double mail under his robes “nought for that he thought to do eny vilonye ne treson. But for he douted euer that debate sholde a-rise amonge his felowes… or eny treson where-of ther were I-nowe in the londe” (“not because he planned to do any villainous or treasonous act, but because he always was suspicious that an argument might arise amongst his fellows… or that he might encounter treasonous/villainous behavior, of which there was plenty in the land”).49 Later, whilst traveling, “Gawein and Elizer, thei wolde not slepe, but were euer in susspecion of the saisnes that were so many in the londe” (“Gawain and Elizer would not sleep, but were ever suspicious of the Saxons, of which there were so many in the land”).50 Backing an heir who is from effectively an unknown background, Arthur’s early knights must be on the lookout for men who intend Arthur harm. Knights who join his fellowship later in his reign do not need to exhibit such circumspection, as most contentious parties have been subdued and are acting on the principles of the Round Table. The Prose Merlin, however, is an Arthur enfance narrative, and his early companions must help him into an effective kingship, one which is as concerned with the pragmatics of dealing with human fallibility as it is with promoting ideals of chivalry. Arthur’s early counselors – Merlin and Arthur’s first generation of knights – need to aid the young, naïve Arthur in growing into a good and effective king by surrounding him with loyal men who can see clearly: who are watchful, wary, and continually looking beneath surfaces. Arthur is not alone in his royal naïveté, though he is by far the most overly trusting. Neither Arthur, Gonnore’s husband, nor King Leodegan, father to both the royal and “false” Gonnore, recognize that the royal Gonnore has been replaced with her half-sister, while Leodegan’s steward Cleodalis (husband to the false Gonnore’s mother) realizes immediately that the two women must have exchanged places. It is only after Merlin intercedes that King Leodegan checks the crown birthmark on Gonnore to ensure that the false Gonnore has not taken her place. Neither do the two 49 50

Ibid., 454. Ibid., 539.

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kings take any precautions going forward to prevent such an exchange happening a second time (which of course it does).51 The anxiety about an unsuspecting king falling prey to unperceived treachery is not one that comes to full disastrous fruition in Arthur’s court in this text. However, within the Prose Merlin, the placement of the Grisandolus interlude in the middle of the narrative heightens that anxiety by providing an example of the depths to which Arthur’s kingdom could sink if the king were to fail to outgrow his overly trusting naïveté before Merlin and his cunning-yet-loyal older knights are no longer around to serve him. In the Grisandolus interlude, Merlin travels away from Arthur’s kingdom to Rome, where he aids the exceptionally imperceptive emperor Julius Caesar and meets Grisandolus, a woman disguised as a knight and, moreover, the best knight in Caesar’s court. At the time of Merlin’s arrival, the emperor is shown to have been exercising a blind trust in his court and household that has painted him the fool and spun his empire into chaos. This is a risk Arthur runs, so the audience infers, if he does not learn greater shrewdness. In his trust of his lustful wife and his failure to perceive that her twelve waiting women are actually her lovers in disguise, Caesar has exposed his empire to a succession crisis through the possibility that any heir born to his empress is potentially false. Caesar’s inability to see past appearance and to discern the true nature of affairs has left his court lacking proper knights; indeed, his best knight is a woman. His people, as beggars, literally walk on top of undetected money, while the social order is crumbling, with squires slapping their knights and women running wild. Caesar’s literal and figurative blindness also makes him susceptible to unwise proclamations and dangerous offers, culminating in what nearly becomes a coup de grâce for his empire: Grisandolus almost inherits half of his lands due to the emperor’s inability to detect her disguise and his need to rely on others to uncover Merlin’s disguise. In effect, what the English Prose Merlin offers through its heightened imagery of untrustworthy appearances and hidden value, through its reworking of disguise-encounter scenes in an otherwise quite faithful translation, is a view of ethical kingship that demands keen attention particularly to what people say, a realization that appearances can be deceptive, and a somewhat suspicious nature for true political stability to be assured.

51

Ibid., 451–52; 463–68.

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Conclusion The English romance authors composing and translating during the Wars of the Roses were writing in an era of political upheaval, in which ideas of rightful and legitimate kingship were very much in debate. The interests of the authors and translator discussed above regarding kings in disguise or perceiving disguise are thus unlike those of earlier English romance authors who wrote works like King Horn and Havelok the Dane, or of contemporary Scottish authors who favored king-and-subject tales such as Rauf Coilyear. These Scottish and earlier English authors delighted in the concept of the investigative king and capitalized on anxieties about an inquisitive monarchy whose eyes and ears could be anywhere. Rather, late medieval English authors use the concept of the king’s two bodies – his social and personal selves – coupled with the sense of social release disguise affords to probe contemporary anxieties about the essence of good and worthy kingship. Examining the king as risk-taker, as naïve or dangerously imperceptive, and as unable to control his desires or willing to allow him to supersede the behavior demanded of his position, these texts use the fantasy of temporary release from the constraints of public office that a disguise can provide in order to portray the varying types of kingly (un)ethical behavior that might threaten or buttress social order: that is, ethical actions made with the wellbeing of the realm in mind, and unethical behavior made for selfish, personal reasons with no regard for larger consequences. Despite their evident proclivity for adopting disguises themselves in many romances, across the genre, kings are consistently characterized as inept at detecting others in disguise. This is particularly noticeable in Arthurian romance, where royal naïveté and moral goodness seem to go hand-in-hand – as do shrewdness and fewer compunctions about strictly ethical royal behavior. When it comes to deceitful individuals, it appears that the general attitude amongst medieval English authors and redactors was that it takes one to know one. Through disguise motifs, these narratives address anxieties surrounding a king’s ability to perceive false counsel, false friends, and treasonous plots. While probity is a quality admired in kings in romance, an overly trusting nature is a threat to the stability of the realm. It is imperative, then, that kings surround themselves with counselors who anticipate unethical behavior in others: who mistrust appearances, who continuously display and counsel wariness, and who serve to protect the king from others’ deceitful machinations as well as from his own short-sightedness and gullibility.

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“Adventure? What is That?” Arthurian Ethics in/and the Games We Play

ALEXANDRA STERLING-HELLENBRAND

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Introduction

he title of this essay comes from one of the most iconic scenes in medieval German Arthurian romance. The episode occurs near the beginning of Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein. Riding through the forest in search of adventure, the knight Kalogrenant comes upon a clearing, where he finds a flock of wild animals presided over by a ferocious-looking herdsman. Kalogrenant states the purpose of his journey, namely, to seek adventure, and receives the title question in response: “Adventure,” asks the herdsman, “what is that?” (âventiure, waz ist daz).1 Taken aback, Kalogrenant goes on to explain that he is a knight and knights seek adventure. The bemused herdsman finally points Kalogrenant toward a fountain where, if the knight pours water on the stone nearby, he may find what he seeks. Kalogrenant follows these directions, only to be unhorsed by the knight who defends the fountain. Kalogrenant returns to Arthur’s court, where he then relates his unfortunate encounter to Iwein and his comrades ten years later. The question “adventure, what is that?” is never again explicitly asked in the poem. I suggest, however, that the romance of Iwein itself becomes an answer. The herdsman’s query resonates through Iwein’s subsequent encounters, revealing an underlying anxiety about the nature of knightly adventure (Is adventure good? Are knights good?). Hartmann’s contemporary Wolfram von Eschenbach even more overtly 1

Hartmann von Aue, Iwein. Text und Übersetzung, ed. Georg F. Benecke, Karl Lachmann and Ludwig Wollf; trans. Thomas Cramer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001), line 527. Further references to Iwein will be in the text. Kalogrenant explains further that a knight’s purpose is to seek another opponent who will fight with him. Glory and fame belong to the victor, lines 530–37.

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interrogates the concept of adventure through frequent use of gaming analogies and metaphors. In book VI of Parzival, for example, Segramors downplays his defeat at Parzival’s hand, saying that “chivalry is diceplay”2 (ritterschaft ist topelspil; line 289.24), likening knightly pursuits to a game of chance, or a roll of the dice. Parzival believes he has played the chivalric game well thus far, and the Arthurian court reinforces this belief with its acclaim, until Cundrie’s rebuke drives him from the Round Table to search for the Grail. His prior success is illusory. In fact, Parzival’s mother has died of grief, he has assaulted a woman who was then further mistreated by her angry husband, and he has ignored the suffering at the Grail castle. I submit that Wolfram’s Parzival, like Hartmann’s Iwein, constructs a space for interrogating the courtly order. Both Hartmann and Wolfram prompt the audience to reflect on the shallow and capricious nature of adventure as well as its capacity for good when practiced properly but further embedded in a larger context of what it means to be a good knight/lady in thirteenth-century society. The romances juxtapose the Arthurian court and the court of Laudine or the Grail world, allowing poets thereby to address a variety of ethical questions: What is right? What is good? Can I do love service for this lord’s lady and still be an honorable knight? Can I engage in adventure to gain honor or fame at the expense of another’s honor or livelihood or at the cost of another’s life? The game metaphors prevalent in the medieval romances of Hartman and Wolfram highlight the importance of choice in the courtly endeavor. Questioning the fickle nature of adventure’s “game” and confronting their respective protagonists with a spectrum of potential choices to be applauded or rebuked, the romances insist that their knightly heroes transform their seemingly arbitrary quests into more purposeful action. In her essay on “Arthurian Ethics” in the Cambridge Companion to Arthurian Literature, Jane Gilbert suggests that Arthurian discourse often displays a kind of double vision; it offers “specific inflections” for universal human problems, incorporating “two distinct moral spaces, one identified as Arthurian and another portrayed as that of the text’s own present.” Encompassing these two spheres is what Gilbert calls “Arthurtime,” a space that “exists in constant tension with the present… neither now nor never.” 3 Arthurtime, for Gilbert, creates a space for ethical discourse to occur. The double vision engenders a distance 2



Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, ed. Karl Lachmann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1964); English Translations from Wolfram von Eschenbach Parzival with Titurel and Love Lyrics, trans. Cyril Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 122. 3 Jane Gilbert, “Arthurian Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arthurian Legend, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 155.

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between audience and narrative, a space for critical reflection where ethical considerations permeate stories of chivalric quests and love service told by narrators whose often humorous asides belie the serious nature of the underlying questions. Furthermore, Gilbert says, “if Arthurian writers and readers can never fully inhabit the Arthurian moment, neither can its residents.”4 This double vision, for Gilbert, forms a constituent element of Arthurian discourse and makes it inherently ethical. I explore Gilbert’s Arthurtime as a space that can exploit the concept of game and game-play to raise ethical questions and enact various responses from the Middle Ages to the present. In the context of Arthurtime, the act of participating in the game could be described as a variation on what John Dagenais calls the medieval process of “ethical reading,” which focuses on “the text as process of judgment and choice.”5 Dagenais refers particularly to written text; however, the idea of text – or narrative – as process can apply for multiple audiences, whether readers or listeners. Stefka Eriksen broadens the idea of ethical reading to accommodate the concept of game as I will apply it here, as it “allows for and accepts dualities, contradictions, oppositions, similarities and associations.”6 The game in medieval Arthurian romance, and arguably the game of romance reimagined over time, similarly facilitates what I might call the ethical process of play. The ethical process of play allows for the articulation of ethical questions relating to the tensions between social responsibility and personal desire, for example – exploring the nature of the “good” through a kaleidoscope of variations. Adventure provides the framework while the game and game-play – whether in metaphor or in display or in interactive play – provides the mechanism. Iwein and Parzival superficially see adventure as a means to gain fame, honor, and a lady’s favor, at least at first. As Hartmann and Wolfram allow the pursuit of adventure (âventiure) and the game of knighthood to unfold in their romances, we see the sometimes comical but often serious consequences for those who play. Gilbert also places adventure in an ethical framework that presents romance heroes consistently with a number of actual alternatives for action and for ethical experimentation: “when faced with a new creature, we can hit it, kiss it, or ask it a

4

Ibid., 156. John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the “Libro de buen amor” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 16. 6 Stefka Eriksen, “Arthurian Ethics in Old Norse Literature and Society,” in Riddarasögur, ed. Else Mundal and Karl G. Johansson, Bibliotheca Nordica 7 (Oslo: Novus, 2014), 175–98: 180.

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question.”7 Adventure, misunderstood by Kalogrenant as a quest for individual gain, becomes a mechanism by which Hartmann throws Iwein’s choices and responsibilities into even greater relief against the backdrop of romance. Wolfram further utilizes the idea of “game” to enhance the tension between the Arthurtime of the narrative and the now of the audience, encouraging his audience to reflect critically on essential questions that structure a good life: What is right? What is good? Both Hartmann and Wolfram demonstrate how adventure compels their romance protagonists to face and make, or refuse, choices that could lead to productive community membership. Modern iterations of the romances take up the game metaphors to adapt adventure and the ethical process of play for contemporary discussions of the same questions (What is right? What is good?). The theme of adventure as a dangerous game reverberates through numerous Arthurian afterlives, particularly in the twentieth century, as the game evolves from a metaphor in medieval romance to take concrete physical form as a tabletop board game. Over time, iterations of the game variously embody the potentially explosive conflict between personal desire and social responsibility – personal desire reflected in the impulse to play the game, responsibility reflected in the need to work cooperatively in order for the game to lead to any kind of success. Understood as game, adventure itself becomes an object of scrutiny (can chivalric adventure be good or lead to good?), providing various entry points into Arthurtime for audiences from the thirteenth century to the present. Game functions as a mechanism to explore the tensions between individual desire and the common good that emerge through adventure. Arthurtime’s double vision also allows respective audiences to experience the ethical process of play, as Arthurian adaptations reimagine the game of adventure over time, exploring various paths toward self-knowledge in the service of community. In this essay, I start in the thirteenth-century context with a brief discussion of the game of âventiure in Iwein and Parzival. I then follow echoes of romance adventure in a twentieth and twentyfirst century context that enjoys but also closely scrutinizes the courtly game. I highlight three modern adaptations that emerge from medieval romance and that variously remediate the dangerous game of medieval âventiure.8 The first example is the Museum Wolfram von Eschenbach (1995) which makes Wolfram’s game imagery a central part of its 7 8

Gilbert, “Arthurian Ethics,” 157. Bolton and Grusin define remediation as the means “by which new media refashion prior media forms.” Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding new media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 273.

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presentation. My next examples widen the scope from German medieval literary tradition and reception to the broader realm of games and gaming with a focus on tabletop games. The games offer new-old and yet still unique opportunities for players to participate actively, to enact adventure, to confront and navigate its choices. Cooperative games like Shadows over Camelot and King Arthur Pendragon allow players to take up their own quests at the uniquely negotiable interface of Gilbert’s Arthurtime, “neither now nor never.” They bring the performativity inherent in romance full circle, in a very real sense. The players face adventure themselves, as Gilbert suggests the protagonists of romance do, with a number of alternatives for action – but here in real time – and the opportunity to make their own choices on whether to hit or kiss a new creature or ask it a question. The appeal and challenge of the game present medieval and modern audiences with an open invitation to ask what is right, to decide what is wrong, to play along, to experiment with various scenarios – and ultimately to learn, perhaps to change. As the structuring principle of medieval Arthurian romance or the modern roleplaying game, adventure opens a space for ethical engagement where the games we play or read or hear offer us opportunities to reflect on the nature of knighthood then and now, to consider the application of real or metaphorical knightly pursuits for the common good, and ultimately to ponder the meaning of community.

Âventiure, waz ist daz? The simple question asked by the fierce yet benign herdsman hovers on the edge of our consciousness throughout Iwein. The fact that we do not find it in Chrétien’s Yvain underscores its significance. Chrétien’s herdsman asks the approaching Calogrenant simply “to tell me/who you are and what you want” (Et tu me redevroies dire,/ Queus hon tui es et que tu quires; lines 356–57).9 Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein is arguably, at least in part, a reflection on the nature of knightly responsibility touched off by the herdsman’s innocent response to Kalogrenant, who has declared his desire to seek adventure. Kalogrenant’s interaction with the herdsman indicates that the erstwhile knight has little idea of what he seeks; indeed, the question (“âventiure, waz ist daz?”) continues to reverberate not only throughout Kalogrenant’s adventure but also throughout the 9

Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain: The Knight of the Lion, trans. Burton Raffel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), lines 356–57; Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain (le Chevalier Au Lion), The Critical Text of Wendelin Foerster, ed. Thomas Bertram Wallace Reid (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1942).

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entire narrative.10 The contrast between the ideal and the reality of his adventure hints, at least in his case, at the hollowness of the knightly ideal. Kalogrenant’s naivete seems tragically amplified not only in Iwein’s heedless pursuit of Ascalon but also in the advice of Gawein who urges Iwein to join him on the tournament circuit to avoid making the same error that Erec made, a fellow knight who lay idle for many a day because of his lady Enite (der sich ouch alsô manegen tac/ durch vrouwen Ênîten verlac; lines 2793–94). Iwein agrees, resulting in Laudine’s repudiation for missing the promised deadline and his subsequent madness. These episodes underscore the potentially serious consequences of questing that Iwein, at least, must learn in the second part of the romance. In his madness, Iwein divests himself of all trappings of knighthood and his former life, to which he gradually returns. Upon his recovery and his rescue of the lion, Iwein encounters a mournful Lunete who reveals she is about to be executed for her poor advice to her lady (namely that her lady marry said Iwein, who cannot remember his promises or keep a deadline). Lunete’s execution is set for noon the following day.11 Iwein helps her because it is the right thing to do,12 although she protests that her life is not worth as much as his.13 Seeking lodging for the night, Iwein stays with a lord who happens to be Gawein’s brother-in-law;14 this lord, in turn, tells of being threatened by the giant Harpin,15 who has captured and mistreated his sons because he (the knight) refuses Harpin the hand of his daughter. Iwein promises to aid his host by fighting the giant, if he can accomplish this combat by noon on the following day so that he can then save Lunete as well. The narrative here offers several hundred lines of tension-filled verse, with constant reminders of Iwein’s fear that he may not make it to Lunete by noon.16 The audience remains constantly 10

Schnyder makes the point that Kalogrenant’s misadventure needs to be corrected, which is what Iwein initially sets out to do. While Iwein is not technically seeking aventiure at that point, unlike Kalogrenant, Iwein is also racing to get to the fountain before Arthur does. See Mireille Schyder, ‘“Âventiure? waz ist daz?’ Zum Begriff des Abenteuers in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters,” Euphorion 96 (2002), 257–72: 259. 11 Hartmann von Aue, Iwein, line 4015ff; She had sought help from Arthur’s court but found no one to help her; see Iwein, lines 4160–68. From Gawein’s brother-inlaw, we also hear of the kidnapping of the queen ten days earlier. This is another narrative delaying strategy that builds tension while offering an explanation for Lunete’s inability to find a champion when she sought one. 12 Ibid., lines 4341–45. 13 Ibid., lines 4315–23. 14 Ibid., lines 4730–33. 15 Ibid., lines 4463–506. 16 Indeed, that day takes over 700 lines (lines 4820–5541), after which Iwein must also spend a fortnight recovering and nursing his lion companion.

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aware that Iwein (whose thoughts also address his difficult situation) has a deadline to keep and someone else’s life depends on him as it never has before. Hartmann shows us various facets of adventure, though the word adventure (âventiure) is not often used explicitly to describe Iwein’s encounters.17 We see the lure of glory in tournament and contest with Kalogrenant’s mis-adventure and Gawein’s wish that Iwein leave Laudine to join him for a year. We wonder with Iwein in his madness if knightly adventure is an illusory dream. The course of Iwein’s narrative eventually shows us adventure as an exercise of responsibility. Hartmann does not dwell on the question (adventure, what is that?); yet, the entire poem enacts an answer. Each of Iwein’s time-delimited episodes lays out the ethical pattern, revealing caritas as the new purpose of adventure: service to others.18 Lunete faces execution, the lion is severely wounded, three hundred captive women work in abysmal conditions. The costs are high for frivolous challenges like coveting glory and pouring water on a stone: people suffer, people can die. Knights can and must do better, by choosing to act with compassion and care for others.19 In attempting to place adventure in a larger theoretical framework,20 Mireille Schnyder answers the herdsman’s question in seven theses; 17

Will Hasty, “Love and Adventure in Germany: The Romances of Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Gottfried von Straßburg,” in Companion to Middle High German Literature to the 14th Century, ed. F. G. Gentry (Leiden: Brill, 2002) points out that Hartmann does not specifically condemn Kalogrenant’s behavior as “morally or ethically flawed,” though scholarship tends to assume this is the case. Iwein does, however, provide a compelling contrast, 241. Dietmar Peil suggests that Kalogrenant represents a more immature understanding of aventiure – an aspect underscored by the fact that the events of Kalogrenant’s story lie ten years in the past before he tells it in “Aventiure, waz ist daz? Überlegungen zur âventiure – Definition des Kalogrenant,” Hans-Joachim Althof, Deutsch– französisches Germanistentreffen Berlin, 30.9. bis 4.10.1987. Dokumentation der Tagungsbeiträge. DAAD Dokumentationen & Materialien (Bonn: DAAD, 1988), 55–77: 73. 18 Hasty, “Love and Adventure in Germany,” 244. 19 This is far from the lighthearted escapism that Auerbach ascribes to romance in his reading of Calogrenant’s story in Mimesis. See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 133ff. 20 Adventure is the tale that must be told so that others can listen. Schnyder, “Aventiure,” 260–61; Jutta Eming and Ralf Schlechtweg-Jahn, “Das Abenteuer als Narrativ,” in Aventiure und Eskapade: Narrative des Abenteuerlichen vom Mittelalter zur Moderne, ed. Jutta Eming and Ralf Schlechtweg-Jahn, Transatlantische Studien zu Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (TRAST), Band 7 (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2016), 7–8. The edited volume by Eming and Schlechtweg-Jahn contributes to a growing body of cross-disciplinary research theorizing adventure.

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the first three of these are most useful for this essay. The first locates adventure (aventiure) firmly in the realm of imagination. It is a creation of speech/language, for there is no adventure that has not been told (emphasis mine).21 Adventure is a narration told at court retrospectively about a past occurrence; the act of narration arranges the episodes of a quest for the unknown into the order of time and space and thereby creates adventure. Schnyder sees in the retrospective narrative the forward motion that propels Iwein into new meaning for his life’s path. Schnyder’s second thesis places narration in a larger context: adventure is a world-organizing principle, one that makes sense out of what has come before (what is told) and thus constitutes a meaningful whole out of seemingly disparate parts.22 In Iwein, adventure becomes a mechanism for coherence and order. Hartmann demonstrates this clearly not only in Iwein’s time-constrained narrative, but also in the critique of adventure that is missing from Erec and also from his French sources.23 For Hartmann, aventiure provides an opportunity for Iwein to restore order and also for Iwein (as well as the audience) to engage in the critical self-reflection that organizes the various adventures into a meaningful whole. Hartmann’s Iwein emphatically imbues adventure with an ethos of service that supports, rather than threatens, stability.

Adventure as Game of Chance For the earliest romance poets, like Chretien and Hartmann, adventure is what a knight does; it involves an encounter or a quest. This is the simplest answer to the herdsman’s question. However, as described by Schnyder’s first two theses, adventure is also the tale that is told about these encounters and quests: a narrative, created by imagination and shaped by language, that gives meaning to disparate episodes by connecting and threading them into a coherent whole.24 Hartmann creates a narrative 21

Mireille Schnyder, “Sieben Thesen zum Begriff der âventiure,” in Im Wortfeld des Textes: worthistorische Beiträge zu den Bezeichnungen von Rede und Schrift im Mittelalter, ed. Gert Dicke, Manfred Eikelmann, and Burkhard Hasebrink (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006), 269, 370–71. See also Schnyder “Aventiure,” 259. 22 Schnyder, “Sieben Thesen,” 371. 23 See Schnyder, “Âventiure,” 263 and Peil, “Âventiure, waz ist daz?,” 67ff. 24 In this prologue to Erec et Enide, Chretien describes the tale of adventure (conte d’avanture) as a beautifully structured narrative (un molt bele conjointure) – adventure refers both to the quests as well as the story about them. A similar abstraction is rendered in German as der âventiure meine (the sense or meaning of adventure) which is how Gottfried praises Hartmann’s crystalline words in Tristan). Lady Adventure appears in Parzival line 433.7.

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that clearly contrasts what a knight believes he does (in the unreflective actions of Kalogrenant and Iwein at the beginning) with what a knight is supposed to do (in Iwein’s activities with the lion). Adventure becomes an ethical framework that structures both Iwein’s actions and our/the audience’s understanding. Schnyder’s third thesis underscores the nature of adventure as a game of chance, which brings us to Wolfram’s Parzival, where Wolfram employs abundant game imagery to present adventure as a game of chance.25 Wolfram’s lexicon supports this imagery, as the word play (“spil”) also occurs in numerous compounds throughout the text. The severity of the contest at the Schastel marveile is highlighted by the comparison to a child’s game.26 There are references to knights as pieces in the game, whether as tools of the devil or otherwise, of which Cundrie’s reprimand in Parzival line 316.24 is an example: “ir sît der hellehirten spil/ gunêrter lîp, hêr Parzivâl!” (“You are Hell’s lord’s plaything, you are accursed, Sir Parzival”).27 The animosity inherent in the game of combat is underscored by Wolfram’s use of the word “nîtspil” (animosity) several times both in reference to the activities of Gawan28 – first in book VII as he approaches the kingdom of Meljanz, later when Gawan and Parzival prepare to challenge one another before Arthur and his court.29 Last, but certainly not least, there is the importance of the game of chess itself, not only in expressions by the narrator30 but most of all in the battle in book VIII.31 Throughout Parzival, it is clear that these games can have tragic results. Knights die (Schionatulander, Isenhart, Ither) or they are maimed (Anfortas, Klinschor); women are raped (Jeschute, Antikonie) or rejected (Orgeluse) or abandoned (Belakane) – and then the cycle begins again as knights then seek to win favor or gain revenge, engaging in contests that 25

The other theses are as follows: Adventure is a process by which one comes to recognize the purpose of one’s life (IV). Schnyder applies this to Erec, Iwein, Parzival and Gawan. Gradually, narratives show an increased number of adventures over the focus on the individual’s fate (V) and adventure no longer focuses solely on the person of the hero (VI) nor on wondrous events but also becomes a calculable risk (VII); see Schnyder, “Sieben Thesen.” 26 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, lines 557.10–14. 27 Edwards, Parzival with Titurel and Love Lyrics, 134. 28 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, line 341.6. 29 Ibid., line 706.4. 30 Ibid., line 115.6. 31 The chess game deserves much more attention than I can give it here. For a recent study, see Hans Jürgen Scheuer, “Schach auf Schanpfanzun. Das Spiel als Exempel im VIII. Buch des “Parzival” Wolframs von Eschenbach,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, Sonderdruck 134.1 (2015): 29–45, for whom the chess game in Book VIII offers a potentially new courtly paradigm. For recent discussions of chess and other games in the Middle Ages, see Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature, ed. Serina Patterson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1–23.

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can result once more in violence. The game has serious consequences for individuals that ripple outward to further disrupt lives and communities. The Grail society suffers because its king sustained a festering wound through love-service to Orgeluse who had engaged him in her grief at the death of her lover Cidegast. The sorcerer Klinschor exerts his power by holding the community at the Schastel marveile hostage, having turned his back on the courtly world after his humiliation in the service of the Queen of Sicily, whose husband castrated Klinschor after the lovers were found in bed together. In their adventures that follow Book VI, after they leave Arthur’s court, Parzival and Gawain ultimately heal the courts at Munsalvaesche and the Schastel marveile, respectively. Wolfram’s complex network of game metaphors creates, for Schnyder, an organizing principle that underscores the idea of chivalric contests as games of chance.32 In book VI, while entranced by the drops of blood in the snow that remind him of his wife, Parzival unhorses Segramors who lands ignominiously on the cold wet ground. At court, despite any insults directed at him, Segramors downplays his defeat at Parzival’s hand. er sprach:” ir habet des vreischet vil, ritterschaft ist topelspil und daz ein man von tjoste viel. ez sinket halt ein mers kiel. (lines 289.23–26) (He said you have just heard much about how chivalry is dice-play, and if a man falls by the joust – well a sea’s keel may sink too, in its time).33

Segramors soothes his wounded ego with the idea that knighthood is a roll of the dice. Among the gaming words that Wolfram uses, the word topel (also meaning “dice-play”) and its related forms stand out because they are few in number. It occurs three times in Parzival and it recurs in Willehalm. Wolfram has used the word topel earlier to comment on the courtly love and the chivalric game: “vil hôhes topels er doch spilt,/ der an ritterschaft nâch minnen zilt” (lines 115.19–20) (For the stakes a man plays for are most high indeed, if he strives for love by chivalry34). This occurs in a highly allusive passage, known as Wolfram’s self-defense, where Wolfram maintains his integrity as a knight despite the anger he harbors 32

See Schnyder “Sieben Thesen,” 371. See also Schnyder, “Glücksspiel und Vorsehung. Die Würfelspielmetaphorik im ‘Parzival’ Wolframs von Eschenbach,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 131.3 (2002), 309. The narrative is also a game, for Schnyder, because the narrated events are also a “throw of the dice,” ibid., 321. 33 Edwards, Parzival with Titurel and Love Lyrics, 122. 34 Ibid., 50.

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toward one particular woman. The game metaphor here emphasizes the importance of the game of love and its high stakes. Significantly, Wolfram uses the term again when the narrator describes the state of affairs after Parzival departs from the Grail castle without having asked the question; after the squire shuts the gate, the narrator comments that the die has been cast: umbe den wurf der sorgen wart getoppelt, do er den grâl vant, mit sînen ougen, âne hant und âne würfels ecke (Parzival lines 248.10–13) (Sorrow’s throw counted double when he found the Grail with his eyes, without a hand, and without the die’s edge).35

Parzival himself has become the die that is cast. Wolfram puns on the meaning of eyes, reminding us that Parzival saw the Grail with his eyes; however, he did not ask the question. Though Parzival himself did not have to make a “throw” (“âne hant”) nor does he have a die’s shape (“ane würfels ecke”), he has determined the story’s next steps through his (in) action.36 He leaves the Grail castle in disgrace and he will need eventually to come to terms with his transgressions. In addition, this is the second time that Parzival himself has been thrown as the dice in the game. The image used at Parzival’s departure from Munsalvaesche recalls the image that accompanies Parzival’s birth at the end of Book II. The hero’s birth marks the throw of the dice that also sets in motion the story for which we have waited: hiest der âventiure wurf gespilt, und ir begin ist gezilt; wand er ist alrêrst geborn, dem diz maere wart erkorn. (lines 112.9–12) (Here the adventure’s dice are thrown and its beginning marked, for now at last he is born on whose account this tale was chosen.)37

Wolfram has made us wait over three thousand verses for this moment. Not only does Parzival’s own story begin, but the true story also begins at last, the story that will bring him through the challenges of the world to the rulership of the Grail. Providence and chance exist in a cosmic balance, where a story is known and yet not known. Schnyder 35

Ibid., 105. Schnyder, “Glücksspiel,” 313. 37 Edwards, Parzival with Titurel and Love Lyrics, 48. 36

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suggests Parzival’s birth is the first real “dice throw” of the tale (âventiure) that determines the arc of the narrative. It is the tale itself that will bring Parzival through the world’s confusion; though the narrator may subordinate his role to âventiure, the poet keeps his tale well in hand.38 While the poet leaves little to chance, despite any protestations to the contrary, chance plays an important role for the reader, who does not know what will come – and for the hero who also has no idea how his story will unfold. From the very beginning of his prologue, Wolfram has compared his text with the arbitrary nature of a game of chance, warning the audience of what is to come;39 we must be prepared to follow how the dice roll in the story that unfolds.40 If we can do so, we will demonstrate the wit required to understand the story properly. We have thereby become the companions of the hare that Wolfram celebrates41 and Gottfried derides;42 Wolfram thus places considerable demands on the audience in terms of interpretive agility,43 reminding us that we will need wit and a clear mind as this game plays out. In addition, Wolfram expands the game metaphor with his use of the word “schanzen” (line 2.13) that refers to dice play as well as a joust. Similarly, terms used in the second paragraph of the prologue are also drawn from jousting; the verbs used also describe the movement of horsemen on the tournament field. Not only, suggests Wolfram, do the tournament and the throw of the dice serve as metaphors for the apparently unruly path of the narrative. But the readers and listeners must also be (at least metaphorically speaking) experienced riders and game players themselves, with the mental acuity that is equivalent to skill in riding or throwing dice, as such skill is necessary in order to understand the story.44 Like Parzival, the audience clearly has work to do. In the Arthurtime of Parzival, where adventure structures the game for both the hero and the audience, both are called to participate as the ethical process of play unfolds. 38

Schnyder, “Sieben Thesen,” 372 and also Schnyder, “Glücksspiel,” 311. Ibid., 320. 40 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, lines 2.13–16. 41 Ibid., lines 2.15–19. 42 Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, lines 4638–44. 43 As a result, says Nellmann, the public is expected to be intellectually nimble. See Eberhard Nellmann, “Dichtung ein Würfelspiel? Zu ‘Parzival’ 2,13 und ‘Tristan’ 4639,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 123.4 (1994), 458–66: 463. 44 Ibid., 463. The gaming metaphors also highlight elements of ambiguity and doubt (zwivel 82ff) – the magpie image (89ff). See Heinrich Hüning, Würfelwörter und Rätselbilder im Parzivalprolog Wolframs von Eschenbach (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000). For Schnyder, the dice metaphors indicate that Wolfram’s ideal audience will not understand his game entirely until the story’s end. Schnyder, “Glücksspiel,” 325. 39

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In the Arthurtime of Parzival and of Iwein, the ethical process of play involves the audience in an exploration of questions about what is right and good. We follow Iwein and Parzival through their stories, asking: What is a good knight? Can Iwein or Parzival seek honor and be a good knight/ruler/person? As decisions are made by actors in the respective romances, Hartmann and Wolfram constantly juxtapose the ideal of adventure/âventiure with the reality of its possible consequences. Hartmann does not necessarily make the same explicit demands of his audience in Iwein as Wolfram does in Parzival. Nevertheless, through the herdsman’s question (âventiure, waz ist daz?) his entire romance becomes an invitation for the audience to reflect on the nature and purpose of adventure. Hartmann shows the audience how Iwein learns to become a better knight who can subordinate his own desire for glory to the needs of others. Like Iwein, Wolfram’s Parzival urges the audience to recognize the hazards of a selfishly shallow quest for fame, to act instead responsibly and compassionately on behalf of others in need. The game metaphors in Parzival extend the herdsman’s query about adventure, amplifying it through the additional dimension of Parzival’s Grail quest. Not only does Parzival need to make amends for his mistreatment of Jeschute and the killing of Ither, but he must also demonstrate his readiness to rule at Munsalvaesche. The game imagery in Parzival juxtaposes a playful image (a relatively harmless throw of the dice) with repeatedly disastrous encounters that leave knights maimed or dead and ladies abused or suffering. Both Iwein and Parzival learn in the second parts of their romances, as they struggle to recover from their respective repudiations by Laudine and by Cundrie, to remedy their faults and make better choices, as their actions become less self-interested and more otherdirected.45 In the end, Parzival needs to ask question more basic and yet far more profound than that of the herdsman, a question that reveals the caritas of a true knight and king; on his second visit to the Grail castle, Parzival finally asks what we and Anfortas have long awaited: “oeheim, was wirret dir” (Parzival line 795.30; “Uncle what troubles you?”46) Parzival’s question of human compassion is a culmination, whereas the herdsman’s question becomes a prism that refracts Iwein’s actions throughout the romance; like the game images in Parzival, it creates the doubled vision that exposes the hollow ideal of knighthood by juxtaposing the ideal of 45

Indeed, during his time in the forest, Iwein wonders if he has dreamed his previous life as a knight (lines 3563–79). Hartmann thereby highlights the contrast between the ephemeral ideal that Iwein pursued and the reality of the situation in which he finds himself. 46 Edwards, Parzival with Titurel and Love Lyrics, 333.

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the adventure game with the sometimes grim reality of its aftermath. It sets in motion the ethical process of play that leads us to critical reflection on questions concerning a knight’s responsibilities to society at large. And in Wolfram’s Grail world, the courtly game highlights even more powerfully that the ultimate purpose of adventure/âventiure done right is the reward of salvation. I want to turn now to three examples of contemporary adaptations that emerge from medieval romance and that remediate the dangerous game of medieval âventiure. They connect the audience with multiple textual and generic networks, providing the audience with an opportunity for “interpretive doubling,” a chance to toggle back and forth between the “work we know and the work we are experiencing.”47 While the adaptations make use of different media and may initially seem incongruous, they have a common purpose: to tell different stories and to play a different game. The first example is the Museum Wolfram von Eschenbach (1995) which integrates Wolfram’s abundant game metaphors as an essential and central part of its presentation. The second example compares the popular tabletop games Shadows over Camelot and King Arthur Pendragon as examples of cooperative games that create a new interface with Arthurtime. As in the medieval romances, elements of humor and play engage our imagination. In our modern examples, humor emerges through what Clare Simmons terms an “appropriate incongruity” that allows our impressions of the medieval past to collide with it, effecting a deeper understanding of both present and past.48 The adventure of medieval romance informs these Arthurian afterlives to uphold a potential framework that can adapt an ethical message relevant to its respective audiences at any given time.

Staging “Arthurtime”: The Museum Wolfram von Eschenbach49 The Museum Wolfram von Eschenbach in the town of Wolframs Eschenbach opened on the threshold of the twenty-first century with a sometimes oblique and often quirky interpretation of Wolfram’s works. 47

See Linda Hutcheon, with Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, second edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 139. On generic and textual networks, see Ann F. Howey, “Arthur and Adaptation,” Arthuriana 25.4 (2015), 36–50: 45. 48 Clare Simmons, “Humor,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 109–15. 49 For a more comprehensive overview of this museum in the context of twentiethcentury German heritage studies and medievalism, see chapter three, “A Knight at the Museum” in Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand, Medieval Literature on Display: Heritage and Culture in Modern Germany (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

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In its displays, the museum urges us to learn lessons from the past in order to move forward. The museum has eleven rooms, each dedicated to an aspect (or a single work) of Wolfram von Eschenbach. There is one room dedicated to what we can derive from his own statements of his biography; three rooms are devoted to Parzival and the story of the Grail knight. There is one room for Titurel, the tale of Parzival’s cousin Sigune and her ill-fated lover Schionatulander, as well as one each for Wolfram’s love poetry and for the Crusade epic Willehalm, the story of William of Orange. Finally, one can see an overview of the reception of Wolfram’s works from the Middle Ages to the present. The museum takes up, implicitly and explicitly, the game metaphors that Wolfram liberally employs in his works, giving the metaphors real shape and form in various displays. Perhaps the most obvious example of this new shape and form can be found in the mobile that fills most of the “family” room (III). The mobile consists of large Tarot cards linked together and illustrates not only Parzival’s family relationships but also the interconnectedness of all characters who appear in the romance – thus underscoring the relatedness of all humankind, which is arguably Wolfram’s primary message. The cards reflect the episodic nature of the plot, which could resemble a Tarot reading – the audience, or Parzival, learns something new, every time a new card is turned over. Tarot is a game of chance; indeed, for those who believe in its future- (or fortune-) telling potential, it is perhaps much more than a game. And it is the element of chance that connects this game with the “topelspil” (dice-play) of chivalry that Wolfram also mentions in book VI of Parzival (line 289.24). The imagery of the rooms devoted to Titurel (Wolfram’s Arthurian fragment) and Willehalm offer a sharp contrast with the playful mobile, warning much more explicitly of the game’s dangers. The Titurel room, for example, glows with a harsh fluorescent light that highlights the tilelike grid on the floor, the white squares outlined in black. The viewers’ gaze is drawn to a solid black gash that rends the grid, ominously suggesting that the fissure could expand. This room was designed to feel, and it does, like a hospital emergency room. Two figures depicted high on the wall opposite the entrance to the room represent Parzival’s cousin and her lover: Schionatulander died in a duel trying to perform loveservice for Sigune, pursuing a dog with a bejeweled leash Sigune greatly desired because it had a text she wanted to read. They are depicted as though they are sitting in the tree where Parzival comes upon them in book V of Parzival. The display should unsettle us a bit; the atmosphere of a modern hospital superimposed on medieval narrative reinforces the

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danger of the chivalric game and the fragility of life.50 When we enter the room, we look up at the lovers through the text of Titurel printed in modern German on a transparent banner that spans the room above our heads. Seeming to wave in an imagined wind, as the dog scampers off in the background, the banner amplifies the sense of fragility and flimsiness that adventure obscures.51 The danger of the game and the card motif come together in the Willehalm display, which (while not Arthurian) deserves mention here. Suffused in a fire-like glow, the room depicts a battlefield: shields are propped against the wall, a huge beam seems ready to fall from the ceiling (Rennewart’s huge staff), and the floor appears strewn with debris. The debris turns out to be a jumble of index-card-sized plaques that recognize the battle dead, including those whose names are not known (people or animals). The card motif recalls the mobile of Parzival’s extended family, but the cards here illustrate the randomness of war, where Saracens and Christians (animals and knights) end up slain side-by-side. Indeed, we witness here the disaster to which the “topelspil” (“dice-play”) of knighthood can lead.52 As yet another comment on the ethical implications of the chivalric game in the modern world, the museum takes the opportunity to repeat the expression “Wälder zu Lanzen!” (“forests to lances”) at three locations. The first instance occurs in room II, paraphrasing a passage in book VII of Parzival in which Wolfram describes the approach of the knight Poydiconjunz before the battle of Bearosch begins; the knight’s forces have more lances than could be made from the trees in the Black Forest (Parzival lines 379.3–8). The image of forest transformed into weapons, destroyed by warrior knights and made into lances, will be taken up and continued in other rooms of the museum, as the museum designers find a common thread in this image that they follow through Wolfram´s later 50

Hasty reminds us that Sigune did not act contrary to accepted norms of courtly behavior – as generally depicted elsewhere in Wolfram’s romances – by insisting that her love be earned with chivalric deeds. “Love and Adventure in Germany,” 271. 51 As Evelyn Meyer noted in the process of editing this essay, modern eyes may also see this banner as film, perhaps recalling an old-fashioned reel of film or a microfilm on which we may encounter some of the only extant versions of medieval texts now. Meyer reminded me that the speed with which film moves through a reel also emphasizes the speed at which life passes by. Furthermore, whether microfilm or reel, these materials would tear easily, underscoring the fragility of life that this room thematizes so starkly. 52 Indeed, it is probably not a coincidence that the word topelspil occurs twice in Wolfram’s works, once in Parzival and once in Willehalm (lines 427.23–29); see Middle High German Conceptual Database/Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank http://mhdbdb.sbg.ac.at:8000/index.html (accessed 20 July 2022).

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works Titurel and in Willehalm.53 The museum’s message for modern readers is a provocative one: humans destroy our forests in order to kill one another with lances made from good wood that would have perfectly good and peaceful uses. Wolfram’s message for the thirteenth century is not necessarily one of environmental protection; rather, he is criticizing knightly pursuits and the code of chivalry. Nevertheless, says the museum, Wolfram’s critique of forest misuse should resonate with us now, if for different reasons. Whether knights destroy the Black Forest to make weapons for combat in a nominally chivalric contest or whether the same forest deteriorates due to acid rain or industrial clear-cutting, the effect is the same: people and the world suffer. The displays urge modern players of the chivalric game to apply Parzival’s question (“oeheim, was wirret dir” line 795.30; “Uncle what troubles you?”54) not just to the Grail king but to one another – because, as the mobile in Room III reminds us, all humans are related. The Museum Wolfram von Eschenbach also extends the idea of the reckless and futile game of chivalry to emphasize not only the playfulness of Wolfram’s presentation but also the arbitrary nature of the game-asgame. The museum wants its visitors to question the game and then to question themselves. The museum’s almost whimsical design contributes to an “alienating” playfulness that compels the viewer to engage with Wolfram’s works as well as the museum’s message: about war, about peace, about learning from the past, about discarding destructive and injurious ideals. In the ethical process of play, game is the metaphor, play is the vehicle, and adventure as ethically appropriate behavior is the goal. Thus, the museum is another answer to the question: what is adventure? The museum re-mediates Parzival, Titurel, and Willehalm, by translating older two-dimensional narrative into three-dimensional space which literally surrounds visitors with Wolfram’s narratives. As we move from room to room, as we admire clever displays like the mobile of Tarot cards or the lance-forest, the museum draws us playfully into its game: humorous yet earnest display of Wolfram’s world and literature. Conversely, like Parzival and Titurel (and indeed like Iwein), the museum also insists that we recognize the game’s danger, a message that resounds most powerfully through the depiction of Willehalm’s battlefield but resonates clearly throughout all of the other displays as well: chivalry’s game has potentially serious, even life-threatening, consequences for 53

The museum guide quotes the three sections from Parzival (line 379.3–8), Titurel (lines 31.1–4) and Willehalm (lines 389.20–390.8) that contain this phrase and this image. See Museum Wolfram von Eschenbach, ed. Oskar Geidner, Hartmut Beck, Karl Bertau, Dietmar Peschel-Rentsch (Wolframs-Eschenbach, 1994), 25. 54 Edwards, Parzival with Titurel and Love Lyrics, 333.

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all who play it. In the suspended “Arthurtime” of the museum, echoes of the thirteenth century resound in the twenty-first. Forests should not necessarily be turned into lances, for we can take better care both of the forests and of the knights who seek to carry those lances. A heedless challenge or the vain demand for love-service can lead to a joust that can kill. The inability to recognize the suffering of others will prolong and compound that suffering. Death does not distinguish between Muslims and Christians. While the aspect of the dangerous game confronts each visitor anew, the museum has fixed installations that have not changed significantly since the museum opened in 1995. The world around them, however, has certainly changed. The museum’s creative displays urge us to consider the complexity of Wolfram’s literature and his medieval world. The museum invites us into the experimental space of Arthurtime and confronts us with Wolfram’s questions about the nature and the consequences of adventure: is it right to raze forests to make lances for repeated episodes of combat that are part of a capricious game? Can a duel for love service ever be completely innocuous? Can one ever wage a just war? As a modern creation, the museum also demands that we ask and seek to answer those questions with respect not only to Wolfram’s works but also to our lives now: military campaigns still ravage the environment wherever they take place; the ideals of courtly love, filtered through nineteenth-century romanticism and romance novels, have heavily imprinted modern popular culture. Twenty-first century visitors step across the threshold from a world “outside” that must even more regularly and explicitly contend with populist (mis)appropriations of the medieval in support of contemporary ideologies such as racism, nationalism, and political extremism.55 New critical perspectives compel us to acknowledge, for example, that our understandings of medieval texts are always mediated by previous interpretations with attendant cultural biases. The museum does address the reception of Wolfram’s works in one of its rooms (room IX) but it keeps its primary focus on the medieval literary texts and the themes that emerge from them, despite the very contemporary nature of the installations. Wolfram’s Parzival is perhaps most frequently encountered by the general public in the work of Richard Wagner, for example, who is mentioned briefly in room IX. The museum, however, does not take the next step to address Wagner as the representative of a nineteenth-century German imagination that saw 55

This would be an aspect of what Andrew Elliott calls “banal medievalism.” Medievalism, Politics, and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twentyfirst Century (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), 36.

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their Middle Ages as a community that was homogenous, German(ic), European, white. Certainly, the museum does not ignore the figures of Feirefiz, Gyburc or Rennewart in the contexts of their respective works. The room dedicated to Willehalm makes a powerful statement about the arbitrary nature of war that kills all, even the animals, heedless of creed or race. The museum emphatically proclaims a socially conscious message that resonates with current discourse about peace and about sustainability. The issue of race, however, has come to the forefront of medievalist discourse in the last two decades and – for current audiences – it could be more prominently addressed in the museum.56 Given their physical immutability, however, the displays in the Museum Wolfram von Eschenbach cannot engage overtly with the contemporary metanarratives that entangle the modern Middle Ages. Despite the museum’s desire to engage its modern audience and its focus on social justice issues, it unwittingly restricts the further unfolding of the ethical process of play in the relative rigidity of its displays.

Engaging “Arthurtime”: Tabletop Camelot Arthurian games are not new. From board games to role-play and the new “terrain”57 of digital or online multi-player modes, they are everpopular Arthurian products that can be found in a wide variety of genres.58 Before going any further, I humbly acknowledge the extensive and ever-growing corpus of research on medievalism and games; my interest here does not concern virtual/digital games, though I do suggest the arguments put forward here could apply in those media. I will focus more narrowly here on tabletop games, specifically two types of cooperative games: board games and role-playing games (RPG). I discuss 56

Lisa Lampert offers one example of how to do this in “Race, Periodicity, and the (Neo-) Middle Ages,” Modern Language Quarterly 65.3 (September 2004), 391–421. See also the series on race and racism in Paul Sturtevant’s The Public Medievalist (www.publicmedievalist.com; accessed 20 July 2022), in this context the essay by Helen Young on “Where Do the White Middle Ages Come From?” (21 March 2017; www.publicmedievalist.com/white-middle-ages-come/; accessed 20 July 2022). 57 See Andrew B. R. Elliott, “Medievalism,” in Handbook of Arthurian Romance: King Arthur’s Court in Medieval European Literature, ed. Leah Tether and Johnny McFadyen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 293–306: 301. This falls into the category of “experiential” (Pugh/Weisl) or “participatory” medievalism (Kline); see Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), and Daniel T. Kline, “Participatory Medievalism, Role-playing, and Digital Gaming,” in Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 75–89. 58 See Elizabeth Sklar, “Marketing Arthur: The Commodification of the Arthurian Legend,” in King Arthur in Popular Culture, ed. Elizabeth S. Sklar and Donald L. Hoffman (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002) 9–23; 16ff.

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one example of each type, Shadows over Camelot (Laget and Cathala 2005) and King Arthur Pendragon (Stafford 1985, edition 5.2 2016). I contend that cooperative games allow players to explore ethical questions at a more uniquely negotiable interface of Arthurtime’s “neither now nor never.” The Museum Wolfram von Eschenbach playfully responds to Wolfram’s portrayal of the chivalric game, but its displays straddle the space between showing and enacting, to borrow from Hutcheon.59 Certainly, as visitors step into rooms that surround them with Wolfram’s narratives, the museum engages them through humor and play. The museum prompts viewers to ask: What is a good knight? What does it mean to do battle for love? What is the value of worldly gain? The interactions remain comparatively passive, however, and one-sided; the museum does most of the work because the designers direct our view with their answers to the questions the displays raise. The designers based their interpretations on deep and close reading of the medieval texts that they translated into complex visual form. The interpretations are compelling, so much so that the voice of the museum dominates, the voice of Wolfram’s texts mediated by the designers who have crammed every possible detail into their displays. The museum is not as open a text itself as one might first expect; its fixed displays remain static, as does the interface between visitor and display.60 I suggest recent tabletop Camelots offer an equally compelling yet more experiential and dynamic means of remediating âventiure for the modern age, as the cooperative potential of the tabletop translates the museum’s static game metaphor into interactive game-play. The games invite guests not just to come in and look around but to take a name, to roll the dice themselves, to make choices, to shape their story. Each time players come together, they configure the Round Table anew; their Arthurtime becomes a space for twenty-first century adventurers to consider similar choices to those faced by Iwein and Parzival. In the following, then, I highlight key aspects of Shadows and Pendragon that facilitate active ethical engagement in the process of play, focusing particularly on the creation of community, the common good, and the nature of knighthood. 59

In chapter one of A Theory of Adaptation Hutcheon identifies three ways in which adaptations basically work: they tell, they show, and they enact. 60 The museum also presents a challenge for visitors unfamiliar with German or the German Arthurian tradition or the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach. The mobile in the “family room” (Room III) is a brilliant representation of the family relationships among the characters in Parzival, for example, but there is little explanation of this in the room itself. One has to have a certain familiarity with the story in order to appreciate the complexity of the display. Details like the footprints of the hopping hare, an image from the prologue to Parzival, are delightful – but arguably one misses the message if one does not know the text well.

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Shadows over Camelot Shadows over Camelot by Serge Laget and Bruno Cathala, was published in 2005 and became the first unqualified success for a non-RPG Arthurian board game. In a review on RPGnet, Shannon Appelcline calls it a “pseudo-roleplaying game in board game form.”61 The preamble to the rule book establishes the narrative, serious yet tongue-in-cheek. The game celebrates its collaborative focus, emphasizing to players that this game is different from any other. Indeed, it has a “word on collaborating” at the beginning of the rule book. The game also suggests that there are times to collaborate openly, times to keep any negotiations to yourself – and if you are the traitor, you can try to sabotage others – however, the injunction not to cheat introduces some intriguing gray areas that could generate interesting conversations at the very least. There are seven quests and up to seven players can play (the minimum is three). The Quest book for Shadows has elements of actual quests – like the Grail quest. The instruction book outlines both individual quests, such as the challenge of the Black Knight or the Quest for Lancelot, as well as group quests, such as fighting assailants of Camelot (the Picts or the Saxons) or winning the Grail. There are also penalties for knights who decide to leave a solo quest to participate in a multi-player quest. Knights share tasks, demonstrating actual cooperation in a common effort; Christopher Allen and Shannon Appelcline, authors of Meeples Together. How and Why Cooperative Board Games Work, call this tactical cooperation.62 Allen and Appelcline, however, see Shadows as a game driven primarily by strategic cooperation; players must decide who will go on any given quest at a particular time to meet the game’s multiple threats on differentiated quests, for solo knights or multiple knights – “with the multi-knight quests usually being tougher than the solos.”63 Decisions are based on available resources and likelihood of success; players draw cards, generically labeled White (good things) or Black (bad things), to determine what action they will take on a turn and evaluate – or negotiate – the consequences of that action. It is possible that one knight could engage in a multi-knight quest but might end up wasting his time. Meeples Together considers Shadows “a foundational game of the cooperative genre” because of its introduction of the traitor 61

Appelcline, “Review of Shadows over Camelot,” www.rpg.net/reviews/ archive/11/11415.phtml (accessed on 20 July 2022). 62 Christopher Allen and Shannon Appelcline, Meeples Together. How and Why Cooperative Board Games Work (Roseville, MN: Gameplaywright, 2018), 87. 63 Ibid., 119.

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element. It was also one of the first games to force players to choose between the personal and the common good.64 The mechanics of the game, at least in my experience and that of my students, can definitely compel us to act in theme-appropriate ways. On the other hand, while each quest appears different, it is essentially the same in terms of the mechanics required to lay down magic cards and manage challenges. In that way, one could also describe Shadows as a serial solitary game. One can collaborate on quests, following the rules above, and the game’s theme may enhance game play but it is also not essential. In other words, the Arthurian narrative elements in Shadows encourage players to behave like knights in the procedural rhetoric of the game but players do not need to know much about the knights (or the narrative) to do so. One of my playing companions once allowed that Shadows over Camelot would work well with very little change set in the Hundred Years’ War. Shadows opens the participatory door to Arthurtime and creates interactive space through its cooperative mechanics. The game does not, however, integrate the Arthurian narrative very deeply into its game design, and one might desire the game to be more “narratively coherent” in general.65 Nevertheless, like the quests of medieval romances, the quests in Shadows facilitate choices that consistently require the players to weigh the value of knightly pursuits against the common good: do I join my fellow knights on the Grail quest or do I challenge the Black Knight on my own? Do I go on the quest for Excalibur while the Picts besiege Camelot? Players in the game must also advance evil as part of each turn; in other words, a player must always undertake a good and a negative action. This means that there is always a confrontation to manage and the victory of evil remains a distinct possibility in every game. Camelot’s success or failure depends on the choices that the players make in any given situation. Game-play facilitates the ethical process of play, as players enact decisions that respond to the continual dilemmas confronting them over the course of the game.

King Arthur Pendragon We now turn to the game almost universally acclaimed as the gold standard of Arthurian role-playing games: Greg Stafford’s King Arthur Pendragon. A commercial and critical success since 1985, Pendragon 64 65

Ibid., 357. S. Samothrakis, “Narrative Progression Traits for Role-Playing Games,” Game & Puzzle Design 2.1 (2016), 38–45: 40. Samothrakis also sees Pendragon as a game that leaves relatively little to chance.

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offers a complex game that anchors its role-playing firmly in Arthurian literary ground, drawing from Stafford’s long fascination with and broad knowledge of Arthurian legends. Anthony Lloyd Montgomery calls the game a “love letter to Sir Thomas Malory,”66 while Elizabeth Sklar marvels at the extensive bibliography of the Game Master’s Book, showing the game to be “a veritable treasure-trove” of historical and literary information.67 Stafford himself touts the game’s foundation in history and literature, suggesting that another game like Prince Valiant might be more to a player’s liking if “you don’t want to bother with rules or history or literature.”68 Expressing the general consensus of many, Andrew Elliott declares that Pendragon “most obviously characterizes the enthusiasm and freedom of the fantasy RPG genre.”69 The focus of discussion here is the newest version of the game, edition 5.2, updated by Stafford himself. This complex game deserves an essay of its own; nevertheless, I focus here on three aspects of Pendragon that prompt a deeper ethical engagement than we find in Shadows: community, the nature of knighthood, and social attributes. Stafford sets out the Pendragon realm in great detail in chapter one of the rulebook. The game actually spans several generations from start to ultimate finish, taking place during the time period between 485 and 565; ending with Arthur’s death at Camlann, it begins during the reign of Uther Pendragon. The place is Salisbury. news has come that more Saxons are gathering in far Saxony to come to the aid of their kinsmen in Britain. The preparations for yet more war are building, and the noble British knights prepare once again to defend the realm under their courageous Pendragon. Your character’s ancestors, your grandfather, and father, participate in these events…70

Evident here is the importance of family lineage. Each player is a knight with a family history yet to be determined according to tables in chapter three. Players are embedded not only in historical circumstances, to the greatest detail possible, but also in a family story. A list of possible 66

Montgomery asserts: “If Call of Cthulhu was Chaosium’s greatest commercial success, this game was their greatest artistic one.” (https://andrewloganmontgomery. blogspot.com/2019/05/king—arthur—pendragon—52.html; accessed 20 July 2022). 67 See Sklar, “Marketing Arthur,” 17. 68 Greg Stafford, King Arthur Pendragon, fifth edn (Houston, TX: Nocturnal Media, 2016). 69 Elliott notes the rare commercial and critical success, as the game was able to capitalize on the popularity of John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur. “Medievalism,” 301. 70 Stafford, King Arthur Pendragon, 15–16.

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events is provided71 and the rolls of the dice determine the relationship of the player’s family to the event. Not only does the prominence of family lend an element of verisimilitude to the game play, but the family structure also ensures that all players are embedded in a “larger web of relationships,”72 which enhances cooperative play. Furthermore, family is the mechanism by which the game continues. Glory and honor are important; however, family is a vital part of an ongoing game. The game is designed to extend over several generations. A player needs a family in the game in order to turn over everything to an heir, which then becomes the player’s new character when the previous one dies or retires. The cross-generational play is a new element, since in most games one plays a character till death or retirement and then starts over with an entirely new character. For Stafford, this game is about knights and what knights do.73 All the players in the game (other than the game master) are knights whose goal in the game is to grow in “Glory.” The game does not include the normal fantasy tropes; in other words, one does not (and cannot) play the normal fantasy character classes or types such as dwarves or elves or clerics. Each player is simply human and simply a knight. Stafford is also straightforward about the decisions he makes in game-design; he clearly knows the limits of history and literature, and he clearly knows when he bends the rules. We may question his decisions, but he offers definitive and compelling reasons for the decisions he makes; the story of Pendragon takes place in the fifth century, for example, but the rules and laws are those of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe. Of his decision to focus only on knights, Stafford explains that he did not want to “mimic the popular conception of fantasy that threw every possible player type into a big messy pool of options. I wanted to stick to the standards of literature, and did not cater to commoners, thieves, scribes, or even magicians.”74 Knights clearly remain embedded in their family relationships, as family obligations are sources of glory, along with the usual options such as combat, chivalrous behavior, religious behavior,

71

Ibid., 58ff. Shannon Appelcline, “Pendragon,” in Hobby Games: The 100 Best, ed. James Lowder (Seattle, WA: Green Ronin Publishing, 2007), 236–39. 73 Stafford acknowledges the male-oriented focus and insists there is space for women: “Keep in mind this important fact: The Arthurian legend has survived for 1,400 years because it has been able to adapt to the needs of its audience. Therefore, if you wish, there is certainly room in the Enchanted Realm for women knights.” King Arthur Pendragon, 34. 74 Ibid., 259. 72

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social position, possessions, and riches.75 Stafford focuses exclusively on knights as characters, though there are others, and he derives a concept of knighthood for his players centered around the idea of conflict. This certainly applies in a medieval or a modern context: “King Arthur Pendragon is about conflict. Knights fight. They are warriors, and must endanger themselves for their livelihood…”76 There are other conflicts in this list, such as conflict of lifestyle or conflict and its consequences. For our purposes here, it is most significant that Stafford continually turns the question to his players: “So beside that, what kind of knight are you?” He asks further: “Are you content with fighting and drinking? Are you moved by ideals of religion or virtue?” And finally he states simply: “All characters in the game will die. Guaranteed. But what kind of knight will yours be?”77 Right at the outset, then, Stafford opens the ethical space in which the players will engage. Passions and traits, that is, the game mechanics that enable players to quantify an individual character’s inner self, open the negotiable space further.78 All characters begin with the same passions: loyalty (to lord), love (of family), hospitality, honor and hate (of Saxons). The Gamemaster and player can negotiate over the creation of a new passion during the game if circumstances warrant, and the Gamemaster can create others over the course of the game. There are thirteen character traits listed in pairs on the Knight’s Character Sheet; these include, for example, pairs such as chaste/lustful, generous/selfish, honest/deceitful, spiritual/ worldly.79 A character must possess both traits in a pair; the mechanics of the game do not allow one without the other. Players determine trait values by starting with a prescribed value (most traits begin with a value of ten, for example, though the valorous trait always begins at a value of fifteen). And then they roll the twenty-sided die (1d20) to come up with the actual value for their character. Since every virtue has an opposing vice and the total of both must add up to twenty in play, this compels the balance in any given character.80 When the question of appropriate and correct behavior arises, the traits add nuance and a degree of agency on the part of the player. For 75

Ibid., 8. Ibid., 30. 77 Ibid., 30. 78 Ibid., 33. 79 To these pairs, the full list adds: energetic/lazy, forgiving/vengeful, just/ arbitrary, merciful/cruel, prudent/reckless, temperate/indulgent, trusting/ suspicious, valorous/cowardly, modest/proud. 80 If a character has a twelve in generous, for example, then he has an eight in selfish. Or if a character has a fifteen in worldly, he has a five in spiritual. 76

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White, this is the game-mechanical innovation in Pendragon that allows for ethical movement that can define a character’s personality so as to influence behavior. In other words, if a character with high Pride wanted to forgive an insult he received from a non-player character (NPC) guest of his lord,… the GM could call for a die roll that might result in the character refusing to bite his tongue, regardless of the player’s wishes.81

The social attributes open spaces where players can participate in deeper ethical considerations (i.e. situations in which a passion is relevant); the game mechanics generate these situations and then also allow for an appropriate advantage or negative consequence as a result. The traits also permit nuanced interactions depending on the context.82 Stafford intended the use of “traits and passions” to determine the parameters of behavior, and “correctness” in the Arthurian setting. If a character gains the proper traits and passions, then “he is doing just exactly those things that constitute correct behavior in Arthurian society.”83 In the dimensions of social attributes, Pendragon offers hitherto unexplored connections with the growing interest in the moral and ethical impacts of games and play. Since the 1980’s, role-playing games have been the epicenter of what Laycock terms “moral panic.”84 In their introduction to a recent special issue of the journal Games and Culture devoted to issues of “Morality Play,” Malcom Ryan and his co-authors raise questions regarding design options for including ethics within games and the way design choices impact the type and degree of player engagement with morality in games?85 In the same volume, Karen Schrier discusses the evaluation of the procedural rhetoric of games in terms of

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See William J. White et al., “Tabletop Role-Playing Games,” in Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations, ed. S. Deterding and J. Zagal (London: Routledge, 2018), 33. 82 William White, “The Right to Dream of the Middle Ages: Simulating the Medieval in Tabletop RPGs,” in Digital Gaming Reimagines the Middle Ages, ed. Daniel T. Kline (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 15–28: 23. 83 Stafford, King Arthur Pendragon, 83. 84 Joseph P. Laycock, Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic Over Role-playing Games Says About Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2015). Byers and Crocco offer an overview of role-playing games, their history as well as issues and controversies. See The Role-Playing Society: Essays on the Cultural Influence of RPGs, ed. Andrew Byers and Francesco Crocco (Jefferson, SC: McFarland, 2016.) 85 See Malcolm Ryan, Paul Formosa, and Rowan Tulloch, “Playing Around with Morality: Introducing the Special Issue on “Morality Play,”” Games and Culture 14.4 (2019), 299–305.

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moral content, such as the inclusion of moral choices.86 In Pendragon, even more explicitly than in Shadows, the question of “what is adventure?” becomes “what kind of knight will I be?” The question demands, at least on the game level, a degree of introspection and self-reflection that can inform the decisions of game play. Furthermore, as White suggests, the audiences for these games “are increasingly aware of the game as offering a choice about how and what to play.”87 In this way, these tabletop games actualize the ethical process of play, adapting Arthurtime as an interactive and negotiable interface where players can enact their choices and participate in a kind of living culture – at least for the duration of the game.88

Conclusion Finally, at the end of an essay on adventure, games, and play, it seems appropriate to mention the infamous magic circle. Huizinga introduces the circle as one of several ritual spaces where play can occur.89 The circle has remained a topic of vigorous discussion in game studies since Tekinbaş and Zimmerman made the circle an element of game design: a division between play and reality, between order and chaos, between ritual and ordinary life.90 In talking about participatory medievalism, Kline describes the circle as a “porous membrane rather than a fixed boundary” that also applies to the “neither now nor never” of Arthurtime, whether we want to call that play-space a magic circle 86

Karen Schrier, “Designing Games for Moral Learning and Knowledge Building,” Games and Culture 14.4 (2019), 306–43. 87 White, “Right to Dream,” 25. This resembles what Schlechtweg-Jahn terms virtual story-telling. In the space of the game, where the world of the story meets the world of the audience, the audience understands that it is both co-present and not present in the story. 88 The medieval is “more than just a stockpile of historically static facts”; it is also “a living, subversive presence in contemporary culture.” Kline, “Introduction: All Your History Are Belong to Us,” in Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages, 1–11: 10. 89 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London and Boston, MA: Routledge, 1944), 4. 90 Tekinbaş and Zimmerman adapt Huizinga’s concept in chapter nine of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). Ultimately Calleja argues for a more complex understanding of the circle, with regard to boundary negotiation, especially for digital games and virtual reality scenarios. See Gordon Calleja, “Ludic Identities and the Magic Circle,” in Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Culture, ed. Valerie Frissen, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Jos de Mul, Joost Raessens (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 211–24: 222.

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or not.91 Arthurtime enfolds the game of adventure in a separate space; the delineation is real though the boundaries might remain somewhat ambiguous. Paraphrasing Gilbert, I would suggest that Arthurian play also displays not just double vision, but a double consciousness. And this double consciousness ensures that the games and the play of Arthurtime adventure can resonate both inside and outside that separate multivalent space, encompassing thirteenth-century narrative as well as twentiethcentury museum and a spectrum of games from tabletop to console. As we moderns continue to revel in the “palimpsestuous intertextuality” of Arthurian narratives, we not only want to “speak about, teach, and theorize their pleasures.”92 We want to enact and interact with those “pleasures” as well; games like these offer a perfect opportunity to do just that. As we play our modern versions of adventure, we also continue the ethical process of play that Arthurian narratives have cultivated since the Middle Ages; like medieval audiences, we are called to negotiate and renegotiate the space between play and seriousness, between real and ideal, between our “now” and an Arthurian “then.”93 Game and gameplay offer various entry points into Arthurtime, creating different spaces for audiences from the thirteenth century to the present to interrogate the chivalric endeavor of adventure. In Iwein and Parzival, adventure becomes 91

Kline, “Participatory Medievalism,” 76. See Gail Ashton and Daniel Kline, “Introduction,” in Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–13: 6. The dichotomy between play and seriousness goes back to antiquity. Patterson cites Curtius in Games and Gaming in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2015), 7. 93 A number of studies posit medieval romance as an elastic space for medieval audiences: in its virtuality, see for example Haiko Wandhoff, “Jenseits der Gutenberg-Galaxis. Das Mittelalter und die Medientheorie,” in Bilder vom Mittelalter. Eine Berliner Ringvorlesung, ed. Volker Mertens and Carmen Stange (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2007), 13–34; in its visuality, in addition to the work of Michael Curschmann, see Carsten Morsch, Blickwendungen: Virtuelle Räume und Wahrnehmungserfahrungen in höfischen Erzählungen um 1200 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2011); in its ability to make the past present in a process of “Vergegenwärtigung,” see Horst Wenzel, Mediengeschichte vor und nach Gutenberg (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlich Buchgesellschft, 2007). Like romance, the Middle Ages itself offers its interpreters an elastic space for game and play; see Kevin Moberly and Brent Moberly, “Play,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, 173–80; also, Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012). New research in medieval German studies is offering new perspectives on digital analogues to medieval romance; see the special edition of the journal Paidia (www.paidia. de/) on medieval studies and computer games: Sonderausgabe ,Vom ‚Wigalois‘ zum ‚Witcher‘ – Mediävistische Zugänge zum Computerspiel, ed. Franziska Ascher and Thomas Müller, particularly the articles by Cornelia Pierstorff and Ralf Schlechtweg-Jahn (accessed 20 July 2022). 92

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a framework for ethical behavior. Iwein explores the tensions between individual desire and the common good, tensions that affect not only the courtly but also the Grail world in Parzival. In Parzival, Wolfram’s language amplifies the game-like qualities of adventure, where human perception of chance is ultimately tempered by divine Providence. Gameplay even more explicitly structures the ethical framework of adventure in various Arthurian adaptations that make use of Arthurian discourse to engage modern audiences with the quest for self-knowledge in the service of wider community. The Museum Wolfram von Eschenbach engages in the play of display, creating clever and whimsical visualizations of Wolfram’s works underscored by contemporary social issues. Whereas the Museum Wolfram von Eschenbach playfully but passively (with respect to the visitor’s experience) responds to Wolfram’s portrayal of the chivalric game, I suggest that tabletop Camelots like Shadows over Camelot and Pendragon offer an equally compelling and much more interactive means of remediating âventiure for the modern age. What is adventure? In answer to Hartmann’s question, the adaptations exhort us to make different choices, to tell different stories, and to play a different game.

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The Ethics of a New Edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur – and More Evidence for the Superiority of the Winchester Manuscript

FIONA TOLHURST AND K. S. WHETTER

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ne of the merits of this volume on Arthurian ethics is its acknowledgment of the variety of ethical issues present in the Arthurian corpus.1 Individual Arthurian texts can have fundamentally different underlying moral philosophies. To take a representative example, the French Queste del Saint Graal (c. 1215–30) reflects monastic Christian values. As a result, the Quest proper begins with a prohibition against excessive intermingling of men and women, and it turns out there is an equally strong prohibition throughout the Quest against excessive bloodshed.2 Lancelot gets into trouble on both counts: his custom of fighting and inflicting serious, blood-drawing physical damage upon others to enhance his own earthly reputation no longer brings him glory when measured against the strict Christian values of the Grail Quest, and his love affair with the queen disqualifies him from coming too near the holy object that is the goal of this new quest.3 In contrast to La Queste, the non-cyclic prose Lancelot (early thirteenth century) – even more than its cyclic counterpart – reflects courtly values in celebrating both knightly prowess and earthly love. This text valorizes Lancelot and Guenievre’s adulterous affair, making it clear that Lancelot’s love saves Arthur’s kingdom and Guenievre’s life and concluding with the queen’s

1

Fiona died unexpectedly whilst this paper was under review but the argument and wording are complete as she intended. It is dedicated to her (KSW, 26.vii.22). 2 La Queste del Saint Graal: Roman du XIIIe Siècle, ed. Albert Pauphilet (1923; Paris: Champion, 1978), 19.3–27. 3 See especially ibid., 65.7–71.27, 116.2–33, 140.5–145.4, 254.20–258.24.

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public declaration of her justified love for Lancelot.4 These two thirteenthcentury French texts illustrate how Lancelot, as a literary character, changes with each ethical standard by which he is measured, from the time of his twelfth-century creation by Chrétien de Troyes in Le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot) through to his last medieval appearance in Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century Le Morte Darthur. Indeed, during this period Lancelot becomes an ethical conundrum: “at once the loyal servant, the loyal lover, and the supreme traitor.”5 As the examples of the French Queste and the non-cyclic Lancelot reveal, each author takes a different approach to the issue of Lancelot’s ethical standing in order to suit the hero to the text and contexts he inhabits. Sir Thomas Malory downplays the treachery of Launcelot’s affair with Gwenyvere as much as he can, even going so far as to present both lovers – like their counterparts Trystram and Isode – as sympathetically as possible, even when they get caught together in the queen’s bedroom.6 For Malory, as for some other Arthurian authors, a strict code of Christian ethics and swashbuckling heroism do not comfortably coexist. In modern publishing as in medieval Arthurian texts, there is no single code of ethics; the only certainties are reissued textbooks and price hikes. Professors and students try to order a textbook for class, only to learn that the text – whether of medieval Arthurian literature or microbiology – that was perfectly viable a year or two ago has been discontinued and replaced with a new, often annoyingly repaginated, and invariably more expensive edition. Although this chapter does not focus on the ethics of modern publishing, including what is frequently, for students, the shady world of secondhand campus book-buyers, it is nonetheless true that academic presses are under at least as much economic pressure as commercial ones. Consequently, the profit margins on classroom editions of medieval texts are especially tight, thereby making it difficult to produce books that meet the ethical standards of a good classroom edition: affordability, reliability, and readability.7 To 4



Lancelot do Lac: The Non-Cyclic Old French Prose Romance, ed. Elspeth Kennedy, vol. I: Text (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 608.14–609.27. 5 Derek Brewer, “The Presentation of the Character of Lancelot: Chrétien to Malory,” Arthurian Literature 3 (1983), 26–52: 33. 6 On the thematic and generic consequences of the Gwenyvere-Launcelot and IsodeTrystram parallel, including the importance of the sympathetic parallels Malory creates between the four lovers, see our Arthurian Intertextualities: Misreading and Re-reading Malory’s Morte Darthur and the Alliterative and Stanzaic Mortes (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), especially chapter four. 7 For the purposes of price comparison throughout this chapter, we consulted Amazon.com in April 2020 and rounded prices to the nearest US dollar.

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clarify, a classroom edition differs from a critical edition in purpose, market, and textual apparatus: the former is designed to give students (and general readers) a quality text at a reasonable price, a text whose scholarly apparatus aims almost exclusively to facilitate understanding of both the text and its cultural contexts. The latter is designed to facilitate scholarship by providing a text of unsurpassed reliability, one that often costs much more than a classroom edition due to its target market (scholars and academic libraries) and has greater heft. Because a critical edition’s apparatus is more complex, not only facilitating textual understanding but also addressing specialist concerns such as stemmata and textual variants, scholars expect to pay more for it.8 The appearance of any new edition requires that it has a market, meaning it is justified economically. Economic viability, however, does not necessarily coexist with ethical justification for production. A key ethical question to ask of any new edition is this: does it have sufficient reliability (greater than free, online options) such that professors can reasonably require students to pay its market price? Yet measuring a textbook’s reliability is always complicated by the fact that every new edition justifies its publication through a claim, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, that the previous edition of this newly edited text is inadequate.9 As scholar-teachers who are preparing a new classroom edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur for Broadview Press,10 we will seek to answer the question of whether or not there is an ethical justification for a new classroom edition of Malory’s Morte Darthur by measuring several Malory editions currently on the market against the standards of affordability, reliability, and readability. Based on an 8

Our somewhat artificial distinction between “classroom edition” and “critical edition” is a convenient shorthand for distinguishing between related but somewhat different kinds of editions (and apparatuses) and the different needs of two audiences: the audience reading an edition intended for students (first-time or general readers) compared to the audience reading an edition intended for scholars (expert readers). At least for pre-modern literature, we conclude that part of the reliability of a good classroom edition stems from its being subject to editorial judgment – to being critically edited. Nevertheless, our two types of edition are distinguishable by editorial approach as well as size and cost. As Tanselle observes, “the kind of apparatus” an editor produces is obviously determined by “the type of audience for which the edition is intended”: see G. Thomas Tanselle, “Some Principles for Editorial Apparatus,” Studies in Bibliography 25 (1972), 41–88: 42. 9 Ralph Hanna III, “Producing Manuscripts and Editions,” in Crux and Controversy in Middle English Textual Criticism, ed. A. J. Minnis and Charlotte Brewer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992), 109–30: 109–10. 10 The Broadview Morte Darthur, ed. Fiona Tolhurst and K. S. Whetter (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, forthcoming). Later in the essay this edition is cited as BMD, followed by the manuscript folio number.

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analysis of not only the ethical underpinnings of editing Malory’s book but also the merits and shortcomings of the Malory textbooks currently available, The Broadview Morte Darthur is ethically justified.

The Ethics of Editing Malory’s Morte It is a truism of textual criticism that a modern edition of a medieval text not only presents the text but also interprets it; this interpretation, in turn, often encourages users of the edition to take a particular interpretive stance. Given that there is only one extant manuscript of Malory’s book, the reliability of the various editions of Le Morte Darthur is more difficult to assess than general readers would think. The single manuscript of Malory’s Morte is London, British Library Additional MS 59678, often referred to as the “Winchester manuscript” due to its discovery in 1934 at Winchester College.11 This manuscript, which dates to the late 1470s and was copied by two otherwise unknown scribes, is not a holographic manuscript since Malory completed the Morte in 1469–70 and died in 1471. Yet the manuscript is closer to what Malory wrote than is the second-earliest textual witness, William Caxton’s printed edition of 1485.12 Most scholars agree that Caxton intrusively edited Malory’s work, yet they have wide-ranging opinions about the relative value of Caxton’s incunabulum and the Winchester manuscript – in part because of how drastically Caxton truncated Malory’s account of the Roman War. As a result, the ethics of editing Malory’s Morte are complex indeed. A key ethical issue affecting how scholars edit Le Morte Darthur is related to reliability: how closely should a modern edition replicate the physical appearance of the Winchester manuscript’s medieval text? For book historians and cultural materialists, “the format and material

11

The manuscript can be accessed in a printed black-and-white facsimile and an online color facsimile. See, respectively, The Winchester Malory: A Facsimile, introduction by N. R. Ker, Early English Text Society supplementary series 4 (London: Oxford University Press, 1976); and The Malory Project, directed by Takako Kato and designed by Nick Hayward (www.maloryproject.com, accessed 13 April 2020). 12 Caxton’s incunabulum survives in two copies: a complete copy in the Pierpont Morgan Library, and a copy missing a few leaves in the John Rylands Library. Both are now available in facsimile. See, respectively, Le Morte D’Arthur printed by William Caxton, 1485, introduction by Paul Needham (London: Scolar Press, 1976); “Thus endeth thys noble and ioyous book entytled Le morte Darthur…” Bookreader Reference item 18930 in the University of Manchester’s Digital Collections (Luna. manchester.ac.uk, accessed 13 April 2020). The common view is that Winchester and the Caxton stand in parallel relations, each two stages removed from Malory.

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manifestations of a text significantly influence reading experiences.”13 Nevertheless, manuscripts are often ignored in the discipline of book history, despite medievalists having made the case during the last twenty years that modern editions of medieval texts should take into account the physical appearance of the medieval book (the bibliographic code), as well as the words on its folio pages (what is frequently referred to as the lexical code).14 The extent to which particular editions of the Morte reflect the physical layout and textual details of Winchester varies tremendously. Although the issue of fidelity to the Winchester-text is significant, another ethical issue is fundamental to the development of any edition of Malory’s Morte: to what extent should an edition reflect the fact that Sir Thomas Malory is the text’s author? A scholar’s answer to this question depends on how that individual defines the relative value of the Caxton and Winchester texts, with an individual who highly values Caxton tending to favor sociological editorial theory and one who highly values Winchester tending to favor intentionalist editorial theory. Both positions are further complicated by the extent to which a scholar valorizes or dismisses the idea of The Author. Among those who highly value the Caxton-text are C. S. Lewis and Cory James Rushton. Lewis does so based on his emotional connection to this version as a reader: Caxton’s Morte Darthur is the version of Malory that Lewis – and others – had long read and loved prior to the 1934 discovery of the Winchester manuscript and Eugène Vinaver’s 1947 besttext edition of that manuscript.15 Rushton values the Caxton-text for a sociological reason: it was Caxton, not Malory, who promoted the Morte as a proto-novel and, perhaps by doing so, helped secure its popularity in the ensuing centuries. For Rushton, the author-function is shared because “[i]n Foucauldian terms, the ‘author’ of the Morte Darthur is in some sense 13

Peter L. Shillingsburg, “The Evidence for Literary Knowledge,” in his Textuality and Knowledge: Essays (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 1–12: 3. 14 For the bibliographic-code argument in relation to Malory, see D. Thomas Hanks, Jr, “Back to the Past: Editing Malory’s Le Morte Darthur,” in The Malory Debate: Essays on the Texts of Le Morte Darthur, ed. Bonnie Wheeler et al. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 285–300; and Hanks, “Textual Harassment: Caxton, de Worde, and Malory’s Morte Darthur,” in Re-Viewing Le Morte Darthur: Texts and Contexts, Characters and Themes, ed. K. S. Whetter and Raluca L. Radulescu (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 27–47: 44–5. 15 C. S. Lewis, “The English Prose Morte,” in Essays on Malory, ed. J. A. W. Bennett (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 7–28: 27; W. F. Oakeshott, “The Finding of the Manuscript,” also in Essays, 1–6; and The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947; second edition 1967; third edition, rev. P. J. C. Field, 1990).

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not Malory alone, but Malory/Caxton – or even Malory/Caxton/Vinaver/ Field.”16 Strikingly, Lewis’s conviction that “[w]e partly make what we read” and his comparison of the Morte to “a great cathedral” constructed by Malory and the “successive builders” who are his editors (especially Caxton and Vinaver) give credence to Rushton’s sociological approach to reading – and editing – Malory’s book, just as they anticipate many of the arguments supporting both reception theory and sociological editing.17 Also highly valuing the Caxton-text, while giving due acknowledgment to the Winchester-text’s authority, Meg Roland and others give voice to a potentially deconstructive view of editing.18 Roland argues forcefully for the benefits of a plurality of texts, and for textual interpretation that gives due heed to Caxton’s version of Malory’s Roman War story alongside the very different version (twice as long) that is recorded in the Winchester manuscript: this is a pluralistic interpretation grounded in acceptance of both versions as equally valid.19 Roland bases her argument in part upon Jerome McGann’s denunciation of Vinaver’s intentionalist and best-text editorial principles as being too restrictive, privileging Malory’s authority in the Winchester-text and thereby ignoring the Morte’s “social relationships” as evidenced by the Caxton incunabulum and its reception.20 A key element of Roland’s argument is her assertion that all scholarly citations of P. J. C. Field’s critical edition should include the caveat “that Field’s edition is an ‘ideal’ edition, emending from a variety of witnesses and source texts.”21 Implicit in Roland’s assertion is the notion that, as Peter L. Schillingsburg puts it, “[v]iewing alternative versions of texts can put each text in a new [interpretive] light.”22 Some 16

Cory James Rushton, “Malory and Form,” in A New Companion to Malory, ed. Megan G. Leitch and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), 125–43: 127–28. 17 See Lewis, “English Prose Morte,” 22, 25–28. 18 Meg Roland, “‘But that was but favour of makers’: Redactions, Editions, and Authorship in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur,” Arthuriana 29.1 (2019), 34–49. 19 Roland, ibid. is modifying her own earlier arguments, but as her critique of Field’s edition makes clear, she still gives more credit to Caxton’s Morte than do most Malory editors. Roland’s earlier arguments in favor of multiple texts of the Roman War and the ways such textual plurality enhances potential interpretation are found in Meg Roland, “Malory’s Roman War Episode: An Argument for a Parallel Text,” in The Malory Debate, 315–21; and Roland, “‘Alas! Who may truste thys world:’ The Malory Documents and a Parallel-Text Edition,” in The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, ed. Siân Echard and Stephen Partridge (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 37–57. 20 Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983; Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 66–7, 81–84. 21 Roland, “‘But that was but favour of makers,’” 44; 46 note 9. 22 Shillingsburg, “Evidence for Literary Knowledge,” 8.

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textual critics would go even further and adopt Paul Zumthor’s notion of textual “mouvance” (“variance” or “mutability”): the idea that, when there are multiple witnesses to a text, there is no original or best version but rather pluralistic variant versions.23 Unless we overlooked the citations, neither McGann nor Roland references Zumthor, yet these scholars share a similar theoretical and editorial persuasion. Despite the complexities inherent in choosing between the Winchester and Caxton texts of Malory’s Morte, and between a singular and plural author-function, texts do not spring of their own agency fully formed from scribal workshops, printing presses, or printers, or even from library shelves or tablet screens. Furthermore, as G. Thomas Tanselle argues, “[h]owever much those writings [from the past] as published and read were a collaborative effort, we are not being unhistorical in wanting to know just what the initiating mind contributed to that effort.”24 The ideal of the social text simply creates a false dichotomy that substitutes one authority (diachronic reception) or set of authorities (textual variance) for the authority of the writer who created the text; it is also generally overlooked by disciples of sociological editing that “a socially constructed text can [still] contain unintended errors” that require emendation and emendation presupposes some form of underlying “intention” and authority.25 What is more, the call to pluralistic, socially constructed texts often has a worrisome effect: “denying the historical significance of the earliest stages in the history of every text” – thereby denying the importance of the early text, specifically its authorial agency and the author’s intentions; such downplaying of the originating textual moment is done in order to focus on or substitute a later cultural moment that “merely elevate[s] the intentions of compositors, publisher’s editors, censors, and everyone else to an equal level with authorial intentions [or origins].”26 Every editor must wrestle with the ethical-critical question of which cultural moment should be honored and which text(s) should be edited, judgments that will be based on a combination of specialist 23

Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972). For a more detailed overview of the textual and editorial issues, see Thomas H. Crofts and K. S. Whetter, “Writing the Morte Darthur: Author, Manuscript and Modern Editions,” in A New Companion to Malory, 53–78. 24 G. Thomas Tanselle, “Historicism and Critical Editing,” Studies in Bibliography 39 (1986), 1–46: 21. See also Nicholas Jacobs, “Kindly Light or Foxfire? The Authorial Text Reconsidered,” in A Guide to Editing Middle English, ed. Vincent P. McCarren and Douglas Moffat (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 3–14. 25 G. Thomas Tanselle, “Textual Criticism at the Millennium,” Studies in Bibliography 54 (2001), 1–80: 11–2. 26 Ibid., 2; and Peter L. Shillingsburg, “The Semiotics of Bibliography,” in his Textuality and Knowledge, 28–47, 41.

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knowledge, historical inquiry, and subjective discretion. If, as Roland argues, Malory scholars – or at least his editors – have not taken much account of McGann’s challenge to traditional editing practice, it might be because ultimately, as Shillingsburg justly objects, “McGann’s ideas support critical archiving, not editing.”27 In consequence, we suspect, Malory’s editors have rebutted McGann by simply ignoring him. Although intentionalist editorial theory and sociological editorial theory inhabit fundamentally different philosophical worlds, Shillingsburg and Tanselle are unusual (and admirably clear) in arguing for the potential complementarity of these approaches.28 These scholars make it possible to imagine an edition of Le Morte Darthur that honors the intentionalist approach in striving to reclaim the words Malory wrote, while keeping in view the importance of the material text of the Morte and its manuscript ordinatio. Hence, we hope in the Broadview Morte Darthur to give readers a critically edited text that provides an informed and justified bridge between the text’s appearance in its unique medieval manuscript witness and the twenty-first-century readership of that text. In the case of Malory’s Morte Darthur, the Caxton-text is an important scholarly resource; nevertheless, three key facts require editors to privilege the Winchester-text. No scholar would deny that the Caxton incunabulum is an important textual witness, an indicator of the Morte’s historical and cultural reception as well as a window into the social impact that the Morte had on Caxton and possibly his customers. Nevertheless, as the author himself several times reminds his audience, the fact remains that Le Morte Darthur was written by Sir Thomas Malory – not by William Caxton.29 It is also undeniable that over a century of source-study has revealed the extent to which Malory’s Arthuriad differs from its sources.30 Ralph 27

Roland, “‘But that was but favour of makers,’” 41; Shillingsburg, “Semiotics of Bibliography,” 43. 28 See ibid.; Tanselle, “Textual Criticism,” including his related essays cited in his first footnote; Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice, third edition (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 93–100; G. Thomas Tanselle, “Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology,” Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991), 83–143. 29 See Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, ed. P. J. C. Field, vol. I: Text (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 144.1–5, 539.7–9, 664.9–18, 789.14–18, 940.21–30. All but the last of these passages correspond to Winchester, folios 70v, 280v, 346v, 409r; the final authorial remark exists only in the Caxton incunabulum, sig. ee6r. Subsequent references to the text of Malory’s Morte will be parenthetical, citing manuscript folio numbers (prefaced by “W”) and Field’s page.lines (prefaced by “MD”). 30 Modern source-study of the Morte can be said to begin with H. Oskar Sommer’s edition of Le Morte Darthur, 3 vols (London: Nutt, 1889–91), vol. III: Studies on the Sources, but it is exemplified in the scholarship of Robert H. Wilson, Eugène Vinaver, P. J. C. Field, and Ralph Norris. The fullest list of the relevant studies is

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Norris might go too far in concluding that “Malory critics are ill-advised if they make their critical judgements independently from the evidence of Malory’s sources,”31 but source-study has certainly established that Malory’s originality is substantial. Amongst other benefits, source-study thus provides scholars with resources through which to appreciate Malory’s artistry; yet a third key fact remains. Although the Caxton-text of Le Morte Darthur contains material that the Winchester-text does not, provides some readings that are superior to Winchester’s, and reveals much about the Roman War story through comparative analysis of its version with Winchester’s, the manuscript in general (although not a holograph) is closer to the text written by Malory than the incunabulum because the incunabulum reflects Caxton’s drastic alteration of a copytext manuscript very similar to Winchester.32 In short, the Winchester-text provides the greatest possible access to Malory’s authorial voice, artistry, and composition process. Both fifteenth-century witnesses to (or versions of) Le Morte Darthur have their respective merits, but they are not quite the same text, and therefore lead to very different textual and literary-critical conclusions. Carol Meale concludes her study of the Winchester manuscript and its editors by observing how “as readers of Malory today, in choosing which version [of the text] we privilege above the others, we should recognize that we actively participate in the creation of meaning.”33 As editors of the in-progress Broadview Morte Darthur, we agree that the choice of text is important and that it affects meaning. We also agree with the majority of our recent predecessors that the best and most authoritative edition of Malory’s Arthuriad is one based on the Winchester manuscript, even if that edition must be corrected in places using the Caxton incunabulum. Nevertheless, a new manuscript-based classroom edition of Malory’s Field’s Bibliography. Another key study is Malory’s Originality: A Critical Study of Le Morte Darthur, ed. R. M. Lumiansky (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964), although the Lumiansky volume is concerned primarily with source-study as a tool through which to establish the unity of Malory’s Arthuriad. 31 Ralph Norris, “Malory and His Sources,” in A New Companion to Malory, 32–52: 52. 32 For Caxton’s changes to Malory’s text, see especially Sally Shaw, “Caxton and Malory,” in Essays on Malory, 114–45; Hanks, “Textual Harassment,” 27–47; and Takako Kato, Caxton’s Morte Darthur: The Printing Process and the Authenticity of the Text (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2002). 33 Carol M. Meale, “‘The Hoole Book’: Editing and the Creation of Meaning in Malory’s Text,” in A Companion to Malory, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), 3–17: 17. Readers interested in Winchester should also consult Helen Cooper, “Opening Up the Malory Manuscript,” The Malory Debate, 255–84; and K. S. Whetter, The Manuscript and Meaning of Malory’s Morte Darthur: Rubrication, Commemoration, Memorialization (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017). For facsimiles of the manuscript, see note 11, above.

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book is ethically justified given how the available editions measure up to the standards of affordability, reliability, and readability.

Ethical Evaluations of Editions Old and New(er) Comparison of Malory editions on the market today reveals a spectrum in terms of one aspect of reliability – whether and how well they give access to the Winchester-text. However, these editions vary greatly in affordability, other aspects of reliability, and readability. Two readily available and somewhat affordable editions of Malory’s Morte provide reliable access to Caxton’s incunabulum, but therefore fail to offer access to the superior Winchester-text. Elizabeth Bryan’s Modern Library edition used to cost only $11 and provides an accurate text of Caxton’s printed edition.34 It therefore enables students to experience the many chapter and section breaks that Malory’s first printer created, breaks that make Malory’s book seem accessible to students accustomed to reading novels. Nevertheless, because Bryan’s edition lacks both the glossing and the commentary today’s students need to understand a Middle English text, it lacks readability. As a result, students working with Bryan’s edition not only lack access to the most accurate version of Malory’s Morte but also struggle to understand Malory’s late-medieval English. Janet Cowen’s two-volume Penguin Classics edition likewise offers access to the Caxton-text and it offers student readers glosses of archaic words.35 Cowen’s edition is reasonably affordable, ranging from $16 to $20 per volume, but it contains a less reliable Caxton-text than does Bryan’s because of the modernized spelling. This modification increases the Penguin’s readability for a student audience but prevents it from being a point of access to Malory’s late-medieval English. Helen Cooper’s Oxford World’s Classics edition is not only a readable Winchester-based text but also a very affordable option ($12 to $17).36 Yet this edition is relatively unreliable for two reasons: Cooper’s partial modernization of Malory’s spelling, and her substantial abbreviation of Malory’s text. Cooper offers a concise but thorough “Introduction” as well as useful “Explanatory Notes” and an exemplary “Index of Characters” that together make Malory’s text and characters more readable – and 34

Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur, introduction by Elizabeth J. Bryan (New York: The Modern Library, 1994). (The price in July 2022 seems to be $20.00 [KSW].) 35 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, 2 vols, ed. Janet Cowen, intro. John Lawlor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). 36 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur: The Winchester Manuscript, ed. Helen Cooper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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more understandable – to students than most other editions.37 Given the remit of the series, though, Cooper had to modernize Malory’s spelling to a large extent and substantially abridge the text. As a result of these alterations, students reading this edition lack access to Malory’s story in its entirety. They also lack access to his late Middle English – with some awkward exceptions. Cooper’s “Glossary of Recurrent Words” that appears just before the opening of the narrative provides essential linguistic help with Malorian English. However, because Cooper leaves untranslated and unglossed a good number of recurring Middle English words, today’s students are likely to misunderstand many a false friend in Malory’s Arthuriad. For example, the word “worship” appears in the “Glossary,” yet students are unlikely to be able to keep in mind as they read the entire narrative that this word means “honor” rather than “worship,” as it does in modern usage. Furthermore, because this word can mean “fame” or “glory” as often as “honor” in Malorian usage, more guidance than a limited and prefatory word list is needed if student readers are to understand what Malory is saying. To take another example, the frequently used Middle English word “wood” (“furious, insane”) can cause students great confusion in a phrase such as “Sir Ector bete on the basyn as he were woode” (W 97v: “Sir Ector beat on the basin as if he were insane”).38 If students assume that Sir Ector is beating on the basin as if he were a piece of wood, then Malory’s narrative seems odd indeed. By choosing not to modernize or regularly gloss false friends such as “wood,” Cooper makes her edition both less readable and less reliable. Cooper’s abridgments of Malory’s Morte likewise make the World’s Classics edition less reliable, for her excisions can lead students to two types of misinterpretation. First, students risk misinterpreting characters whose careers get truncated. Although, as Cooper makes clear, “[a]ll omissions are signaled in the notes,”39 many students will likely not read the notes in the back of the edition. This situation leaves teachers in the position of explaining the interpretive limitations of, and apologizing for, the textbook. Second, although Cooper might be correct that “[f]ew readers now are likely to share Malory’s passionate interest in the details of battle,” today’s readers – especially students – need to know the extent to which the “technique of fighting, and more particularly 37

We are much indebted to Professor Cooper for her willingness to allow us to adopt in The Broadview Morte Darthur her idea of providing a full character index. 38 We quote and cite the Winchester manuscript and thus put Ector’s name in bold typeface to signal its rubrication; the passage occurs on page 97 of Cooper’s edition; Field, MD 192.13–14. 39 Cooper, ed., Morte Darthur, xxv.

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of single combat, is Malory’s favourite topic.”40 Because Cooper’s abridgment particularly impacts scenes of combat, notably in “The Noble Tale betwixt King Arthur and Lucius the Emperor of Rome” and “The Book of Sir Tristram de Lyonesse,” students get a distorted sense of the focus of the text. Failure to realize the extent to which Malory revels in celebrating knightly combat can lead to students’ failure to appreciate the martial and epic components of Malory’s storytelling, elements that are essential for a full understanding of Le Morte Darthur’s genre, themes, and characters. To illustrate the impacts that such abridgments have on readers’ understanding of Malory’s text, we offer two representative examples. First, the excisions from “Arthur and Lucius” (the Roman War story) lead to misinterpretation of a major character, for they include Gawayne’s entire escapade in the Emperor’s camp that puts his martial heroics on display; these heroics not only mark Malory’s Arthuriad as frequently exhibiting epic-heroic generic features but also define Gawayne’s character as admirable. In this episode, Gawayne reveals himself to be a major force in Arthur’s army, a redoubtable fighter, and a formidable enemy who justifiably beheads the Emperor’s cousin (W 79v–81v; MD 160.20–163.28). Cooper’s omission of this episode greatly reduces readers’ awareness of Gawayne’s prowess and heroism. It also distorts their understanding of his development as a character. In the opening Tale of Le Morte Darthur, Gawayne gets rebuked for failing to grant mercy, especially because his lack of mercy unwittingly leads to the death of a lady; this failure results in Gawayne’s correction through a special “ordynaunce” (“judgment”) that he must obey: always to fight on behalf of ladies, and always to grant mercy (W 38r–39v; MD 84.3– 87.9; Cooper 55–56). What is lost by excising Gawayne’s subsequent adventures in the Roman War story is readers’ realization that, having learned from his previous mistakes, the knight quickly puts this decree into action by refusing Arthur’s offer to compensate him for his injuries with the heads of their mutual enemies because, says Gawayne, these enemies should be shown mercy (W 81r–v; MD 163.22–28). Gawayne’s capacity to enact an ethical code is all the more notable for occurring in 40

Respectively, ibid, xxv; and Vinaver, ed., Works (3 vols, third edn), xxxiii. On the significance and consequences of combat in Malory, see especially Andrew Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms: The Narrative of Combat in Le Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997); and K. S. Whetter, “Warfare and Combat in Le Morte Darthur,” in Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare, ed. Corinne Saunders, Françoise Le Saux and Neil Thomas (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 169–86.

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circumstances – mortal war – that would justify the slaughter of these enemies. Gawayne’s heroic actions in “The Noble Tale betwixt King Arthur and Lucius the Emperor of Rome,” missing in Cooper’s edition, explain and justify the favoritism Arthur displays toward his nephew later in what Malory calls The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of the Rounde Table (MD 940.17–18). The king’s affection for Gawayne is based not only on blood ties but also on the knight’s good qualities: prowess, magnanimity, loyalty, and moral uprightness. Cooper’s edition, therefore, will cause readers to undervalue Gawayne as a character and view Arthur’s favoring of his nephew as less than fully justified. Second, Cooper’s abridgment of Malory’s text hinders readers’ recognition of the narrative and thematic importance of “The Book of Sir Tristram de Lyonesse” as well as encourages their misinterpretation of Palomydes. Malory devoted slightly more than a third of his entire Arthuriad to this Trystram Tale, and although Cooper does an admirable job of abbreviating it to a manageable length for students, her excisions create the misleading impression that the adventures and characters of this part of Malory’s narrative are simply carbon copies of one another or, worse, trivial. It is especially lamentable that Sir Palomydes’ adventure at the Red City is cut, for attention to this adventure could prevent a common misreading of the Tale and character. The standard scholarly interpretation of Sir Palomydes is that he is not a full member of the Arthurian community. This adventure suggests an alternate reading: Sir Palomydes feels so much a member of the Round Table elite that he can assert that, should he be slain on the adventure of the king of the Red City, either Trystram or Launcelot will avenge his death (W 292v; MD 563.1–19). Because Cooper greatly reduces the narrative weight of “The Book of Sir Tristram,” her edition both masks the significance of the Morte’s middle third and distorts readers’ understanding of the key figure of Palomydes. Of the complete texts on the market, Vinaver’s one-volume edition for the Oxford Standard Authors series, contentiously titled Malory: Works, provides a reasonably reliable and affordable Winchester-based text; nevertheless, its readability is limited while its reliability is marred by a distortion of the text’s structure that is based on outdated scholarship. First issued in hardback in 1954, revised in 1971, and subsequently reissued in paperback in 1977, this paperback textbook is based on Vinaver’s Second Edition of The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (the 1967 three-volume critical edition); the one-volume Malory: Works was long the dominant choice

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for teaching purposes.41 The strengths of this classroom edition are that it provides a reasonably reliable, complete Middle English text, together with a greatly abbreviated but still helpful version of Vinaver’s magisterial “Commentary” illuminating the relationship between Malory’s Morte and its French and English sources.42 For the last fifteen years, however, the cost of the paperback Vinaver was prohibitive: in 2020 Amazon.com’s price was $87.00; OUP and many campus bookstores were charging over $90.00! Although the current price of under $30.00 is reasonable, many students find this edition difficult to read, for Vinaver offers no on-page glossing of Middle English words and only an occasional translation (in the “Notes”) of difficult Middle English phrases.43 Admittedly, there is a full glossary in the back of the volume. Nevertheless, as noted above, students can process Malory’s prose better with footnotes on the same page as the text (as in Shepherd’s edition, discussed below) than with a glossary to which they must repeatedly turn, and better still with glosses in the margins. Students are unlikely to flip back and forth between narrative and glossary as they read. Vinaver’s one-volume classroom edition also provides no indication of the Winchester manuscript’s layout, specifically no indication that the manuscript does not support Vinaver’s separation of the Morte into eight distinct works.44 Furthermore, this edition provides a reasonably accurate text, but not the most accurate, especially in the contentious Roman War story.45 From an editorial perspective, the single most complicated aspect of Malory’s Morte Darthur is the Roman War story as recorded in Malory’s Tale II and Caxton’s Book V. The crux of the problem is the fact that the text as recorded in the Winchester manuscript is nearly twice the length of the text as recorded in Caxton’s incunabulum, but the textual-critical controversy extends to questions about whether Caxton or Malory himself was responsible for these differences, and thus whether a modern edition

41

Malory: Works, ed. Eugène Vinaver, second edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Works, second edn, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967). The Standard Authors series was initially designed for a general readership, but the paperback texts quickly became mainstays of the higher education curriculum. 42 Cf. this account of Vinaver’s editions to Crofts and Whetter, “Writing the Morte Darthur,” 64–68. 43 For example: “had lytyl ado to telle hym = had little reason to tell him” (Malory: Works, note to 4.9). 44 Although not all editors treat Winchester’s rubrication pattern and marginal notes as authorial, we do and therefore have an even stronger objection to Vinaver’s layout than previous editors. 45 W 71r–96r; Malory: Works, 111–46.

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should be based on one version or the other – or both.46 Field establishes how both witnesses (Winchester and the Caxton) alternately abbreviate their exemplar at the opening of the story, and he convincingly proposes that the best solution to the textual problem is to combine both witnesses at these points.47 Vinaver produced both his critical and classroom editions long before Field made these findings, but it is telling that in his critical edition Vinaver prints the Winchester text at the top of each page and the relevant Caxton text in smaller type at the bottom of each page.48 Vinaver did not have the space to do this in his one-volume Oxford Standard Authors classroom edition, where he prints the Winchester text alone. Consequently, the version of the Roman War in Vinaver’s one-volume edition is no longer the most accurate text available – but students using it have no way of knowing this. Finally, and most problematically, as its title indicates, this one-volume textbook reflects Vinaver’s theory that the Morte is “a series of eight separate romances”: the non-unified Works of Sir Thomas Malory.49 Because almost all scholars today consider Malory’s Arthuriad to be a unified whole, Vinaver’s classroom edition based on an outdated understanding of Malory’s book is much less reliable than it once was. Of the classroom editions currently available, by far the most reliable is Stephen H. A. Shepherd’s Norton Critical Edition, based on the Winchester manuscript.50 It is also affordable at the price of $28. For scholar-teachers for whom the appearance of the medieval text matters, this is the only (other) edition in which the editor attempts to embrace the material aspects of Malory’s Arthuriad. This should be the best classroom edition currently available due to its many advantages: Shepherd presents a complete, Middle English, and Winchester-based text (emended from the Caxton as necessary); includes useful critical contexts; and offers some glossing of challenging words and phrases at the bottom of the page. In addition, Shepherd faithfully replicates the rubrication (use of red ink) and marginal notes of the Winchester manuscript, thereby giving 46

For detailed arguments on all sides of these issues, see the essays comprising The Malory Debate. The fullest overview of, and best solution to, the Roman War problem remains P. J. C. Field, “Caxton’s Roman War,” in The Malory Debate, 127– 67. 47 Ibid., 127–67. This is obviously the solution Field adopts in his edition, but Field’s proposal was accepted by Shepherd in his 2004 edition (see note 50) – as it is by us in our forthcoming Broadview Edition. 48 Vinaver, ed., Works of Sir Thomas Malory (3 vols), 181–247. 49 Ibid., xxxix. 50 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur: or The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of the Rounde Table, ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York: Norton, 2004).

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students a reading experience akin to viewing the manuscript, or its facsimile. As many scholars have acknowledged over the last generation, students gain much understanding of medieval material culture and book history by experiencing Malory’s text (and other medieval texts) in a modern form that reflects the materiality of the medieval book. Nevertheless, for several reasons, Shepherd’s edition is unreadable for students not already familiar with Middle English and codicology. One barrier to full understanding of the text is that the amount of glossing is inadequate for the vast majority of today’s students. Another barrier is that the glosses provided are at the bottom of the page instead of in the margins, where students could use them more easily; students are likely to lose their place on the page as a consequence of consulting the glosses. This situation certainly slows the reading process, thereby frustrating students who cannot process text at a reasonable rate and frustrating teachers who must assign shorter sections of the text on their syllabuses. Furthermore, although Shepherd is to be applauded for mimicking the manuscript’s rubrication with a bold-face type, the contrasting font in which the rubricated words are presented is so difficult to read that students struggle to identify character names. This is true of not just minor characters such as “Harleus le Berbeus” or “Pedyvere,” but even major characters such as “Gwenyvere.” This edition’s lack of readability impedes both students’ and teachers’ access to the narrative. Making students’ reading experience even more frustrating are the practically nonexistent left-hand margins of the pages, which do not allow for adequate notetaking, and the thin paper stock on which the edition is printed that discourages notetaking: ink annotations can mar several successive pages while notes in pencil quickly degrade. The paper in the recent Norton reprint is slightly thicker, but still far from high quality.51 When teaching Shepherd’s classroom edition, we discovered that, as a result of these barriers to comprehension, many students were resorting to reading an online version of Malory’s Morte; consequently, they were (a) literally not on the same page as their professors and (b) tended to be reading a poor-quality, Caxton-based text. This situation created chaos during classroom discussions and produced often abysmal understanding of Malory’s book. Furthermore, although Shepherd claims that his faithful replication of the Winchester manuscript’s rubrication –

51

Shepherd, ed., Morte Darthur. The date of the reprint is still given as “2004 … First Edition,” but the change from a blue-and-gold to black-and-gold cover image, together with the slightly better paper, clearly indicate a reprint.

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including the scribal errors – is “a practical aid to readers,”52 we contend that Winchester’s rubrication is too ubiquitous to be a reading aid. The rubrication is important and has thematic functions, yet it is too prevalent to aid novice readers in either navigating the text or finding their place, whether in a particular narrative section of the whole book or on a particular page.53 It is also the case that even students who know that this manuscript consistently rubricates character names, some place names, and some objects will be confused when Shepherd’s faithfulness to the manuscript results in the bolding-rubrication of random words that were rubricated by mistake by Winchester’s fifteenth-century scribes. The two scribes’ rubrication of names in Winchester was done in the highly unusual manner of the scribes changing pens and inks each time they came to a name: this practice is obvious not only because all of the names are the right size and space for their position on the line, but also because of the occasional rubrication run-on error where the scribes did not immediately change back to dark brown ink. The phrases “Cradilmente on foote” (W 12r: “Cradilmente on foot”) or “Bors was com” (W 423r: “Bors had arrived”) are typical examples of a run-on rubrication error in places where only the characters’ names should be rubricated. No textual or characterial significance should be assigned to these scribal errors, so an editor should correct them as automatically as a textual mistake.54 As a result, Shepherd’s replication of scribal errors in rubrication through the use of bolding can distract students from the content of the narrative as well as obscure the thematic patterns at work in Malory’s book. Overall, this classroom edition is reliable yet unreadable, particularly in the important manner of character names. For many, though not all, Malory scholars, the most reliable edition of Malory’s Hoole Book is also the most recent: Field’s Le Morte Darthur, an eclectic edition that takes Winchester as the principal textual witness but emends that witness more than any previous edition has done.55 52

Ibid, xii. Shepherd thus explicitly supports and puts into practice an idea about the rubrication first postulated by Meale, “‘Hoole Book,’” 10. 53 The most detailed study of the rubrication, its probable origin, and its thematic function is Whetter, Manuscript and Meaning. 54 Ironically, Shepherd misses the rubrication mistake at W 423r (Shepherd, ed., Morte 608.25), although he does replicate the one at 12r (Shepherd 21.23). Lists of Winchester’s rubrication patterns and scribal errors are supplied by Whetter, Manuscript and Meaning, 92–104; addenda of further errors are available in the Manuscript and Meaning 2020 paperback edition, 243–44. 55 There are now two versions of this monumental edition: P. J. C. Field, ed., Le Morte Darthur, 2 vols (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), and a one-volume paperback edition of the complete text with accompanying glossary: P. J. C. Field, ed., Le Morte Darthur: The [Definitive] Original Text Edited from the Winchester Manuscript

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Neither published form of Field’s text, however, constitutes a true classroom edition, for the two-volume critical edition is not affordable, and neither the two-volume nor the one-volume paperback version is truly readable by the majority of undergraduate students – at least not in North America and not when encountering the Morte for the first time. When he first published his edition in 2013 in two volumes, Field not only justifiably rejected Vinaver’s title of Works and corrected many of Vinaver’s vagaries of physical presentation of the text but also pushed emendation further than Vinaver was willing to go. Moreover, Field and the design team at D. S. Brewer managed to fit the entire text in Volume I, and the entire “Apparatus” in Volume II. The result is a much more aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly edition than was the case with Vinaver’s three-volume Works. However, even more than was the case with Works, Field’s Morte Darthur is too massive and too expensive for use in the classroom.56 Fortunately, this critical edition was soon succeeded by a stand-alone, one-volume edition of the complete text that includes a different “Introduction” and adds the “Index of Proper Names” and “Glossary” from the critical edition. This version sells for about $25, so it is affordable, and it offers good reliability of text for the money: this paperback has the same complete text, corrected in a few places, as the critical edition, and is in Middle English. In addition, the pagination of the one-volume text is the same as in the critical edition, so students who wish to do so can consult a library copy of Field’s “Commentary” and thereby deepen their knowledge of the edition, Field’s editorial practice, and Malory’s text. Nevertheless, this one-volume textbook lacks sufficient glossing to function as an adequate classroom edition for most students, and it banishes the material elements of the Morte’s medieval text – the rubrication and marginalia of the Winchester manuscript – to the “Apparatus and Commentary” in Volume II of the critical edition; students must go the library, hope their library holds the two-volume Field, and and Caxton’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017). “Definitive” appears on the front cover, but not on the title page. Field’s emendations are discussed in more detail below. 56 The ethics of shopping local play an unusually large and often money-saving role in the case of this critical edition: Boydell and Brewer sells the book for $275.00 at boydellandbrewer.com, which is expensive but fair given that the two volumes combined offer slightly more than 2,000 very full pages. Amazon’s price, in contrast, has fluctuated wildly during the composition of this chapter: in March 2020 through to August 2021, the Amazon price was $400; in July 2022 Amazon’s price had spiked to $1,000 [sic!]; and in November 2022 the price dropped to between $300 and $340.00 [KSW].

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then consult the “Commentary” carefully and thoroughly to locate notes about Winchester’s layout. Given that most students will understandably not make such a great effort, and that not all libraries or faculty will have Field’s two-volume critical edition for students to consult, the potential use of Field’s “Commentary” remains an unrealized benefit in this situation. Roland recommends that Malory scholars consult the Morte via the online digital facsimile of its manuscript in combination with Field’s edition, which is certainly a wise proposition for scholars.57 However, most undergraduates will be totally unable to read the Winchester-text in that format, and reading a digital facsimile is by definition far different from the medieval reading experience. Further complicating students’ relationship with the one-volume Field edition are two additional factors: the volume’s narrow page margins that discourage adequate note taking, and its intimidating thickness (caused by its small page dimensions) that causes many students to balk at the prospect of reading it.58 Field’s critical edition has been well received although, as our citations of Roland indicate, not everyone accepts his editorial principles or views the resulting text as fully reliable.59 Several scholars over the years have rightly objected to the manner in which Vinaver’s frequent insertion of title and subtitle pages as well as blank pages between his narrative subsections fragment the Winchester-text; Vinaver’s subsections and layout interrupt the flow of Malory’s text and create subdivisions within individual Tales that are not found in the manuscript and thus, presumably, have no authorial justification. Vinaver’s presentation also obscures the manuscript’s relatively smooth transitions between the eight major Tales. Vinaver first adopted this manner of presentation in his threevolume critical edition and then, with some simplification, retained it in the one-volume classroom edition: these editorial divisions all foreground Vinaver’s conception of Malory’s Arthuriad as an unconnected series of stories, but most of the editorial subdivisions lack manuscript authority. Despite their lack of justification, Field maintains many of these subdivisions, even if he provides different subtitles of his own devising. To take one of the most contentious examples, Vinaver breaks the famous May Passage between what he subtitles “The Great Tournament” and 57

Roland, “‘But that was but favour of makers,’” 44; www.maloryproject.com. In contrast, Kevin T. Grimm and his senior students affectionately nicknamed this edition “the cube,” so it can work well with advanced seminars. (Our thanks to Dr Grimm for this information and his permission to publicize it.) 59 For a survey of reviews and an assessment of the value of the edition, see Crofts and Whetter, “Writing the Morte Darthur,” 68–71. There is some overlap between that discussion and our assessment of Field’s text here. 58

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“The Knight of the Cart” episodes. Field follows Vinaver in providing his own editorial subtitles for these episodes: “The Tournament at Westminster” and “The Knight of the Cart.” Field’s half-page break after the tournament (a break followed by the new section subtitle for “The Knight of the Cart” episode) creates a less intrusive layout than Vinaver’s several pages of subtitle apparatus, yet Field still departs drastically from the Winchester manuscript’s layout of the text.60 Another objection to Field’s edition is its lack of readability for undergraduate students, for without on-page glossing and some on-page translations of difficult phrases, many undergraduate students today cannot read Malory’s book with full comprehension. One fundamental reason for the unsuitability of Field’s edition for general classroom use is its overly specialized content: its lack of onpage glossing or notes indicating a relevant textual or bibliographical discussion in his “Commentary.” A second possible weakness, depending upon the reader’s critical stance, is an occasional lack of full textual reliability. A notable example of both of these weaknesses is Field’s emendation of Arthur’s fourfold lament at the outset of the Quest for the Holy Grail in which Arthur bemoans the fact that he will never again see his knights all together. Field argues that one of these “holé togydirs” (“wholly together”) laments is a scribal duplication and therefore an error that requires correction; he concludes that both Caxton’s reading and Malory’s source support his emendation.61 Field’s text thus reads (with some italics added): “Now,” seyde the kynge, “I am sure at this quest of the Sankegreall shall all ye of the Rownde Table departe, and nevyr shall I se you agayne holé togydirs. Therefore ones I woll se you all holé togydir in the medow of Camelot, to juste and to turney, that aftir youre dethe men may speke of hit that such good knyghtes were here, such a day, holé togydirs!” (672.25–30) (“Now,” said the king, “I am sure that on this quest of the Holy Grail all you of the Round Table shall depart, and never shall I see you again wholly together. Therefore once I will see you all wholly together in the meadow of Camelot, to joust and to tourney, so that after your deaths men may speak of it that such good knights were here, on such a day, wholly together.)

60

Compare and contrast Winchester, folios 434v–435r with Vinaver, ed., Works, 1114.16–1120.6 and Field, ed., Morte Darthur, 839.34–842.5. 61 Field, ed., Morte Darthur, 672.25–30 and “Commentary” (in vol. II) on 672.27.

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Field’s reading is supported by the Caxton text, but the passage in question falls at the bottom of a Caxtonian page, and Caxton is especially prone to tinker with Malory’s prose at the ends of pages in order to either save space or compensate for compositorial errors in setting up the formes.62 Similarly, despite all the benefits of source-study, it is potentially dangerous to emend Malory’s Arthuriad as if it were exactly the same as its source(s). This seems to be what Field does here. Furthermore, by emending the text based on a source, Field produces an edition that some scholars find less than fully reliable, even if only in this notable instance. Of course, scholars will fully understand what Field has done, but students will not know to check the “Commentary” for Field’s explanation of this emendation, and nothing in the text indicates that such a substantial editorial change has been effected. In contrast to Field, we consider Arthur’s repetition of the “holé togydirs” lament to be thematically and characterologically appropriate to Malory’s text. The fourfold refrain reflects the romance genre’s penchant for repetition and it reinforces Malory’s theme of the tragic destruction of the Round Table Fellowship. Repetition also bespeaks Arthur’s emotional state on the eve of the departure of his knights, and it is entirely in keeping with Malory’s alterations of the French Queste – changes that emphasize the importance of the Round Table Fellowship to both Arthur and his knights. The sundering of the Round Table community and Arthur’s lament for the loss of the fellowship here both mirror and foreshadow the greater loss and greater emotional reactions of characters and readers that will occur at the tragic conclusion of the Hoole Book. Consequently, we consider the fourfold repetition in this passage to be a reflection of Arthur’s heightened emotions, and we therefore consider Winchester’s version of the passage to be a genuine authorial reading: “Now,” seyde the Kynge, “I am sure at this Quest of the Sankegreall shall all ye of the Rownde Table departe and nevyr shall I se you agayne holé togydirs; therefore ones shall I se you togydir in the medow all holé togydirs! Therefore I woll se you all holé togydir in the medow of Camelot to juste and to turney that aftir youre dethe men may speke of hit that such good knyghtes were here such a day, holé togydirs!” (Winchester 352r–v; italics and punctuation added) (“Now,” said the King, “I am sure that on this Quest of the Holy Grail all you of the Round Table shall depart and never shall I see 62

The Caxton page in question is the opening of Book XIII, Chapter 6, sig. N5r. On Caxton’s tendency to change Malory’s phrasing at the bottom of pages, see Kato, Caxton’s Morte Darthur, 34–47.

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you again wholly together; therefore once shall I see you together in the meadow all wholly together! Therefore I will see you all wholly together in the meadow of Camelot to joust and to tourney so that after your deaths men may speak of it that such good knights were here on such a day, wholly together!”)

Vinaver’s presentation of this passage, like that quoted here, offers the same wording and fourfold repetition as found in the manuscript. Our punctuation, however, differs from his. Vinaver rightly notes that editorial “punctuation can… bring out the rhythm and movement of [Malory’s] prose,” but he also admits that, in his edition, punctuation “has been resorted to liberally, and no commas have been spared.”63 In other words, Vinaver is quite interventionist in his use of punctuation and his intentions, as he makes clear in his one-volume paperback edition, are “to give [Malory’s] work the appearance of a modern novel.”64 The Morte, however, is not a modern novel, and Malory’s paratactic style gets somewhat obscured by Vinaver’s “libera[l]” punctuation. In contrast, both in the “holé togydirs” lament quoted here and in the Broadview Morte Darthur as a whole, we try to remain as faithful as possible to the Winchester manuscript’s punctuation, particularly since that punctuation is consistent with Malory’s parataxis and emphasizes his narrative and characterial themes. Field achieved a major goal as an editor of Malory by producing clean and readable pages, pages that contrast with Vinaver’s editorially busy pages that can be difficult to read because they are fragmented by a sometimes overwhelming array of brackets and footnotes. Although Field does not consider Winchester’s ordinatio to be authorial, his tidy pages mimic the clean margins of the manuscript. Accordingly, Field has produced an attractive, accessible layout without obvious editorial interference; however, in a case such as the “holé togydirs” passage in which his emendation departs quite radically from the manuscript, from his predecessor Vinaver, and from the two generations of scholarship keyed to Vinaver’s edition, students have no way of knowing the extent to which Field has changed the text unless they (unusually) decide to check whether this passage receives discussion in the “Commentary.” Specialists will know, but junior scholars and students will not, that Field’s reading here is idiosyncratic. As a result, Field’s edition is visually pleasing yet occasionally provides readings that are somewhat distorted

63 64

Vinaver, ed., Works (3 vols), cxxiv. Vinaver, ed., Malory: Works (1 vol.), x.

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due to editorial idiosyncrasies.65 Therefore, it is not always fully reliable for a general student audience; combined with its lack of on-page glossing and indications of commentary-notes, Field’s edition is suitable primarily for scholars.

A New Broadview Edition of Le Morte Darthur A. E. Housman famously concluded that the primary criterion for the textual critic “is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not pudding, in your head.”66 There is no question that all the modern editors of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur surveyed in this chapter possess heads full of impressive “brains.” It is therefore all the more lamentable that there is currently no edition of Malory’s Hoole Book on the market that is fully suited to the task of teaching undergraduates. This is why we have tried to find a middle ground between Vinaver’s conservative and Field’s interventionist styles when editing Malory’s Arthuriad for Broadview.67 In The Broadview Morte Darthur, we offer a complete text of Malory’s Arthuriad, in Middle English, and based on the Winchester-text but emended where necessary using the Caxton-text. Most of these emendations are necessary due to obvious textual lacunae, but some are more subjective because they are based on differences between the two witnesses and the editors’ informed judgment about which witness is correct or superior. For example, it is well-known to Malorian textual scholars but perhaps less well-known to most of Malory’s readers that the eight opening and closing leaves of the Winchester manuscript are missing, as are folios 32, 33, and 252. Folios 192 and 400 are also missing their outside bottom corners. In all of these cases, Malory’s text must be supplied from and edited based on the only other surviving witness, Caxton’s incunabulum. At other times, Winchester is missing a word or letter that is found in the Caxton-text, as (for example) when Gareth strikes his brother during the wedding tournament in “The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkeney” and Gawayne complains, “A brother!… I wente ye wolde not have smyttyn me so” (W 142v: “Ah brother!… I believed you would not have struck me so 65

Our position is still quite different from Roland’s sociological textual-critical conclusions in her “‘But that was but favour of makers,’” 42–44. 66 A. E. Housman, “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,” in Collected Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Penguin, 1988), 325–39: 339. 67 Given Vinaver’s conservativism towards Malory’s words it is surprising that he was so novelistic in narrative layout and intrusive in punctuation.

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hard”). Winchester is missing the word “not,” but the word is present in the Caxton incunabulum and the context clearly shows that Gawayne is surprised that Gareth would hit him: the missing word must therefore be emended based on the other witness. The most contentious difference between the two witnesses, as noted above, is in the Roman War story of Tale II. In this case, however, Field’s conclusion that both witnesses of the Roman War alternately abbreviate the opening of their exemplar, meaning that Malory’s full text can be best reconstructed by weaving together the Winchester and Caxton texts in this part of the narrative, is compelling.68 In other places, however, editorial changes are judgment calls: the “holé togydirs” passage provides a significant example, where – as discussed above – Vinaver authoritatively edits according to Winchester’s reading and Field equally authoritatively edits according to the Caxton reading. Our wording of this lament matches the text found in the manuscript and enshrined in Vinaver’s edition, but our punctuation is quite different from Vinaver’s. In this instance, different editors make critically informed yet subjective decisions about the same passage; such subjectivism is hopefully minimal, but it is also inherent in the process of critically informed editing. In contrast to us, Vinaver followed a best-text editing philosophy; therefore, even when he concluded that the Caxton incunabulum offered a probably superior reading, he retained the possible (even if problematic) reading of the Winchester-text.69 This practice of minimal intervention makes Vinaver’s edition less reliable than it could be. Causing a similar problem through a very different editorial practice, Field’s interventionist and eclectic approach takes the Winchester-text “as the most important single piece of evidence for what Malory intended to write,” but regularly emends that text on the basis of a reading found in the Caxton-text or even (unlike other editors) in Malory’s sources.70 As a result, his edition, too, is at times less than fully reliable. There are several ways in which The Broadview Morte Darthur should improve upon the reliability of Field’s edition when considering a suitable classroom edition. One improvement is our revision of some of Field’s textual subdivisions to bring them into closer alignment with the 68

Field, “Caxton’s Roman War,” in The Malory Debate, 127–67. Vinaver’s editorial principles are evident throughout his apparatus in Works but were first established in Eugène Vinaver, “Principles of Textual Emendation,” in Studies in French Language and Mediæval Literature presented to Professor Mildred K. Pope by Pupils, Colleagues and Friends (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1939), 351–69. 70 This approach is fully laid out in Field, “Introduction,” in Morte Darthur, vol. I, xi– xliii. 69

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text of the Winchester manuscript. We provide footnotes acknowledging Vinaver’s and Field’s editorial subdivisions within the eight major Tales, but do not impose these modern narrative subdivisions upon the medieval text. Another improvement is the less invasive nature of our emendation of the manuscript, enabling our edition to stay truer to the content of the manuscript than does Field’s in cases where we believe the manuscript reading to be authorial. Nevertheless, we do not fall into the same trap that Vinaver did, that of honoring the Winchester-text when Caxton offers a clearly superior reading. For example, at the beginning of “A Noble of Sir Launcelot du Lake,” Malory relates that, after the Roman War, many knights increased in “worshyp” – especially Sir Launcelot. Malory probably wrote “And som there were that were but knyghtes whiche encresed so in armys and worshyp that they passed all other of her felowys in prouesse and noble dedys and that was well proved on many” (W 96r: “And some there were that were but knights who increased so in feats of arms and honor that they surpassed all of their fellows in prowess and noble deeds and that was well proven on many”). All of the italicized words in this passage are missing from Winchester but present in the Caxton-text. Vinaver notes the Caxton readings (except so), and marks which as the superior reading, but nonetheless prints Winchester’s text with these three textual gaps. Field rightly notes how Caxton’s whiche and that they are necessary for sense, but he ignores Caxton’s so. Even given the flexibility of Middle English syntax, however, the passage makes more sense if Winchester’s reading is emended by adopting the Caxton wording. Here we agree entirely with Field and actually add one more word (Caxton’s so) than he does. When the Winchester-text lacks words that are necessary to complete the sense of a passage, it must be emended through use of the Caxton-text. Nevertheless, not all current emendations based on Caxton are necessary. For example, Cooper, Shepherd, and Field unnecessarily adopt a Caxton reading at the crucial moment of Launcelot’s battle with Tarquyn; Vinaver, in contrast, is correct to follow Winchester’s reading. Tarquyn offers to stop fighting Launcelot provided that Launcelot is not the one knight whom Tarquyn most hates. Launcelot’s response in Winchester reads “but sytthyn hit is so that I have thy frendeshyppe and may have// what knyght is that that thou hatyste abovyn all thynge” (W 103r: “but since it is so that I have your friendship and may have [it], which knight is it that you hate above all things?”).71 Our reading agrees with 71

The double slash – or double virgule – at the end of the first clause mimics the double virgule (//) found in the Winchester manuscript at this point. As noted

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Vinaver’s here, but Cooper, Shepherd, and Field all adopt Caxton’s reading of “but sytthyn hit is so that I may have thy frendeshyppe, what knyght is that that thou hatyste abovyn all thynge?”72 Field argues that Winchester’s Scribe B dropped may and then reinserted it after the fact; he accordingly adopts Caxton’s reading as being the more sensible.73 We argue that Winchester’s reading is justified by both narrative context and syntactic logic: Tarquyn has stopped the battle precisely because he is offering Launcelot friendship; he will confirm that friendship in a moment – provided that Launcelot is not his sworn enemy. Winchester’s reading puts greater emphasis on the qualification of Tarquyn’s offer: the friendship is contingent upon Launcelot being somebody else, and the Winchester reading’s formality makes clear that Launcelot knows this – and cannot therefore accept the qualified friendship. When the Winchester-text is clear, grammatically correct, and characterologically consistent, there is no need to emend it. We also depart from Field’s edition by following the suggestion of M. B. Parkes that manuscript rubrication (in general) can be “printed in boldface” in modern transcription, a suggestion made specifically about Le Morte Darthur by Helen Cooper, but thus far employed in an edition only by Shepherd.74 Shepherd might have been ahead of the editorial curve when he published a rubricated text for undergraduates in 2004: today’s students, brought up with tablets and video clips, are more visual than students at any other time in the history of teaching Malory. As a result, today’s students are often open to the ideas that “form matters,” and that the bibliographic or material code can fruitfully be reproduced alongside the lexical code on the pages of a modern edition to augment both each other and the experience of reading and learning.75 Nonetheless, however visual today’s learners might be, very few of them, in our experience, below, virgules (/) and double virgules (//) are used throughout Winchester to denote an array of punctuating effects, including indicating changes in speaker, transitions to new sentences, questions, and final punctuation of other sorts. The virgule is a common manuscript punctuation mark, but it is used less commonly in Winchester than in similar manuscripts. 72 Vinaver, ed., Works (3 vols), 266.22–24; Cooper ed., Morte, 105; Shepherd, ed., Morte, 161.32–34; Field, ed., Morte Darthur, 202.19–21. Field emended Works, third edn on the same grounds and now also adds so before “hatyste.” 73 Field, “Commentary” on 202.20 and 202.20–1. 74 M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (London: Scolar Press, 1992), xv; Cooper, “Opening Up,” 273; Shepherd, ed., Morte. 75 Stephen B. Dobranski, “Editing Milton: The Case against Modernisation,” Review of English Studies 59.240 (2008): 392–408: 406 and 393. Although recommended as a practice for editing Milton’s poetry, we consider this idea equally relevant (within reason) to editing the Morte.

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are able to fathom the faux-gothic font employed in Shepherd’s edition; we therefore represent rubrication using a bolded version of the same typeface used for the rest of the text (a text that includes Winchester’s rubricated marginalia). This layout facilitates discussion of how Malory’s rubrication connects to themes in his narrative as well as highlights in a readable format both the manuscript’s rubrication pattern and its marginalia. Although rubrication is commonplace in manuscripts, using rubrication only to highlight names is unique to Winchester, a manuscript in which all character names, many object names (including Excalibur and Sankgreal), and occasional place-names are rubricated.76 This is so unusual a practice that it must be significant, yet Shepherd’s replication of the scribes’ rubrication errors confuses students almost as much as the font in which Shepherd presents rubricated words, and it distracts from the consistency and probable purpose of the rubrication. Because we believe that the rubrication pattern is more consistent than Shepherd allows, we have emended the rubrication errors in the manuscript, thereby producing the most reliable bibliographic text available for classroom use. By not replicating rubrication errors made by the two Winchester scribes (mostly in places where they forgot to change pens, red for brown or vice versa), we achieve two goals: we avoid confusing students with distracting scribal errors, and we give students better access than Shepherd does to the design of the Winchester manuscript – a design that, in all probability, descends from Malory himself. Giving students access to the Winchester manuscript’s rubrication in the most error-free form possible can help them see – through the visual effect of bolding – how rubrication in the bibliographic code reinforces meaning in the lexical code. More specifically, rubrication makes visible Malory’s focus on the complete cast of characters in his Hoole Book, a focus evident in Malory’s tendency to name most characters. By comparing Malory to his sources, Robert H. Wilson convincingly illustrates the extent to which naming was important to Malory.77 In contrast to the authors of his sources, Malory peoples his Arthuriad with a recognizable “cast of characters” with recognizable backstories, consistently giving names to characters who are unnamed in his sources. This is especially true in lists of names in tournaments or ceremonies. Winchester’s rubrication of names on each and every page of the manuscript visually reinforces Malory’s focus on the characteristics and deeds of the figures in the story 76

For a detailed study of Winchester’s rubrication, including its uniqueness and probable origins, see Whetter, Manuscript and Meaning. 77 See especially Robert H. Wilson, “Addenda on Malory’s Minor Characters,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 55 (1956), 563–87.

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that he calls The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of the Rounde Table, that whan they were Holé Togyders there was ever an Hondred and Fyfty (MD 940.17–19; C XXI.13, sig. ee6r; our capitalization and italics: The Whole Book of King Arthur and of His Noble Knights of the Round Table, who when they were Wholly Together there was ever a Hundred and Fifty). One striking example of this manuscript spotlighting of Malory’s characters comes after the completion of the Grail Quest, when the rubrication of names on folio 409 verso reinforces Malory’s change of focus from “the booke of the Sankgreall” (“the book of the Holy Grail”) to the secular court and concerns of “Kynge Arthure and Quene Gwenyvere” (“King Arthur and Queen Guenevere”), especially their joy at the return “of Sir Launcelot and of Sir Bors.” This joy, however, is not shared by “Sir Aggravayne Sir Gawaynes brothir for he was ever opynne-mowthed” (“Sir Agravain Sir Gawain’s brother for he was ever scandalmongering”); because of Aggravayne’s gossiping about the lovers, Launcelot “withdrew hym fro the company of Quene Gwenyvere for to eschew the sclawndir and noyse, wherefore the Quene waxed wrothe with Sir Launcelot” (W 409v: “withdrew himself from the company of Queen Guenevere in order to avoid the scandal and noise, wherefore the Queen grew furious with Sir Lancelot”). As a result of Launcelot’s withdrawal, the Queen loses her source of joy. Here the manuscript’s rubrication visually enacts Malory’s juxtapositioning of sacred and secular, the love between Malory’s principal characters, the villainy of Aggravayne, and the roles of the human players in the final drama. Similarly, the reconciliatory letter that the dying Gawayne writes to Launcelot in his own “harte blood” (W 477v: “heart’s blood”) is spectacularly memorialized by Winchester’s last extant marginal note recording – in red ink – “How Sir Gawayne wrote a letter to Sir Launcelot at the tyme of hys dethe” (W 477r: “How Sir Gawain wrote a letter to Sir Launcelot at the time of his death”). As Thomas H. Crofts observes, so impressive is Winchester’s rubrication “that, in turning from this manuscript back to the typographical text, one feels as if the lights had gone out.”78 By reproducing Malory’s rubrication in our edition, we hope to give students the benefit of his book’s stunning lighting effects. Another key aspect of The Broadview Morte’s reliability is its honoring – to a much greater extent than previous editions – the minimal punctuation of the Winchester manuscript, a practice that makes it the most readable modern edition yet produced. Certainly, there are 78

Thomas H. Crofts, Malory’s Contemporary Audience: The Social Reading of Romance in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 66.

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Malorian passages that are so minimal in their punctuation that they require some modern pointing to make them comprehensible to today’s readers. For example, in Tale I’s account of the Battle of Bedgrayne, Winchester contains a sentence that will baffle modern readers: “Than Kynge Ban was wood wrothe with hym and folowed on hym fersely the othir saw that and caste up hys shelde…” (W 13v: “Then King Ban was furiously enraged with him and followed after him fiercely the other saw that and cast up his shield…”).79 Clearly, some sort of punctuation mark is needed between “fersely” and “the” to prevent the two independent clauses from running together. Therefore, we punctuate the sentence in this way: “Than Kynge Ban was wood wrothe with hym and folowed on hym fersely; the othir saw that and caste up hys shelde…” Nevertheless, previous editors’ unnecessary addition of punctuation marks to Malory’s prose can conceal the nature of the author’s writing style. For example, Winchester’s unpointed description of Morgan’s journey to the convalescing Arthur to try to steal his magical sword and scabbard reflects the urgency of Morgan’s mission: “So erely on þe morne or hit was day she toke hir horse and rode all þat day and moste party of þe nyght and on the morne by none she com to the same abbey of nonnys whereas lay Kynge Arthure” (W 56v: “So early in the morning before it was day she took her horse and rode all that day and most of the night and in the morning before noon she came to the same abbey of nuns where King Arthur lay”). Our edition replicates this urgency, for we view the swiftness with which the action moves as a key characteristic of Malory’s prose style. In accordance with Broadview’s house style we modernize Winchester’s thorns, but maintain the unpunctuated urgency of the original: “So erely on the morne or hit was day she toke hir horse and rode all that day and moste party of the nyght and on the morne by none she com to the same abbey of nonnys whereas lay Kynge Arthure” (BMD 56v). In contrast, Shepherd ruins the narrative flow of Malory’s description by breaking the sentence into four pieces through the imposition of modern punctuation: “So erely on the morne,[1] or hit was day,[2] she toke hir horse and rode all that day and moste party of the nyght;[3] and on the morne by none she com to the same abbey of nonnys whereas lay Kynge Arthure.[4]”80 Field likewise disrupts Malory’s 79

Here is a minor example of a rubrication run-on error, for Scribe A writes the opening stroke of the w after Ban in red ink before correctly switching back to dark brown to finish the letter and word. No purpose is served by printing “Kynge Ban was…” 80 Shepherd, ed., Morte Darthur, 93.17–20, with square-bracketed numbers added to highlight the divisions caused by editorial punctuation.

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narrative pace with nearly identical modern punctuation, albeit with a slightly less intrusive comma in place of the semicolon after “nyght”: “So erely on the morne,[1] or hit was day,[2] she toke hir horse and rode all that day and moste party of the nyght,[3] and on the morne by none she com to the same abbey of nonnys whereas lay Kynge Arthure [4].”81 Perhaps the best way to illustrate how problematic the intrusive addition of modern punctuation to the Winchester manuscript can be is to look at a passage in which this practice changes the meaning of Malory’s text, thereby encouraging modern readers to misinterpret his words. A useful example of this problem appears in the powerful scene in the Grail Quest wherein Galahad asks Launcelot for his blessing: an action that helps Malory reposition the Launcelot he inherited from his French source into a mostly successful seeker of the Grail who joins the ranks of Perceval, Bors, and Galahad, and very nearly shares in their Grail success. Winchester’s presentation of this mutual recognition scene makes clear that the son seeks his father’s blessing. When Launcelot and Galahad are reunited on board the ship of Perceval’s Sister near the end of the Quest, and both father and son begin to realize who the other is, Launcelot asks “A sir ar ye Sir Galahad/” (W 400r: “Ah Sir are you Sir Galahad?”). Galahad’s response in the manuscript is clear: “ye for sothe and so he kneled downe and askyd hym hys blyssynge and aftir that toke of hys helme and kyssed hym And there was grete joy betwyxte them…” (W 400r: “yes indeed and so he kneeled down and asked him [Launcelot] his blessing and after that took off his helmet and kissed him And there was great joy between them…”). Winchester’s parataxis and minimal punctuation clarify that however much Launcelot might ultimately need the saintly Galahad’s blessing, it is Galahad who seeks his father’s blessing here before removing his helm to signify an extended stay on the ship. In the Broadview edition, we preserve the manuscript’s clear meaning: “‘A Sir ar ye Sir Galahad?’ ‘Ye forsothe:’ and so he kneled downe and askyd hym hys blyssynge and aftir that toke of hys helme and kyssed hym. And there was grete joy betwyxte them” (BMD 400r). In contrast to this rendering, the heavy-handed punctuation in previous modern editions does more than obfuscate who kneels before whom: it makes it seem as if Launcelot is asking for Galahad’s blessing. Vinaver, for instance, adds punctuation and white space that break Malory’s sentence into three very separate – and misleading – pieces: 81

Field, ed., Morte Darthur, 119.4–7, again with square-bracketed numbers added to highlight punctuation.

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“A, sir, ar ye sir Galahad?” “Ye, forsothe.” And so he kneled downe and askyd hym hys blyssynge. And aftir that toke of hys helme and kyssed hym, and there was grete joy betwyxte them.82

Breaking up the passage in this way makes it difficult for readers to determine who kneels before whom, yet the formatting steers readers toward the erroneous conclusion that Launcelot kneels to his son by separating Galahad’s affirmative response (“Ye, forsothe”) from his action of kneeling. Field creates the same confusion, for he follows Vinaver’s layout and punctuation except in (rightly) changing the lowercase knightly “sir” to upper case: “Sir Galahad” (MD 771.10–14). As a result, Field encourages the same interpretive error in readers as his predecessor. In short, these two scholarly editors make seemingly minor changes (adding punctuation and inserting white space) that turn out to be both major and unnecessary. In this passage, Winchester’s punctuation is not only simpler but clearer. Throughout the manuscript, the major punctuation is generally indicated either by undecorated capital letters (as in the “kyssed hym And” of this meeting between Launcelot and Galahad) or by double virgulae. Both capitals and virgulae denote a wider array of punctuation symbols in Winchester than is common in other manuscripts, but both are used consistently, albeit with some variety, throughout the manuscript to signify all kinds of punctuation: paragraph breaks; direct speech, including changes in speaker; commas or dashes; and sentence breaks.83 In all cases, the specific meaning of a manuscript symbol in a particular location is readily available from context.84 As in the other Morte Darthur cases just discussed, context helps to confirm the true sense of the passage here, for Galahad’s previous remark of “than be ye wellcom for ye were the begynner of me in thys worlde” (W 400r: “then are you welcome, for you were the beginner of me in this world”) indicates that he is the one who will kneel in deference to his father. 82

Vinaver, ed., Works (3 vols), 1012.16–20. These conclusions about the nature and kind of punctuation symbols in Winchester are based on our study of the manuscript in editing the text; the Broadview Morte will be punctuated accordingly. 84 The importance of context in helping to determine punctuation is outlined by Parkes, Pause and Effect, 2. This conclusion is supported by Colette Moore, who notes that speech markers in manuscripts are often signaled simply by the narrative context or “words of the text:” Quoting Speech in Early English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 16, 21, 78, 183. 83

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Given our audience of students and general readers, we hope to produce a text more readable than anything currently on the market. In addition to providing visual representation of the Winchester manuscript’s rubrication and marginalia in an easy-to-read format, we make Malory’s text even more readable through our apparatus. We include marginal glosses that clarify individual Middle English words as students read each line of prose, and we provide footnotes that aid comprehension by indicating where a major textual or interpretative note should be consulted in the back of the volume. Complex actions or phrases that are too long to be glossed in the margin are explained in footnotes. Our method of punctuation likewise enhances the reliability of our edition for we follow Winchester’s punctuation more faithfully than is common in previous editions, yet our punctuation also provides readability by making some necessary concessions to modern practice – notably in using modern quotation marks to indicate direct speech and adding question marks and exclamation points to clarify sense. The result is a much busier text than Field’s but one that suits the needs of today’s students while maintaining a scholarly focus on the importance of manuscript layout. Given the strengths of our edition and its publication by a press that consistently produces high-quality but affordable textbooks, we hope to provide students with an Arthuriad that they can afford, understand, and enjoy. If we succeed in our endeavor of producing an edition that is affordable, reliable, and readable, then The Broadview Morte Darthur is ethically justified.

15

The Ethics of Writing Guinevere in Modern Historical Fiction

NICOLE EVELINA

M

odern historical fiction and fantasy authors, like myself, who work with the Arthurian legend in the twenty-first century have a different perspective on ethics and the Arthurian tradition than many of the other scholars in this book who approach it from an academic position. While we read and interact with the medieval, romantic, and Victorian works, most of us are not academically trained. Therefore, we come to the Arthurian canon from an outside perspective, relying heavily on the research and interpretation of others who have studied the texts over the centuries to form and frame our fiction. Because of this, we often understand the medieval period and its influences on Arthurian characters very differently and have different goals from historical scholars. While we try to be as true to the time period as possible, our goal is to produce fiction that adds to the tradition for a modern audience as opposed to seeking to understand what has already been written or what really happened in history. For example, in my Guinevere’s Tale Trilogy,1 I chose to tell the traditional story of King Arthur and Camelot from Guinevere’s perspective, giving her a fictional life as a priestess before her marriage to King Arthur and as a warrior defending her ancestral lands after Arthur’s death, neither of which are part of the core legend. I also chose to make her a physically, intellectually, and emotionally strong woman unlike many of the stereotypically submissive incarnations of the past. This focus 1

Nicole Evelina, Daughter of Destiny (Maryland Heights, MO: Lawson Gartner Pub­ lishing, 2016), Camelot’s Queen (Maryland Heights, MO: Lawson Gartner Publishing, 2016), Mistress of Legend (Maryland Heights, MO: Lawson Gartner Publishing, 2018).

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on Guinevere – a character who wasn’t as fully explored as King Arthur until around 1980, the beginning of modern Arthurian fiction – and other twists on the key elements of the traditional story are my contributions to the ongoing evolution of the legend. As this article will show, the aim of most modern Arthurian historical fiction and fantasy authors is to contribute to the legend in ways that speak to readers and issues of our own time, while remaining true to the original legend within the confines of the subgenre in which we write. At the same time, other authors, in creating modern “sequels” to the original legend, employ creative license that takes them farther from the historical path to allow for parody, supernatural, or other re-interpretations of the existing story in order to make specific points about modern life. The character of Guinevere has been part of the Arthurian legend from its earliest forms, but in the last forty years she has undergone major changes. Gone is the passive woman of Malory,2 who along with the “angel of the house” of the Victorian era, has influenced so many modern representations of the character. The modern Guinevere created by authors like Parke Godwin, Persia Woolley, Sharan Newman, Lavinia Collins, M. L. Bullock, and myself, is a strong, independent woman with her own storyline and her own agency, thanks in large part to the influence of feminism from the 1960s to the present.3 She is often portrayed as a physically strong warrior, an intelligent leader on par with King Arthur, and an emotionally stalwart woman, while also being a queen in her own right who holds more power than King Arthur,4 a priestess of Avalon,5 or even a vampire.6 With such wildly varying characterizations, it is only natural to ask: how far is too far when adapting a much-beloved character like Guinevere? Her story has been in the public domain since she first appeared in written Celtic poetry around the year 1100 CE, stories that had been told orally for hundreds of years before being committed to paper.7 If it is acceptable for her husband to evolve from a Celtic warlord 2



Thomas Malory. “Le Morte d’Arthur,” in The King Arthur Collection (Rochester, NY: Maplewood Books, 2014). 3 Sara Diane Cooley, “Re-vision from the Mists: The Development of a Literary Genre of Feminist Arthuriana as an Allegorical Response to Second Wave Feminist Politics,” Senior Capstone Projects, Vassar College, 2015, 11; Nicole Evelina, The Once and Future Queen: Guinevere in Arthurian Legend (Maryland Heights, MO: Lawson Gartner Publishing, 2017), 3. 4 Lavinia Collins, The Warrior Queen (London: The Book Folks, 2014). 5 Nicole Evelina, The Guinevere’s Tale Trilogy. Mande Matthews’ Queen’s Honor series similarly makes Guinevere a Druid. 6 Monica L. Bullock, Lost Camelot (Las Vegas, NV: LMBPN Publishing, 2020). 7 Evelina, The Once and Future Queen, 30.

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into the hero of a nation as the story passes through the generations, why not Guinevere? But for Guinevere, like other Arthurian characters, this change is not so easy. Ann F. Howey explains “The Arthurian legend is subject to two contradictory cultural demands, one which insists on accuracy to historical or literary truth and one which insists on the playful possibilities of images removed from all but a tenuous connection to such truth.”8 This dichotomy results in stories that are simultaneously modern retellings of the traditional Arthurian legend and “adaptations to conventions and genres… to a culture increasingly perceived as post-feminist.”9 These novels are both historical, at least to the extent that they are based in ancient legend and set in a quasi-realistic past, and modern in their subject matter and characterization, which raises many questions. To what extent can or should an author change the basic Arthurian story to suit the tastes of contemporary audiences? Given the difference between how women were treated in the past and how they are now, how can an author ethically portray a historical character for a modern audience? As Katherine Cooper and Emma Short note, in nineteenth-century historical fiction there was a marked preference for narratives featuring male agency and female passivity, and in many of these texts men were lauded as great explorers, heroes, and adventurers, while female figures real or imagined, were marginalized, and featured solely as romantic interests.… As a result, female historical figures were and are understood solely through male authored narratives.”10

This literary preference began to change as women reclaimed their histories through women’s history and gender studies programs in the 1970s and picked up the pen themselves in greater numbers than ever before. As historian and historical fiction author Lois Leveen writes: Once upon a time, women’s lives might have been fodder for fairy tales, but they weren’t considered the stuff of serious scholarship. That changed when affirmative action made higher education accessible to unprecedented numbers of students of color and white women. The newly arrived students clamored for content that reflected their experiences, and the experiences of the communities 8

Ann F. Howey, “Arthur and Adaptation,” Arthuriana 25.4 (2015), 36. Ibid., 36. 10 Kathleen Cooper and Emma Short, “Introduction: Histories and Heroines: The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction,” in The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. Kathleen Cooper and Emma Short (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 2. 9

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from which they came. Not finding what they sought, these newcomers dedicated themselves to doing the work necessary to broaden canon and curriculum.11

Cooper and Short elaborate on what is contained in this expanded cannon, writing: These [female authored] texts seek to add to and build on existing understandings of the historical female figure, re-distributing narrative power and providing detailed and complex portrayals of her, at odds with her accustomed place as a one-dimensional, supporting character in history… Yet, as ever, these narrative retellings raise a number of concerns around truth and authenticity, provoking the question of whether female narratives, admittedly reappropriated, should be regarded as any more reliable than their male counterparts.12

While seeking representation and equality for their female Arthurian characters, modern authors, especially women, found themselves facing a whole new set of ethical questions to consider when writing. These had their foundations in the massive shift in perspective that modern authors brought to the Arthurian tradition – both in matters of gender and gender roles, as well as how history and literature are interpreted and why. These questions are the basis for this essay because, while they have been addressed in many ways over the last forty to fifty years, they are still top of mind for Arthurian authors today.

Ethics in Modern Arthurian Writing: Entering into Dialog with Tradition and History As Cooper and Short point out, questions about authenticity and reliability of historical fiction abound, regardless of the gender identification of the author. Ethical writing of a time-honored, quasihistorical character like Guinevere in the twenty-first century requires the author to portray the time period, subject matter, and characters with respect for previous tradition and a clear vision of what sets this character apart from prior versions. This involves careful thought and planning by the author in research, attention to the worldview of the time and place in which the book is set, and awareness of the role the character would play 11

Lois Leveen, “The Paradox of Pluck: How Did Historical Fiction Become the New Feminist History?” Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ article/the-paradox-of-pluck-how-did-historical-fiction-become-the-new-feministhistory/. 12 Cooper and Short, “Histories and Heroines,” 14.

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in that period/location. These elements coalesce to form a character who is a thoroughly modern addition to the lineage of stories, yet still highly recognizable to readers of established works and in historical context. Writing in any established canon, whether it be the Arthurian legend or something more modern like Star Wars, expands upon a tradition that considers certain truths to be, if not sacrosanct, highly crucial to the integrity of the text and nigh immutable. Because of this, readers hold certain expectations for the plot and the characters; to deny them would be to break the implicit promise between the reader and the author regarding elements of the tradition. For example, if an author of the Arthurian legend were to change major elements like King Arthur’s death or his marriage to Guinevere, the reader is likely to feel betrayed because these events are at the core of the legend. Despite the fantasy elements Sharan Newman added to her Arthurian novels, she was well aware of the general constraints surrounding her writing. “Because I was working within a tradition… I recognized that I owed something to it. I had to retain certain basic features that everybody accepted… I felt that I had to play fair with the audience, that I couldn’t allow Guinevere and Lancelot to run off and live happily ever after, for example. That would be like cheating them [the audience].”13 In order to remain in keeping with this tradition and its promises, the modern author must conduct significant research, beginning with reading previous works to understand and enter into a dialog with them. Even if the author is not consciously critiquing previous works, every change made sends a message about that work. For example, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s portrayal of Morgaine as the heroine of The Mists of Avalon is a direct commentary on how past works pigeonhole her into the role of an evil sorcerer. By inverting that expectation, Bradley shows how Morgaine has been misused, misunderstood, and how reclaiming her power can be a metaphor that empowers female readers to do the same in their own lives. In the same way, everything authors choose to keep in their stories re-emphasizes the importance of those elements in the tradition. While some, like the Holy Grail, the isle of Avalon, and even Excalibur come and go depending on the story, the Arthurian legend would not be the same without characters like King Arthur or Guinevere, an identifiable fortress (even if it is not called Camelot) or a battle for the future of Britain. Take 13

Raymond H. Thompson, “Interview with Sharan Newman,” The Camelot Project, 28 July 1989, https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/interview-with-sharan-newman.

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those away and the author is no longer working within the Arthurian legend, but in a different story influenced by it. In addition to reading previous texts, research into the time period of the book is key for accuracy, which modern authors define as making our novels as historically factual as we can based on what is known of the period through archeology, history and sociology. This is especially true when writing in a period readers may not know much about, such as post-Roman or early Britain.14 It is the little details of life – how a woman dons the layers of her gown or how much she pays for a round of cheese – that transport the reader into the world of the book, regardless of when and where it is set. Dame Hilary Mantel, a Man Booker Prize-winning author, recommends authors research until they know as much about the characters as any biographer would “and then add value by taking the story where the historian and biographer can’t go. However much you learn, factually, there is plenty of scope for imagination.”15 Research is also key to creating historically believable, yet relatable characters. Short of time travel, it is the only way to develop a representational mindset of the time. Joanna Courtney writes, It comes down to knowing our heroine inside out. We must research all we can about what makes her different from us – what she would have worn, how she would have washed, arranged her hair, cooked, or instructed others to cook. But then we must explore all the things that make her the same – how she feels about her life, what scares her, what thrills her, who she loves. Only once we know all this can we inhabit her world and create her story.16

While research clearly applies to historical fiction, it also is important for fantasy authors, since most fantasy is based, at least in part, on extant mythological systems and traditions. In order to build a new world, an 14

This period used to be called “Anglo-Saxon Britain.” However, as Mary RambaranOlm and Erik Wade point out, “For years, scholars of medieval history have explained that the term Anglo-Saxon has a long history of misuse, is inaccurate and is generally used in a racist context.” The term is now closely associated with white supremacy and therefore has fallen out of favor. See Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade, “The Many Myths of the Term ‘Anglo-Saxon,’” Smithsonian Magazine, 14 July 2021, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/many-myths-term-anglo-saxon180978169/. 15 Mark Brown, “Students Take Hilary Mantel’s Tudor Novels as Fact, Says Historian,” The Guardian, 31 May 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/31/ students-take-hilary-mantels-tudor-novels-as-fact-hay-festival?awc=11152_158058 9118_2c27491e3cb20961c2c9d24db6e3bbd2&. 16 Joanna Courtney, “Writing Women in Historical Fiction,” in Writers & Artists, www.writersandartists.co.uk/advice/writing-women-historical-fiction.

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author has to understand what it is based upon, even if the new world is in direct opposition to the existing one. Moreover, characters are built the same way regardless of genre. They all have backstories that shape who they are; emotional wounds that they must overcome in order to grow; motivations that drive them to act; and conflict in their lives that tests their will to achieve their goals. In this way, the principles of understanding how cultural, spiritual, economic and political forces influence them remain the same whether they are human, mystical priestess, or vampire. This research will educate both the author and the reader on the worldview presented in the minds of the people at the time through the imagination of the author. It can be very easy and very tempting to allow a modern mindset to slip into historical fiction because the author naturally filters the world, including their research, through their own experiences, which are colored by the time period in which they live. So, an author might incorporate a modern sentiment on a subject without even realizing it. For example, assuming Guinevere would rather stay single than be controlled by her husband, when she would really have been raised to view her husband as more capable of making decisions than she. Or having Guinevere and Arthur abolish slavery in their kingdom because it is unethical, when most wealthy families in postRoman Britain, raised in a Roman system, took their slaves for granted. Writing in a character’s worldview is even more important when it shows aspects of historical life that the reader may not want to experience. As Hilary Mantel said, “A good novelist will have her characters operate within the ethical framework of their day – even if it shocks her readers.”17 This means not shying away from the ugliness of the past, including issues such as bigotry, slavery, misogyny, classism, and violence – they were all, and still are, part of daily life, just to varying degrees. Understanding this is important to the characters as well. The world in which a character is raised colors the way she acts. Throughout history, for the most part, women were discouraged, sometimes through laws and customs, from entering areas reserved for men, both physical – such as banks, jousting rings, and places of business – and symbolic, such as politics, finance, or the military. Rather, they would assert their power in areas they are familiar with such as the kitchen, the market, through 17

Hannah Furness, “Hilary Mantel: Women Writers Must Stop Falsely Empowering Female Characters in History,” The Telegraph, 31 May 2017, www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/2017/05/31/hilary-mantel-women-writers-must-stop-falsely-empoweringfemale/.

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patronage, and for ladies of the literate classes, letter writing and other correspondence. They could also subtly suggest changes to their husbands through their behavior, such as lavishing praise, appealing to ego, or withholding affection. These were not seen as limitations by women in the past, but rather as their areas of strength. So if Guinevere’s story were set in the high Middle Ages, she would have to be subtle and crafty, getting Arthur to think things were his idea because she could not exercise overt authority. On the other hand, as we will see from Persia Woolley,18 Parke Godwin,19 and others, a Celtic Guinevere had more legal rights and was therefore freer to say what was on her mind. Acting and speaking in accordance with her circumstances and cultural expectations is what distinguishes an authentic character representation from one simply set down in another time. Finally, the author’s understanding of their new version of the character is also important. They must be able to articulate why a new Guinevere is needed now, what she has to say to the reader and why that same thing couldn’t be or hasn’t been said in the past. It is that immediacy that makes her relatable to modern readers and adds to the tradition in a way that is relevant and likely to stand the test of time. For example, in making my Guinevere a priestess, I consciously broke the traditional good/bad and mundane/magical dichotomies that make Guinevere and Morgan disparate characters and placed them on an equal footing so I could show how these two highly flawed women could both love and hate one another at the same time. I also changed the source of their animosity from jealousy over Arthur – though that still plays a role – to their youthful quest for favor in Avalon. This is a reflection of my idea that a modern audience wouldn’t be as interested in two female characters fighting over a man – which, although it has been a trope for centuries, has recently fallen out of favor thanks to the Bechdel test20 favored by young female readers and literary critics – as they would in both trying to succeed, sometimes at one another’s expense, just as we see today’s career women doing.

18

Persia Woolley, Child of the Northern Spring, reprint edition (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2010), 8. 19 Parke Godwin, Firelord, reprint edition (New York: Avon Books, 1994), 246. 20 The Bechdel test, created in 1985 by Alison Bechdel, posits that a movie or book has adequate female representation if it meets these three criteria: (1) it must have two or more women in it, (2) who talk to each other about (3) any subject besides men. See https://bechdeltest.com/ for more information.

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Guinevere in Historical Fiction: The Ethics of “Accurate” Representation An examination of how Guinevere has been portrayed in representative modern historical fiction (1980–2020) and its subgenres of historical romance and historical fantasy shows how contemporary authors have achieved an ethical portrayal – as defined in the previous section – of her character for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For the purposes of this article, historical fiction is defined as “a novel which is set fifty or more years in the past, and one in which the author is writing from research rather than personal experience,”21 which is the definition espoused by the Historical Novel Society, an international organization for writers and readers of historical fiction. Though she started out as a character of folktale and legend, Guinevere has been treated as a semi-historical figure by many authors since 1980. Most have sought to portray her as living in the post-Roman early Middle Ages, the period many scholars believe to be accurate when trying to place a real-life Arthur in the historical timeline. In the late 1960s historian Sir Geoffrey Ashe was one of the first in modern times22 to link King Arthur with a Romano-British hillfort in South Cadbury, England.23 Around the same time, archeologist Leslie Alcock24 added to Ashe’s work with his expertise on Cadbury Castle and post-Roman Britain, though he stopped short of actually naming the hillfort “Camelot” and the man who ruled it “Arthur,” preferring to call him instead an “Arthur-type figure”25 who held the title magister militum per Britannias or General Officer Commanding British Land Forces.26 Criticism of the Cadbury theory followed and in 1977 David Dumville wrote a scathing critique of Ashe and Alcock’s scholarship, dismissing it and declaring: “The fact of the matter is that there is no historical evidence 21

Sarah Johnson, “Defining the Genre: What Are the Rules for Historical Fiction?,” Historical Novel Society, 2002, https://historicalnovelsociety.org/guides/definingthe-genre-what-are-the-rules-for-historical-fiction/. 22 Geoffrey Ashe and Leslie Alcock, “Cadbury: Is it Camelot?,” in The Quest for Arthur’s Britain (New York: Praeger, 1968), 125. Ashe and Alcock write that the connection was first made by antiquarian John Leland in 1542. 23 Ibid., 123–47. 24 Leslie Alcock, Arthur’s Britain: History and Archaeology, AD 367–634 (London: Penguin Books, 1971); Leslie Alcock, Economy, Society and Warfare Among the Britons and Saxons (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967); Leslie Alcock et al., Cadbury Castle, Somerset: The Early Medieval Archaeology (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995). 25 Christopher Snyder, “Arthurian Origins,” in A History of Arthurian Scholarship, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 8. 26 Alcock, Arthur’s Britain, 358.

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about Arthur; we must reject him from our histories, and above all, from the titles of our books.”27 For the next twenty years, it was considered unacceptable to suggest Arthur could have been an actual person,28 but since the 1990s scholars like Kenneth Dark29 and Christopher Snyder30 have been exploring the theory, first proposed by Ashe in his 1985 book The Discovery of King Arthur,31 that there is a link between King Arthur and the historical Romano-British military commander Riothamus who led Britain around the year 470.32 This scholarly debate has influenced the location, time period, and focus on historical accuracy of modern Arthurian authors and led the majority of them to place Guinevere in books that are classified as historical fiction, which raises its own set of issues to be considered when trying to write her character in the modern age. All historical fiction authors face a certain number of ethical questions when approaching their subject and writing it for a modern audience, chief among them: 1) how much do they stick to the historical record versus how much to embroider in fiction; 2) similarly, which matters more: historical accuracy or an entertaining story; 3) how to keep the characters true to the conventions of their age while still appealing to a modern audience.33 When a female character is involved, the final question often takes precedence over the other two. One major reason is a lack of easy access to information about women’s daily lives in times past, as most of the commonly available books are focused on men. While there are many works on women’s lives, both fictional and historical, available to those who work in academia, the average author faces strong financial barriers to them unless they can afford to take college courses or pay for subscriptions to academic journals as an independent researcher. In addition, much of the most recent scholarship on women’s lives simply isn’t available to the general public because it is only accessible through databases and unpublished works such as theses, and dissertations. Therefore, many authors have to rely upon information available in public 27

David N. Dumville, “Sub-Roman Britain: History and Legend,” History, 62.205 (1977), 173–92: 188. 28 Snyder, “Arthurian Origins,” 9. 29 Kenneth R. Dark, Civitas to Kingdom (London: Leicester University Press, 1994). 30 Christopher A. Snyder, An Age of Tyrants: Britain and the Britons, AD 400–600 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). 31 Geoffrey Ashe, The Discovery of King Arthur (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1985), 96–100. 32 Synder, “Arthurian Origins,” 15. 33 Gary L. Stuart, “Is Historical Fiction Ethical?,” The Ethics of Writing, https:// ethicsofwriting.com/2018/08/is-historical-fiction-ethical-part-i/.

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libraries and online, which often contains outdated views inherited from the medieval, romantic, and Victorian periods. This then leads to the belief that historical women are difficult to reconstruct accurately due to lack of information. Many historical novelists, myself included, have expressed sentiments similar to Courtney: Women are something of a rarity in history – shy, domestic creatures who peep out between the cracks of their husband’s ‘greater’ deeds… This can be a huge frustration for the historian but it is something of a gift for the novelist as it allows scope to create a character. This, however, leads to the… crucial problem – how to create a heroine who is believably of her time but to whom modern readers can still relate.34

This last point is crucial to writing a book that will be successful in the current publishing climate where strong female leads are expected. Margaret O’Neill Marbury, Vice President of Editorial at Harlequin, recently told Publishers Weekly that the #MeToo movement has greatly influenced the desire for these types of heroines: “We’ve always looked for books with strong female characters, but yes [since #MeToo], we have wanted to acquire more books that support women’s freedoms or highlight female pioneers.”35 Sarah Parvis, Head of Book Development at Rebel Girls, said in the same interview: “The popularity of the genre [books about women and female empowerment] is not slowing down. Readers have become hyperaware of the lack of representation in the books they read, parents seek out titles that aim to fill a gap, and girls are declaring their love for books that showcase strong, smart, compassionate, resourceful girls and women.”36 Opinions like these may make Young Adult characters like Katniss from the Hunger Games and Tris from the Divergent series spring to mind, but they hold true in historical fiction as well with female-driven bestsellers like Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale, Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings, Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures, and Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code, all of which are built around real-life strong women. Because of readers’ awareness of and desire for books with elements of female empowerment, a passive Guinevere without agency would not be welcomed by modern readers. In this environment authors face the 34

Courtney, “Writing Women in Historical Fiction,” n.p. Diane Patrick and Calvin Reid, “Is Women’s Empowerment Coming to Publishing?,” Publisher’s Weekly, 29 January 2021, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/ by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/85436-is-women-s-empowermentcoming-to-publishing.html. 36 Ibid., n.p. 35

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strong temptation to ignore the ethics of historical accuracy and literary tradition to create a revisionist past, one in which female characters are independent, free-thinking and bolder than their historical counterparts would have been, a tendency authors like Mantel and Courtney have spoken out against. Mantel told the Daily Telegraph: Many writers of historical fiction feel drawn to the untold tale. They want to give a voice to those who have been silenced. Fiction can do that, because it concentrates on what is not on the record. But we must be careful when we speak for others. If we write about the victims of history, are we reinforcing their status by detailing it? Or shall we rework history so victims are the winners? This is a persistent difficulty for women writers, who want to write about women in the past, but can’t resist retrospectively empowering them. Which is false.37

Courtney agrees, but points out that history gives plenty of examples of strong women; they are just different from those of today. “There is no way that women in the past could approach the world with the liberated, equal-opportunities attitude that we take today. Yet throughout history there have been plenty of women with strong characters – Boadicea, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth I to name just a few – who hopefully allow us to believe that it was possible to operate as an individual and not just as a secondary figure.”38 Because of the influence of such outstanding historical women like Boudicca39 – who fought against the Romans – and Cartimandua – who allied with them – the post-Roman, early medieval period is seen by some authors, including myself, as the perfect period in which to set a Guinevere who defies the stereotype of the submissive woman. Historian Jonathan W. Jordan describes these women as seeing “themselves as problem-solvers, not trendsetters or role models for future women. Their job was to crack the ribs of a crisis and wrench the still-beating answer from its chest. If war was part of the solution, so be it.”40 Persia Woolley’s Guinevere is a fictional mirror of such historical women. She is a pagan, Celtic queen, and lives in a time when the 37

Furness, “Hilary Mantel,” n.p. Courtney, “Writing Women in Historical Fiction,” n.p. 39 Boadicea, Boudicca and Boudica are all alternate spellings of the name of the queen of the Celtic Iceni tribe who revolted against Roman occupation of Britain around the year 60 CE. 40 Jonathan W. Jordan and Emily Anne Jordan, The War Queens (New York: Diversion Books, 2020), ix. 38

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stronger rights of Celtic women were not only remembered, but still lived daily. As Woolley writes in the author’s notes at the beginning of Child of the Northern Spring: The tales of Arthur’s remarkable kingdom grew out of the Celtic Renaissance which rose as the Roman civilization deteriorated and the Anglo-Saxons began their invasions.… They were a rugged, wild, stormy lot, with a long tradition of queens who were co-rulers with their husbands. The activities of these vital and exciting women were recorded in both Celtic legend and Roman history, and any daughter of theirs was likely to be an independent and remarkable person in her own right.41

Therefore, her Guinevere is characterized as a “tomboy,” a word the author herself uses to describe the character,42 who is not fond of traditionally female activities such as carding, spinning, weaving and sewing. But more importantly, she is independent. Unlike her medieval counterpart who was not consulted by her father, Leodegrance, when her marriage was arranged and yet was expected to acquiesce to his will, Woolley’s Guinevere is allowed to weigh the pros and cons of her marriage with Arthur when he proposes. When Woolley was writing in 1987, Guinevere was hardly ever portrayed on equal footing with Arthur, but Woolley shattered that glass ceiling by making her Guinevere co-ruler with her husband, a woman who is allowed to voice and implement her own innovative ideas. She will not just sit around and be an ornament for Arthur; as she tells Bedivere, “a Celtic queen is a working queen.”43 This was the first time such a Guinevere had been seen on the page. Not coincidently, it this is the same period when women in the United Kingdom and United States “were beginning to see themselves represented by mayors, governors, and congresswomen, and feminist Arthurian authors contributed to this reputation by writing their own female politicians.”44 Similarly, Woolley’s Guinevere rules Camelot while Arthur is away and upon his return, he even commends her success.45 While this was groundbreaking in modern Arthurian fiction, historically, medieval women often took over governing while their husbands were away at war. Ironically, while 41

Persia Woolley, Child of the Northern Spring, 8. Persia Woolley, Guinevere: The Legend in Autumn (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2011), ii. 43 Woolley, Child of the Northern Spring, 241. 44 Cooley, “Re-vision from the Mists,” 28. 45 Woolley, Queen of the Summer Stars, 346. 42

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defying the passive-woman-of-the-past stereotype, Woolley actually ended up portraying her Guinevere more in line with her real-life medieval counterparts. Woolley even dares to go so far as to make her Guinevere sexually independent, which is in keeping with her interpretation of historical Celtic law. When Malegant first makes unwanted sexual advances toward Guinevere, she slaps him. Later, when he rapes her, and in so doing gives her a sexually transmitted disease, it becomes the reason she is barren. While such diseases have existed forever, they are so ingrained in the modern mindset, and so associated with the mid-to-late 1980s in which Woolley was writing,46 that some have criticized her for being too modern.47 Explorations of a seemingly alternative past are usually not done with malicious intent, but rather to explore the gender issues of the present in a way that could not be done in a book with a contemporary setting because they would be expected or glossed over as part of modern life.48 Reminding readers that what they consider modern problems – in this case, sexually transmitted diseases and infertility – have existed for thousands of years has the effect of jarring the reader and getting them to think more deeply on such subjects because of their perceived anachronism. By placing them in the past, Woolley shines a light on them and can delve deeper into their consequences for women, even women of power like Guinevere. Leveen takes a slightly less stringent approach to strong historical female characters, writing “It’s no crime, of course, to create a protagonist who is exceptional. But the exceptionality of a plucky protagonist can imply that it’s pluck – rather than systemic factors of race, class, and gender – that determines one’s narrative trajectory, whether on the page or in real life.”49 In most of Eurocentric history and historical fiction, women who have the privilege of being white, wealthy, educated, or all three, have clear advantages over those who are not. Wealth not only means not having to worry about safety, where one’s food or shelter is going to come from, or other basic needs, it generally conveys a certain amount of power upon a 46

The mid-1980s is when the AIDS epidemic first came to light, with its height following in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 47 Ulrike Borgman, “King Arthur of Britain in the Nineties: Just Like a Man,” in Images of Masculinity in Fantasy Fiction, ed. Susanne Fendler and Ulrike Horstmann (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), 162. 48 Cooper and Short, “Histories and Heroines,” 10. 49 Leveen, “The Paradox of Pluck,” n.p.

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woman or puts her in touch with those who have it, enabling her to have more agency than a person of lower status. Similarly, education enables a wealthy woman to function in a sphere where the men of influence reside, providing her access and the possibility of influence, even if she is without direct power of her own. Education also gives women of lower status more of a possibility to rise in the world as their culture allows. As Leveen notes, none of these factors have anything to do with “pluck,” which is based on the ideas of bravery and determination. In both real life and fiction, a woman can have all the gumption in the world, but if she doesn’t have access to the proper resources, it will be much more difficult – if not impossible – for her to do the things a more privileged woman can. In fact, perpetuating the idea of the “plucky” heroine reinforces the myth that everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they try hard enough. As Mikki Kendall writes in her book Hood Feminism, this rhetoric can be harmful because it infers “to be worthy of respectability” one must be able to advance on one’s own merits,50 the very accomplishment stereotypically attributed to “exceptional” women. In reality, whether one lived in the Middle Ages or is alive now, it is a woman’s socioeconomic situation that determines much of what she is capable of doing in her life, not her willpower or determination alone. The inclusion of these influencing factors is exactly what sets Parke Godwin’s Guinevere apart from others who seemingly sprang fully feminist from the author’s imagination. As Howey notes, “Parke Godwin’s revisionist characterization of Guinevere… is remarkable because it makes of Guinevere a female archetype capable of heroic independence, dignity, and strength.”51 The first of Godwin’s two Arthurian novels, Firelord, sets up Guinevere as Arthur’s equal. As queen of the Parisi tribe, she is educated and experienced as a ruler in her own right when she marries him. Their equality in ruling is made clear in this passage: “While your women dress your hair, you’re already reading half of the day’s first dispatches while your husband reads the rest. You discuss the most urgent over breakfast while other business is already crowding in on you.”52 This is clearly a Guinevere of status, a woman who has the freedom to focus on the ruling of the realm because she has servants to take care of her basic needs. She is depicted as attending to matters of governance first thing in the 50

Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot (New York: Viking, 2020), 89. 51 Teresa Boyle Falsani, “Parke Godwin’s Guenevere: An Archetypal Transformation,” Quondam Et Futurus 3.3 (1993), 63. 52 Parke Godwin, Firelord, 246.

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morning – just as her husband does – rather than taking care of children or overseeing her household as many other women of lesser status and previous iterations of her character would have done. Later, when Arthur exiles Guinevere for her part in Morgana’s death, she doesn’t hesitate to raise a full army against him, threatening civil war. When they meet to negotiate a bargain and Arthur warns her that if her men make even the slightest move he will attack, she responds “I came for my rights, Arthur. Not for a fight.”53 This is the proclamation of a battle queen born and raised, rather than of a misplaced feminist character exacting revenge. This fiercely independent Guinevere continues in Beloved Exile, the story of Guinevere’s life after Arthur’s death. Rather than bowing to tradition and shrinking away to live in a convent, Guinevere fights those who would oppose her right to inherit Arthur’s throne.54 As Godwin himself noted in a 1989 letter to a friend, to have done so would have made Guinevere “something utterly insupportable in context of the legend,” for he contends that she was “rendered astride both pagan and Christian traditions.”55 Godwin brings up a point common to many, if not all, Guineveres who are portrayed as pagan and do not convert to Christianity in the course of the book or series. Because she doesn’t believe in the Christian God, having her live out her life in a convent would not make any sense. This is especially true if she is fighting for the culture and gods of her people to continue even as the power of Christianity grows, a common theme in Arthurian tales set in the early Middle Ages. In addition, Godwin’s Guinevere was raised as a noble in a culture where women had power and when it was threatened, fought to keep it, rather than submitting to the patriarchal will of Christian traditions as Bradley’s Christian Guinevere does. In attempting to keep the throne of Camelot, which Arthur willed to her, Godwin’s Guinevere faces her strongest challenge yet, one in which she, the noble raised to be queen, is brought low in the bondage of slavery, and there, learns compassion for those over whom she rules.56 Through this new growth and awareness, she is able, in the end, to give up the throne for the good of her people, a mature and ethical, if not entirely plausible, ending to the tale. 53

Ibid., 209. Parke Godwin, Beloved Exile (New York: Avon Books, 1994). 55 Falsani, “Parke Godwin’s Guenevere,” 56. 56 Ibid., 62. 54

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Another author who writes a strong Guinevere born into independence and power, albeit with an overtly feminist tone, is Rosalind Miles in her Guenevere trilogy.57 This Guinevere is the daughter of the woman who rules Camelot, so the fabled kingdom is established early as belonging to women – and to Guinevere upon her mother’s death – rather than to Arthur, as tradition dictates. “A queen in her own right, her Guenevere descends from a line of queens who enjoyed the ancient right of “thigh-freedom” – to take up and then discard whatever man they please,” explains Peter Standford in a 1999 interview with the author.58 Rather than catering to a “feminist” audience – a concept Miles despises and feels is outdated – she set out to set the historical record straight as she saw it in regard to women. “I wanted to recapture the active, regal women of this period,” she said. “The only one we all know is Boadicea and we remember her because of her failure.”59 As Miles has done in several of her non-fiction works, she aimed to write a version of the timeless myth in which women are finally recognized and Guinevere’s sin was not her defining characteristic; rather the focus is on her strength. As such, Miles’s Guinevere is reluctant to marry, as she “learned from an early age that she must be responsible for her own self as well as that of her kingdom,” explains scholar Jacquelyn Sweeney Johnson. “After her marriage to Arthur, she sees no reason to step down from her responsibility. Raised to be a strong leader, she has the confidence to make critical decisions which include overriding the King’s command by ordering soldiers on the battlefield.”60 With this backstory as her foundation, in retaining Guinevere’s independence even after marriage, Miles perfectly balances on the knife’s edge of Arthurian ethics for modern authors, portraying the spirit of the historical Celtic woman while still giving modern readers a character to whom they can relate. Perhaps even more powerfully, Miles’s Guinevere goes against the usual portrayal of women shaped by medieval and Victorian stereotypes – those who sacrifice their own identities and dreams for others – by choosing her job, her career, if you will, encapsulated in her 57

Rosalind Miles, Guenevere, Queen of the Summer Country (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2000); The Knight of the Sacred Lake (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2001); The Child of the Holy Grail (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2001). 58 Peter Standford, “The Books Interview: Rosalind Miles – A Feminist in Camelot,” The Guardian, 1 May 1999, n.p. 59 Standford, “A Feminist in Camelot,” n.p. 60 Jacquelyn Sweeney Johnson, “Guenevere’s Conflict: Pagan Love or Christian Ethics” (M.A. thesis, Longwood University, 2003), 28.

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duty to her people, over her own desires. When Lancelot asks her to marry him and rule Brittany with him, she declines. “You are the love of my life. But I am the mother of the land… these bonds may I [not] break.”61 As with many modern portrayals of the character, Miles’ Guinevere becomes a literary incarnation of the Celtic goddess of sovereignty.62 As James Noble writes, “Like the goddess of the earth in spring, she traverses the country, encouraging her people to plant crops and mend the scars war has brought upon the land.” Again, as an incarnation of the land she governs, she becomes pregnant and rears her child alone, “prov[ing] herself capable of mothering – in her own right and on her own terms – not only a child but also a nation.”63

Guinevere in Historical Romance: The Ethics of Modern Romance In twenty-first-century United States, the Arthurian legend cannot be considered historical romance unless the traditional ending is changed so that Guinevere and any number of men (Arthur and Lancelot being the two most popular) end up living “happily ever after.” This is because according to the Romance Writers of America (RWA), the largest organization of romance writers in the country, the modern definition of romance has two core elements: “a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.”64 Because of this, there are not many Arthurian romances by American authors. Conversely, other countries recognize that romance novels can have tragic endings. The UK-based Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA) gives a much broader scope of what they term “romantic fiction” including everything “from stories that focus entirely on the developing relationship between two people, to fiction that shows a budding romance as one part of the hero or heroine’s journey, and into books that focus on long-standing relationships weathering storms.”65 Women’s fiction, which is precluded from RWA because the endings are not always happy, is included in RNA. 61

Rosalind Miles, The Child of the Holy Grail, 342 and 420. For an in-depth discussion of this topic, see Caitlin Matthews, King Arthur and the Goddess of the Land (Rochester, NY: Inner Traditions, 2002). 63 James Noble, “Guinevere, the Superwoman of Contemporary Arthurian Fiction,” Florilegium 23.2 (2006), 197–210. 64 “About the Romance Genre,” Romance Writers of America, www.rwa.org/Online/ Romance_Genre/About_Romance_Genre.aspx. 65 “About Romanic Fiction,” Romantic Novelists’ Association, https://romantic novelistsassociation.org/about-romantic-fiction/. 62

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Ironically, the earliest books considered “Arthurian romances” – generally defined as the stories that began with Chrétien de Troyes’s verse romances in the late twelfth century,66 specifically those written in vernacular languages such as French, English, and German – would not be categorized that way in twenty-first-century America. The tragic ending of Arthur’s death and the irreparable separation of Guinevere and Lancelot would not allow those tales to be categorized by the modern definition of “romance.” Writing feminist historical romance adds another layer of complexity to retelling the life of a well-known character like Guinevere. Historian Mariadele Boccardi refers to this quandary as ‘the dual temporal dimension in which the genre operates, the time of the writing (the present) and the time of the setting (the past).”67 The tension from these two opposing forces often results in characters that simply do not fit in with their historical surroundings, like the plucky slaves and overly outspoken aristocratic suffragists that populate many historical romances. This is certainly true in the case of female characters. Because modern authors (usually female) live in a world where sex and sexual power are equated with strength, many – whether consciously or not – imbue their characters with strength and feminism they likely would not have experienced or felt in previous times. This false empowerment can take many forms, including giving women equal rights, freedom of choice, and sexual agency mindsets long before or in places where their historical counterparts would not have had them. These are often most obvious in certain types of historical romance, which are less concerned with actual history than stories peopled with contemporary characters in period dress – books Candy Tan and Lydia Joyce term “wallpaper historicals”: ‘Wallpaper’ historicals are, essentially, costume dramas. Yes, the characters dress up in clothes that more-or-less resemble clothing of the period… But the reader can’t really believe for one minute that these people could have actually existed in 1813 (or whenever), nor did the world of the book ever exist… Hence a derivative story with no historical substance and characters that might be my next door neighbors in fancy clothes.68 66

Norris J. Lacy “Arthurian Romance,” Oxford Bibliographies, www.oxfordbib liographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195396584/obo-9780195396584-0188.xml. 67 Mariadele Boccardi, The Contemporary British Historical Novel: Representation, Nation, Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 5. 68 Candy Tan, “On Wallpaper Historicals,” Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, 25 May 2006, https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2006/05/on_wallpaper_historicals/.

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Not only is this historical inaccuracy, it is also ethically suspect because readers who see these portrayals may come to believe that women of that time/place really were that free and outspoken. This is one thorny issue that Lavinia Collins navigates in her Arthurian books, which include a trilogy about Guinevere. Unlike previous works, in which Guinevere is portrayed as relatively chaste or at least limits her lovers to Arthur, Lancelot, and sometimes Mordred or Kay,69 Collins’ Guinevere is anything but, leading readers to comment that the books contain an “incredible quantity of romance and racy sex, verging on the salacious at times,”70 and are “bordering on erotica.”71 In fact, Collins admits that Amazon made her change the cover of her first Guinevere book, The Warrior Queen, because it showed Guinevere’s naked breast72 and “hints at the possibility of risqué content.”73 However, this is the whole point. Collins wrote on her blog: “I wanted it to be racy, I wanted it to be sexy and exciting.”74 Sex is part and parcel with the story because Collins is playing with the ideas of power and control in her novels. In an online interview, she admits that the thing that drew her to the women of Arthurian legend is power. “In a completely masculine world, and even in medieval texts, they appear as enticingly influential, as changeful and threatening. As everything that female characters in so many modern films, TV, and popular culture are not.”75 A striking example of this comes when the famous extramarital affair begins. In Collins’s series, it is Guinevere who initiates the affair, pressuring Lancelot when he resists her advances.76 Though written before #MeToo and our current cultural obsession with power and sexual 69

Evelina, The Once and Future Queen, 20–21. This does not, of course include any of the instances of rape that occur in the legend. 70 Tricia Preston, review of Guinevere: A Medieval Romance, by Lavinia Collins. Amazon, 21 June 2016. 71 Leonide Martin, review of Guinevere: A Medieval Romance, by Lavinia Collins, Goodreads, 25 January 2017. 72 Lavinia Collins, “Free The Nipple! The Fight for Female Nudity on Our Own Terms,” Lavinia Collins Author Page, 5 August 2014, https://vivimedieval. wordpress.com/2014/08/05/free-the-nipple-the-fight-for-female-nudity-on-ourown-terms/. 73 Lavinia Collins, “On Writing a Sexy Book – and Telling Your Parents You’ve Done It,” Lavinia Collins Author Page, 22 March 2014, https://vivimedieval.wordpress. com/2014/03/22/on-writing-a-dirty-book-and-telling-your-parents-youve-done-it/. 74 Collins, “On Writing a Sexy Book,” n.p. 75 Lavinia Collins, “Reading and Writing Arthurian Women: A Guest Post by Lavinia Collins,” Geek Girl in Love, 1 June 2015, https://geekgirlinlove.com/2015/06/01/ reading-and-writing-arthurian-women-a-guest-post-by-lavinia-collins/. 76 Collins, The Warrior Queen, 2530.

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consent, Collins is prescient in showing how clear and uncomfortable the power balance is when the expected gender roles are reversed. This flipping of gender roles may not be historically accurate, but Collins is trying to balance history with entertaining storytelling. As we saw with Persia Woolley’s Guinevere, Collins is not the first to use sex to discuss modern issues in the context of Arthurian legend. Collins is a worthy successor to Woolley in this regard. Following the rules outlined in this chapter for ethical modern portrayals of the Arthurian legend, she creates a semi-accurate historical world in which Guinevere would naturally expect to be more powerful than the men around her. In this vision of Breton society, women are warriors and they have a strong voice in the family and society. Guinevere is the one with the power. Then all of a sudden, she is forced into the British world in which women are treated like brood-mares and slaves, quite a shock to her independent system. As historical fiction writers, both Collins and Woolley have leeway to loosen the rules of historical accuracy in favor of creating a compelling tale – this is what differentiates them from the historian who must stick to hard facts. If a historical fiction author is going to consciously betray the norms of a time period, building up a semi-accurate world that explains and enables the change is the most ethical thing she can do. In so doing, the author is being true to the “historical” part of the genre by portraying the period as realistically as publicly available sources will allow, while using the “fiction” part to spin a story that not only captivates the reader but can also explore themes one would not at first glance associate with history, even when they were prevalent in the past.

Guinevere in Fantasy/Historical Fantasy: The Ethics of Imagination Since the 1982 essay “The Secondary Worlds of Fantasy” by Kenneth Zahorski and Robert H. Boyer, fantasy fiction has been divided into two main schools, low fantasy and high fantasy, based on the world they take place in and the amount/effect of magic on that world. Low fantasy is generally accepted to take place in the “here and now,” that is the real world, while high fantasy is usually “set in a secondary, alternative world” and is characterized by heavy use of magic and fantastical creatures.77 77

Kenneth J. Zahorski and Robert H. Boyer, “The Secondary Worlds of Fantasy,” in The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art, ed. Roger Schlobin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 56–81. These definitions have, of course, changed since 1982. For example, “low fantasy” has been divided into subgenres such as magical realism, urban fantasy, pulp fantasy, and dark fantasy. Similarly,

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In comparison to straight historical fiction, the fantasy genre, and to some extent its subgenre historical fantasy, has looser rules and greater imaginative capacity.78 Because of this, authors who place Guinevere in this realm have more freedom in their storylines and characterizations than others. Marie Štefanidesová wrote in her dissertation: “Throughout the ages, there has hardly been any author who succeeded in producing a compact record of the Arthurian legend without mentioning the characters connected with the supernatural.”79 While the most common characters to be associated with fantasy elements of the Arthurian legend are Merlin, Morgan, and to a lesser extent, the Lady of the Lake, some authors have dared to give Guinevere supernatural abilities as well. “Counterbalancing the mythic masculinities of Arthurian knights, these feminist versions of Arthurian women celebrate a magical and mystical view of femininity, in which female characters are graced with deep insights and keen spiritual awareness about the challenges, both sacred and secular, of their world,”80 note Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl in their book Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present. “A tale of King Arthur is hardly ever historical fiction. Arthur is, instead, almost always historical fantasy,” asserts medievalist and author Michael Livingston. He goes on to note that some of the best tales have been those in which the magic is not overt; rather it simmers under the surface of the plot, balancing every word on the line between historical reality and what he calls “(non-)reality.”81 In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Mike Ashley calls this type of fiction “rationalized fantasies.” In these books:

“high fantasy” now includes sword and sorcery, fairy tales (and their retellings), and portal fantasy. Some publishers and writers consider magical realism, dark fantasy, historical fantasy, portal fantasy and urban fantasy their own subgenres outside of high and low fantasy because they can fall into either category. For updated definitions and categorization, see Masterclass, “What Is the Fantasy Genre? History of Fantasy and Subgenres and Types of Fantasy in Literature,” Writing, 8 November 2020, www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-the-fantasygenre-history-of-fantasy-and-subgenres-and-types-of-fantasy-in-literature#howdid-fantasy-originate-as-a-genre, n.p.; Tor Online, “Fantasy Subgenres: Which Subgenres Belong to Fantasy?,” www.tor-online.de/feature/fantasy-genres/. 78 Historical fantasy can also be considered a subgenre of historical fiction. 79 Marie Štefanidesová, “Perception of Women of the Arthurian Legend in the Middle Ages and in the Twentieth Century” (B.A. thesis, Masaryk University, 2007), 30. 80 Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (London: Routledge, 2013), 75. 81 Michael Livingston, “Parke Godwin and the Historical Fantasy of King Arthur,” Tor. com, 6 October 2016, www.tor.com/2016/10/06/parke-godwin-and-the-historicalfantasy-of-king-arthur/.

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the supernatural elements [are replaced] by rationalized religious or mystical interpretations and present the stories as straight fiction… They sometimes take the historical reality of a post-Roman Britain, although some prefer the timeless quality of an Arthurian alterworld. Both weave fantastic and supernatural elements into the story, usually rationalized but sometimes taken as a natural part of that world.82

My own Guinevere series falls into this category, as does its inspiration, Bradley’s seminal novel The Mists of Avalon, wherein Merlin, the Lady of the Lake, Morgaine, and the other priestesses of Avalon possess and use magic, but other characters, including Guinevere, do not. Because in Bradley’s work Guinevere is not the main character and her characterization is far from positive, the discussion of her herein will be brief. Ironically, Bradley herself criticized Malory for doing to the Arthurian women exactly what she did to Guinevere: Yet, I wondered: if Malory disapproved so much of these women, why did he not simply expunge them from the mythos, as he did with so many other elements of the ancient Celtic folk-tales that he grafted on to the doings of his 5th-century historical hero chieftain. My theory is that he could not, because in the originals, now lost, Morgan and the Lady of the Lake were absolutely integral to the whole story and it was unthinkable to tell tales of Arthur without also telling tales of the women involved… Malory minimized the women; he made them into villains, nitwits, and evil sorceresses… But Malory could not get rid of them entirely.83

Likewise, because she couldn’t tell the story without Guinevere, Bradley minimized her strength and influence in the novel in favor of Morgaine and cast Guinevere instead as the villain, an evil Christian instead of an 82

Mike Ashely, “Arthurian Fiction,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, ed. John Cute and John Grant (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1997), 61. 83 Marion Zimmer Bradley, “Thoughts on Avalon,” www.mzbworks.com/thoughts. htm, n.p. Many scholars agree that Malory could not eliminate women but have differing views as to why and how he treated them. Siobhan M. Wyatt, Women of Words in Le Morte Darthur (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) shows how Malory uses altered language to portray his female characters as valuable for their chiding, yet constructive speech. In “Public Displays of Affliction,” Melissa Ridley Elmes explores the violent injuries and death that befall Malory’s women; in “Treason at the Feast” she analyzes how heightened emotions like suspicion, fear, anger and pride shape the character of Guinevere. See Melissa Ridley Elmes, “Public Displays of Affliction: Women’s Wounds in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur,” Modern Philology 116.3 (2019), 187–210; Elmes, “Treason at the Feast in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur,” in Treason: Medieval and Early Modern Adultery, Betrayal, and Shame, ed. Larissa Tracy (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 320–39.

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evil sorceress. It is appropriate that Bradley chose the term “nitwit” to describe Malory’s women, because it is also an accurate word to describe Bradley’s Guinevere, who is one of the few women in the novel not imbued with mystical powers; in fact, Guinevere’s own father calls her a “featherhead.”84 However, though her portrayal of Guinevere is anything but admirable, Bradley must be given credit for making her a woman of her time and her surroundings – one of the hallmarks of an ethical modern Arthurian author. As Štefanidesová notes, Bradley’s “Guinevere was only a woman struggling in the world ruled by men.”85 This Guinevere clearly represents the submissive woman who has been beaten down by patriarchy and the strict morals of Christianity, both of which were introduced to the British Isles by the Romans and romanticized by historians. This is the same predicament found in the historical story of Queen Boadicea, who was held up by many nineteenth- and twentiethcentury historians as an example of a strong woman who was ultimately conquered by white men (the Romans) and the patriarchy and therefore fit nicely into their narrative of Christian white supremacy. If Mists is on the low end of historical fantasy, then books like Newman’s 1981–85 Guinevere trilogy lie somewhere near the middle. A professional scholar of the medieval period, the author indicates that she wanted to present a Middle Ages that was as historically accurate as possible. “I know that I write fantasies, and I know that they’re considered light reading… But every bit of history in those books is absolutely as accurate as I could make it,” she said in a 1989 interview. “I was, however, using Arthurian tradition to say what I wanted to say about society of the Dark Ages… I was exploring the struggle to survive even though you know that the barbarians are at the gates, that your society’s dying, and that Rome has abandoned you.”86 Despite these heavy historical themes, Newman’s books also contain strong supernatural elements reminiscent of the Celtic Otherworld as modern audiences understand it, including ghosts, a unicorn, the underwater realm of the Lady of the Lake, and the voices of faerie-folk that only some characters can hear.87 Both Guinevere and Lancelot have

84

Bradley, The Mists of Avalon, 254. Štefanidesová, “Perception of Women of the Arthurian Legend,” 36. 86 Thompson, “Interview with Sharon Newman,” n.p. 87 Sharon Newman, Guinevere (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1996). 85

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strong ties to otherworldly realms.88 With ethical portrayals in mind, Newman made sure her readers understood that these seemingly strange elements were taken quite seriously by people of the time. “I even tried to make it clear that people at that time would have believed stories that we now consider fantasy,” Newman said.89 “In those days there was more belief in the magical nature of things… I felt I was writing a historical novel, only I was using the fantastic elements that the people in those days would not have been surprised to find. These elements were part of the social history.” Accordingly, Newman’s Guinevere is a “well educated, and selfassured, if still somewhat naive, young woman who stands more than a fair chance of proving to be a successful wife and queen.”90 As the books continue, however, the supernatural elements wane as the duties of adult life, such as providing Arthur an heir and ruling a kingdom, take over. Toward the end of the series, Guinevere is given one last opportunity to return to the Otherworld, which she rejects in favor of living out her life on her father’s estate, where she feels safe and can care for her people.91 But she knows that death will someday come for her, and it “is coupled with a promise to return to the land of magic, where people have pet unicorns and she can be united with Lancelot forever.”92 In constructing the plot this way, Newman remains true to the more realistic aspects of the legend but still keeps to her own version of the story where the fantasy elements are important to Guinevere; by allowing her to experience them as a young girl and again after death, Newman not only emphasizes the connection to the Otherworld experienced by children and those who have passed, but also shows that the only times Guinevere is her true self and is truly happy are before the responsibilities of life set in and after they are left behind in death. In her commitment to historical accuracy while infusing her tale with magical elements, Newman shows herself to be committed to developing a story that both portrays a realistic past, but also entertains, even if today’s readers would view the fantastic elements as more fiction than fact. On the other end of the spectrum are novels that border on high fantasy like Guinevere Forever by M. L. Bullock, the first book in her 88

Stephen Knight, The Politics of Myth (Strawberry Hills, NSW: Melbourne University Press, 2015), 523. 89 Thompson, “Interview with Sharon Newman,” n.p. 90 Noble, “The Character of Guinevere,” 202. 91 Sharon Newman, Guinevere Evermore (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1998). 92 Pugh and Weisl, Medievalisms, 76.

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Lost Camelot trilogy. The series envisions Guinevere as a vampire, joining other twenty-first-century works that imbue classic stories with supernatural creatures and pop culture, à la Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation. Books like this have been called parody, satire, and “literary mash-ups… of period drama and horror.”93 Bullock’s trilogy has Guinevere on the receiving end of a curse cast by Morgan, one that turns her into a vampire and dooms her to a life of immortality. While she cannot die, she is forced to witness Arthur and Lancelot’s rebirths countless times while being unable to approach them. As the trilogy progresses, they reunite to once again battle darkness, though this time it is not the Saxons that threaten Camelot, but supernatural forces they barely understand, led by Morgan, who is herself something dark and other than human. This Guinevere is a very modern woman, but that is to be expected when she has had seven hundred years to watch the world evolve and grow along with it. She ponders this shift in power dynamic over the centuries, thinking “Strange to think he would need me to protect him when the reverse had always been true. Arthur had been my protector until he could not be, and then Lancelot had.”94 In making Guinevere a vampire, Bullock automatically imbued her with physical strength; it was time and hard-won wisdom that brought her the rest of the way into a fully-fledged independent woman. By allowing Guinevere to mature and evolve over the centuries of her supernatural afterlife, Bullock creates a thoroughly modern character her readers can relate to without making her seem out of place with the larger Arthurian tradition. According to Michael Gamer, a professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania, these fantasy/horror/historical mashups have their origins in “the explosion of fan fiction brought about by the Internet,” in which anything is possible.95 He also noted that these authors might be “simply responding to something already present”96 in these works, that is, making obvious what has been hidden by centuries of subtext and societal taboo.97 But here again, whichever path authors 93

Dave Itzkoff, “Move Over, Jane Austen. Now Lincoln Meets the Vampires,” The New York Times, 13 April 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/books/14artsMOVEOVERJANE_BRF.html. 94 Bullock, Guinevere Forever, 727. 95 Mary Halford, “Jane Austen Does the Monster Mash,” The New Yorker, 4 April 2009, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/jane-austen-does-the-monster-mash. 96 Ibid., n.p. 97 Lev Grossman, “Critique of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” Time, 8 March 2010, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1968104,00.html.

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follow, they must balance the fictional elements that they add with the requirements of the legend; if they stray too far from the basic tale, it becomes a different story entirely. The idea of hidden subtext is an interesting angle from which to examine Bullock’s Guinevere. At its core, The Lost Camelot Trilogy is a story about the struggle for power, only this time it is the women, Guinevere and Morgan, who feel the lust, as embodied by the legendary sword, Excalibur. “I was strong,” Guinevere thinks, “strong enough to wield the sword. Excalibur wanted me to hold it, love it. I knew that. With Excalibur in my hand, I would once again rule Camelot. I would feel human again.”98 Unlike previous tales, which highlighted the lengths to which the kings of Britain would go to possess the throne of Camelot, this story brings out the power-hungry depravity that modern society can now admit resides in women as well, making them equals after centuries of subservience in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. In this way, Bullock is not only pointing out a culturally imposed lack in previous versions and righting it, but also making a point to modern audiences that this female desire and feminism can, like any other seemingly noble motivation, go too far, turning it into something to be feared – just like the horror of vampirism and the curse that plagues both women. If there is one thing no one in the Arthurian legend can experience without consequence, it is pleasure. Guinevere was happy with Lancelot and so she had to be cursed for it – in this case at the hand of Morgan, who felt she should have been the recipient of Lancelot’s love. As Morgan herself says: “How desperate you were to die. That was your sin, Guinevere. You thought you could escape the consequences of your actions. You sought the path of least resistance. If you had not put your lips on the vial, if you had not taken a sip, you would not be what you are now. You did this by your own hand! I did nothing!”99 So in this modern retelling, Guinevere’s sin was to attempt suicide – not her adultery, not her barrenness, sins given to her by men of ages and moralities past – her willingness to act with agency and take her life, and death, into her own hands. Here we see the age-old Arthurian love triangle cast in a new light, with an empowered Guinevere and a preternaturally powerful Morgan – a new spin on Malory’s dangerous “student of necromancy” who tried to frighten Guinevere to death – fighting for the love of Lancelot and suffering the consequences. This is a very modern predicament as opposed to Arthur and Lancelot both 98 99

Bullock, Guinevere Forever, 1441. Ibid., 190.

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attempting to win Guinevere’s affections, one that young audiences, who cut their reading teeth on the likes of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, can relate to. Jessica Barton agrees, saying these types of books are ways to make long-dead (read: boring) stories engaging to new generations. “[They] keep readers interested, [they] keep the pages turning… Rotting corpses? Gory death scenes? Of COURSE it’s engaging! (And WHY didn’t I think of it first?!)”100 Young readers are just glad someone did. And scholars can be proud that the someone was Bullock, who carefully considers the tradition in which she is writing while imbuing her story with horror and fantasy elements that, in less talented hands, would come across as forced and kitschy, but with Bullock’s attention to detail and the subtleties of motivation, read as plausible and fitting to the world she has created.

Conclusion As we have seen from the examples in this chapter, modern authors of Arthurian historical fiction, romance and fantasy have successfully found ways to ethically add their own spin to the classic tale while remaining within the confines of historical realism and keeping within the established canon. In order to do this, they must research the timehonored tales so they include an informed dialogue with them in their own work, follow the unwritten rules and expectations of their genre, conduct historical research in order to portray their world with a degree of accuracy, and maintain a worldview in keeping with the period in which their book is set. As authors of fiction, these writers have the freedom to add elements to the traditional story that non-fiction writers and historians do not, which is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because it enables greater artistic freedom, which can result in plot points and characters that not only evolve the story for modern times, but also make it appear fresh and appealing to readers. It is a curse, however, because of the many opportunities to stray from tradition that would turn the story into something other than what it has always been. By walking this fine line with care and precision, the historical fiction author can create a story that readers will love and academics can respect, even if they don’t completely agree with it. 100

Jessica Barton, “Book Review! Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” Nerdist, 21 May 2010, https://archive.nerdist.com/book-review-abraham-lincoln-vampire-hunter/.

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As a modern Arthurian author living and writing in a time when truth and tradition are called into question on a daily basis in favor of telling a good story (even in the news media), it can be tempting to lay aside the ethics of Arthurian storytelling in favor of entertaining readers and perhaps hitting the bestseller list. However, I have found that in retelling Arthurian legend, tendency to stray too far from tradition is lessened the more one studies and honors the legends on which one is building one’s own story. In a retelling, one is not jettisoning history and tradition in favor of a new imagining, but updating an ever-evolving tale for the time in which one is writing. As I crafted my own Guinevere series, I imagined all the other authors who came before me and consciously analyzed what elements each added to the tradition, weighed the merit of those ideas both historically and to contemporary society, and chose whether or keep or discard them for my modern audience. I knew my readers would mostly be female, so I wanted to place the emphasis on the women of Camelot who had mostly been hidden in the shadows of their male counterparts, especially Guinevere, whose life story I was exploring. But I also knew how crucial those male characters are to the tradition; it would not exist without them. So I chose to show them through a woman’s eyes, allowing them to have vulnerability and emotions that the male authors of the past could not access, both because of their own machismo and perceived or real cultural constraints. As a historical fiction author, I also looked for the cracks and holes left in previous retellings that I could fill in with heretofore unexplored details, which is the boon of every historical novelist. When I noticed that Guinevere had never been given magical abilities before, I asked myself and the tradition “why not?” When no good answer presented itself, I chose to say “why not!” and her second sight and ability to manipulate the elements were born. However, I did not just gift her with these powers randomly; they were crafted based on the very real beliefs of the Celtic and Pictish people to whom she is related and in opposition to the submissive view of women that was beginning to come into fashion with the rise of Christianity in post-Roman Britain. Perhaps most importantly, even when looking at my immediate Arthurian predecessors, I saw a distinct lack of emphasis on Guinevere’s life pre-dating King Arthur and again after his death. My readers, as modern women, are no longer defined solely by the men in their lives (fathers, husbands) and so neither should my Guinevere be. This is my biggest contribution to the legend. In addition to telling the traditional

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Arthurian story in Camelot’s Queen, I dedicated an entire book to Guinevere’s youth (Daughter of Destiny), one that did not anticipate King Arthur, as well as another focused on her experiences after the end of his story (Mistress of Legend). Especially when looked at together, all three books of The Guinevere’s Tale trilogy are respectful of the cannon of the Arthurian legend in their foreshadowing and fulfillment of the expected story, but the additional books give Guinevere context and a full life independent of the men she loves, just like the ones my readers live. In that way, I have – I hope – ethically modernized Guinevere’s story for the twenty-first century without losing sight of the tradition on which it is based.

Afterword ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD

C

hoices are a central part of the fabric of narrative fiction, and bring with them the possibility/danger of transgression, also a feature of most fiction. In the Arthurian world choices and transgression are set against the idealism which is associated with chivalry and the Round Table, though this idealism is sometimes questioned or subverted, especially in post-medieval versions. Part of the appeal of the legend lies in the aspirations generally associated with Arthur and his knights: the high standards of behavior they set for themselves, the ambition to create a just society, and the inevitable failure of these ambitions in the end. The fundamental themes of the legend all invite ethical scrutiny: fighting and conquest, pride and desire for honor or “worship,” love and marriage, loyalty (to king or fellow knight or lady or promise). In myth and folklore around the world, great heroes are frequently brought down by treachery from within the family or entourage, and this is Arthur’s fate; but many ethical issues are raised in the complex circumstances which lead to the end of Camelot. Can individuals be held responsible for predestined outcomes? Are some characters inherently bad? Can repentance, however late, absolve the sinner and change behavior? In the introduction the editors suggest “that ethics in medieval texts are a didactic program embedded within the narrative, intended to help the reader think through moral concerns.”1 But it is easy to think of Arthurian works which leave the reader confused about the moral concerns raised, from Chrétien on. Some are discussed here; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an obvious example, but there are many others. Jane Gilbert’s seminal essay, much cited here, makes clear that approaches to ethics in Arthurian texts vary considerably from century to century in the medieval period, as well as in the more wide-ranging 1

Elmes and Meyer, “Introduction,” 2.

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plethora of Arthurian fiction from the nineteenth century on, and this is confirmed by the essays in this volume.2 The world of Arthur was used by the early romance writers (mostly clerics) to inculcate better standards of behavior in the knightly class, but we should remember that the legend had already been developing for centuries, and that Arthur was not always presented in earlier stories as the ideal king; he could be weak or unjust, challenged and outwitted by both secular and religious figures, even mocked and ridiculed. This ambivalence continues as the romance genre flourishes; modern readers are often surprised to find how seldom the medieval Arthur goes on quests or has adventures himself. And the knights of the Round Table who do star in medieval romances can be quite variously represented; characters are not consistent throughout the period. To some extent this is a matter of the country in which a text is produced; it is hardly surprising that Lancelot, a French invention, is much less admired in England, whose legendary king he cuckolds. Gawain is a more complex figure. In England he is often the Top Knight and Arthur’s right-hand man, the beau idéal of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but not always. Malory seems to draw on a variety of versions of Gawain, sometimes heroic but sometimes an indisputable example of the toxic masculinity discussed by several contributors, as his own brother makes clear in The Tale of Sir Gareth. And of course, as several essays here show, readers had and continue to have very varied responses. Moral concerns evident to medieval readers may seem much less significant in the twenty-first century, and vice versa. Critics today raise issues about class and gender and violence and imperialism which would not have occurred to most medieval readers. How important are Christian values in any given century, and how central to the legend? And how much did medieval readers worry about clashes between religious and secular values which may seem very striking to us today? Less than we might suppose, according to Barbara Newman, who picks out the ending of Malory’s Morte Darthur as a prime example of what she calls “medieval crossover”; she argues that he refuses to choose between secular and religious values, instead managing to have it both ways.3 It is certainly hard to see what sort of moral can be deduced from Lancelot’s long affair with the queen who inspires him, his failure because of this love in the Grail Quest, his abduction of the 2



Jane Gilbert, “Arthurian Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, ed. Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 154–70. 3 Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013).

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queen and civil war with Arthur, his abject repentance and somewhat exaggerated sense of responsibility for so many deaths and disasters, his own saint-like death after years as a hermit, and the very secular eulogy delivered by his brother Ector praising Lancelot as the best knight ever (the last passage of direct speech in the whole work and Malory’s addition to his sources). Modern critics often write as if it were obvious that the affair between Lancelot and the queen is the reason for the tragic ending of the story, but it is far from clear in medieval texts, which tend not to ascribe blame or draw moral conclusions (though Malory does explicitly blame Mordred and Agravain). There is a fundamental ethical problem in the world of medieval chivalry, in that the chivalric life encourages and indeed requires several of the Seven Deadly Sins, pride, anger and lust. We know that the Church took a dim view of tournaments, and might refuse burial in holy ground to those who died in them. Yet it is hard to think of a chivalric romance which does not involve fighting in some form and pride in success and reputation; and lust in the form of love is an ennobling force, in symbiotic relationship with chivalric prowess either as a spur to action or a prize for achievement, or both. In medieval texts Lancelot’s adultery is crucial to his greatness, though post-medieval writers do not necessarily follow this lead. Tennyson, for instance, constantly presents the affair as a corrupting force and a source of shame. In one twenty-first-century take on the story, most things about Arthur are a source of shame: Philip Reeve’s Here Lies Arthur presents the king as a minor thuggish warlord who never hesitates to stoop low in moral terms.4 Nor does Myrddin here hesitate to spin Arthur’s misdeeds as heroic successes, saying this is what people want to hear. Perhaps this is indeed how the legend began. What is striking in the novel is that the clear-eyed observer is a low-status girl, a nobody in social terms; she is our eyes as the story develops, and our ethical compass, and by the end she despises Arthur, though she makes a living from telling stories about him as Myrddin did. Moral concerns and toxic masculinity are certainly to the fore in this text, as are questions about class and gender. As the final essay in this volume shows, modern authors have many options in choosing protagonists and social contexts, and thus ethical concerns and viewpoints; promoting the roles and views of women has been a popular choice in the last fifty years. Arthur’s medieval status as one of the Nine Worthies in the later Middle Ages did not continue unquestioned in later centuries, but from 4

Philip Reeve, Here Lies Arthur (London: Scholastic, 2007).

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early on ethical issues have been raised by Arthurian authors, though not always resolved with any clarity. Part of the enduring power of the legend is that it acts as a kaleidoscope, allowing different generations of writers and readers to see variations on both plots and ethical values (and editorial policy too, as Kevin Whetter and the late Fiona Tolhurst demonstrate in their discussion of editing Malory). Arthurian ethics do exist, but in many forms; the concept should be treated as important but undefinable and used with caution, like “courtly love.”

INDEX Accolon 281 acting too quickly (ze gâh) Arthur, King 54–60 Gawein 63 Keye 54–56, 58–59 see also not acting quickly enough under Arthur, King adultery 69, 225, 232–33, 240, 269–70, 275, 283, 383, 389 adventure as game of chance 297, 303–09 Agamben, Giorgio xiv Agravain (Aggravayne) 183, 183 n.40, 269, 352, 389 Alcuin 8, 9 Alexander A 286 n.33 Antanor 49–52 Apollonius 283 Aristotle xiii on virtue and action 249 Arthur, King (Arthure, Artûs) xviii, 1, 3–5, 8, 12, 15, 18–30, 35–45, 64–65, 107–08, 117–26, 130, 153, 155, 168–74, 183–85, 190–91, 254–55, 175–83, 292–94, 352–53, 357–58, 363–66, 369–74, 381–83, 388–89 and authority 55, 79, 182–85, 189–90, 252–53 and hospitality 28, 191 and the Very Black Witch 19 as a Continental lord and chevalier 11, 117–20 as a god cniht to anyone 121

as ideal king 38, 44, 55, 388 not acting quickly enough 60–64 see also Arthur, King under acting too quickly (ze gâh) rulership 10, 14–16, 35–37, 44–45, 48–49, 54–64 Arthurian legend 9–11, 22, 29–34, 99, 276, 279, 357–62, 374–86 Arthurian scene, the xii, xvii Arthurlife xii Arthurtime xii, 6, 86, 297–300, 307–09, 313–17, 322–23 Ascalon 53, 55, 73, 79, 301 audience 9, 11, 14, 17 n.23, 24, 28, 47, 68, 79, 112, 118, 120–21, 125–26, 130, 161, 170–72, 204, 216–18, 231, 245–46, 250, 272–78, 283, 297–304, 307–10, 322–24, 327 n.8 intended audience 112, 327 n.8, 334, 347, 356 taste of contemporary audiences 356–59, 361, 364, 366, 383 Auerbach, Erich Mimesis 88, 302 n.19 Augustine 8, 9 autonomy 5, 137, 174, 177–79, 197 Avadain  91 aventiure, waz ist daz (adventure, what is that?) 296–97, 300–03, 308 Ban 287, 292, 353 barbarity 173

392

INDEX

Beaumains see Gareth Bedwyr 14, 18 Beowulf 21 Berluse 228 Bersules 280 Bertilak 190–97 as Marcher lord 5, 173–74 biopolitics xiv, 134–35 of marriage 135–41, 146 Blackthorn, Count (Schwarzer Dorn) 57, 60, 80 inheritance dispute 57–60 Book of Leinster 134–35 Loinges mac nUislenn 135 Mesca Ulad 135 Scéla Conchobair maic Nessa 135 Bors 287, 292, 341, 352, 354 Bradley, Marion Zimmer The Mists of Avalon 361, 379 Bretel 288–90 Bullock, M. L. Guinevere Forever 383–84 Burlow Beanie 275, 277 Cador 126–29 Cai (Keie, Keye, Sir Kay) 17–18, 25–27, 32, 44–56, 45 n.37, 63, 67–68, 74, 144, 155, 213 Camelot 179–85, 190–92, 195–96, 221, 225–26, 314–17, 344–46, 361, 365, 372–73, 382–85 camere van wijsheiden (Chamber of Wisdom) 165–72 Canhastr Can Llaw 23 Caw of Prydyn 20, 23 Caxton, William and custom (consuetudo) 60 Book of the Knight of the Tower 246–47 Book of the Order of Chivalry 247, 260 edition of the Morte Darthur see Le Morte Darthur, editions of under Malory, Sir Thomas preface to Morte Darthur 245–50 Chanson de Roland 88–92

Chastel de la/le Tor de Cuevre 98, 103–06 chivalric aggression 146–50 ethic(s) 123–26, 129, 204, 213, 227–29, 234, 244, 252, 260, 270 ethos 59, 219–22 habitus 248, 250–57, 260–70 chivalry 9–13, 39–41, 53–54, 86, 101, 111–13, 118–30, 138–41, 156–57, 168–70, 198–218, 222–44, 245–48, 297–312, 389 see also knighthood as ethical construct 112–15, 117–18, 126 ethical practices of 5, 50, 85, 112, 119, 168, 202 n.8, 263, 266 ritterschaft ist topelspil (chivalry is dice-play) 297, 303–14 Chrétien de Troyes xv, 88, 96–97, 111, 113, 119–20, 122, 138, 172, 375, 387 Chevalier de la Charrette 204, 277, 326 Cligès 91 Conte du Graal 85, 94, 95, 99, 100, 200, 262 Erec et Enide 139, 206, 303 n.24 Yvain 65, 74–75, 137, 140, 300 Christine de Pizan Epistre Othea 246 n.3, 260 Cilydd, son of Lord Celyddon 29–31 circulation of materials 131, 155, 249 clash between ethics and the law 66–67, 83–84 Cleodalis 291–94 clothing 22–24, 44, 180, 235, 240– 44 and sumptuary laws 185–89 see also sumptuary under law(s) codification of knightly ethical behavior 152, 164

INDEX

colonialism 99, 108, 173–74 colonization 99, 102, 131 n.2, 131–35, 137, 142–46, 174 Conchobar, the King of the Ulstermen 135–36 courtliness 42, 59, 64, 118, 165–67, 204 courtly literature xiii–xv, 72 Creiddylad, daughter of Llud SilverHand 14, 18, 23, 30 crusades 40, 85–86, 90–108 The Fourth Crusade 95–100 cuckolding; cuckoldry 231, 242–43, 275–76, 388 Culhwch 10, 13–34 Culhwch and Olwen 8–10, 13–34 Cunneware of Lalant see punishment of Cunneware of Lalant Custennin 20, 25, 27 Cyledyr, son of Nwython 18 Damas 281 Decretum Gratiani 71 dehumanization 132, 134–35, 145–46, 149–50 see also humanization Deirdre 135–36 demesne 174–77, 191, 195–96 Derrida, Jacques xvii n.16 L’animal que donc je suis xv diffidatio (defiance) 175 refusing to acknowledge authority 178–85 visual authority and resistance 185–89 Dillus the Bearded 18 Dinadan (Dynadan) 220–44 and cowardice 220–31, 237 and cross-dressing 234–43 and hypermasculinity 219–24, 240–44 and japery 222–25, 229–31, 236–37, 241–44 disenfranchised communities 150 disguise 238–39, 271–95 blindness 273, 283–87, 292

393

kingly 272–83 motifs 273, 294–95 Doged, King 25 editorial theory 329–33, 342–51 intentionalist 329-332 sociological 329, 332 Edward II, King 175, 284 Edward IV, King 249 Eidoel, son of Aer 27–28 Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen 110, 127, 284, 368 Ellene 206–12 Englishness 114–15 Emer 135 emotions xiii, xvi-xvii, 51–52, 60–61, 63–64, 212–18, 228– 29, 253–55, 280–81, 329–30, 345–46, 357–58, 385 Enite (Enide) 43, 70, 75, 138–39, 301 Erec 41, 43, 46–47, 67, 70, 81, 138–39, 301 Estoire de Merlin 152, 153 n.4, 154 n.6, 273, 286 ethical; ethics xi–xvii, 1–4, 8–13, 20–21, 33–34, 38–40, 42–45, 54–59, 62–64, 65–69, 82–84, 85–90, 99, 107–08, 111–13, 125–26, 131–33, 151–52, 155, 168, 171–72, 173–74, 177–79, 190–91, 198–99, 216–18, 219–23, 245–53, 259–60, 266–70, 272–74, 283, 288–89, 295, 296–300, 320–24, 325–28, 365–66, 387–90 see also unethical ethical process of play 299–300, 307–09, 312–14, 317, 321–24 Evelina, Nicole Guinevere’s Tale Trilogy 357, 386 Camelot’s Queen 357, 386 Daughter of Destiny 357, 386 Mistress of Legend 357, 386 Fickenhild 282–83

394

INDEX

flying chess set 157–59 Foucault, Michel xiv, 107, 135 n.12 Freiburg Schwabenspiegel 71 Gaheris 248, 266–79 Galahad 347, 354–55 Galahalt, Haut Prince of Surluse 235–40 game(s) 289–300, 304–14, 322–24 as topelspil (dice-play) 305, 310–11 cooperative games 309, 314–22 board games 127, 314–17 role-playing games (RPG) 317–22 tabletop games 299, 309, 314 game metaphors 306–07, 315 game-play 298, 315, 317 Gareth 229, 241, 248, 250–70, 347–48 Gawein (Gauvain, Gawain, Gawayne, Walewein, Walwein) 40–41, 60–64, 80–81, 99–106, 127, 155–61, 156 n.8, 168–71, 173–74, 190–97, 211–16, 268–70, 290, 301–02, 336–37, 352 gender 30, 77, 136, 128, 220–23, 234–44, 246–52, 359–60, 370, 377, 388–89 Geoffrey Chaucer 1, 12, 242 “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” 285 Geoffrey of Monmouth Historia Regum Britanniae 14, 28, 31, 92, 99–100, 109–10, 117, 120–22, 130, 134, 141–46, 149, 203–04, 276 geopolitical 86, 95, 137 Gest of Robyn Hode 276, 282–83 giant(s) 15, 17–18, 20, 28, 28–29 n.70, 99–102, 106, 137, 142, 146–50, 180–81, 203–05, 208–11 Glewlwyd Mighty-grip 25 Gliwi 25–28

Global North Atlantic Arthuriana 131, 131 n.1, 132 n.3, 137–41 Glossia Ordinaria 71 Godwin, Parke 358, 364, 371–72 Beloved Exile 372 Firelord 371 Goleuddydd, daughter of Lord Anlawdd 29 Gorau, son of Custennin 20 Gottfried von Straßburg Tristan 68, 307 Grail Quest 9, 85–86, 90, 95, 106–07, 219, 308, 316–17, 325, 344–45, 352–54 Green Knight 173–74, 179–91, 195–97, 258 Grisandolus 294 Guinevere (Gaynor, Gonnore, Guenevere, Guenievre, Gwenyvere) 48, 57–60, 95, 182–84, 225–26, 231–36, 240–43, 269–70, 275–77, 293, 325–26, 340, 352, 357–86 literary adaptations of 357–86 Gurgaran 98–106 Gwenabwy, daughter of Caw 23 Gwyddog, son of Menestyr 23 Gwydre, son of Llwydeu 23 Gwyn, son of Nudd 18, 22–23 Gwythyr, son of Greidawl 18, 22–23 Hartmann von Aue 38, 54–57 Erec 40–41, 43–44, 46–47 Iwein 35–36, 44, 47–48, 60–64, 65–84, 296–303, 308 Hautdesert 173, 190–97 Havelok the Dane 272, 295 Helena 141–49 Henry II, King 93, 110, 113, 118, 178 n.19, 179, 284–85 Henry III, King 179, 284 Henry IV, King 196 n.81, 272, 279 n.20

395

INDEX

Henry V, King 275 Henry VI, King 272 heteronormative; heteronormativity 131 n.2, 133, 145, 219–22, 223, 228, 234–35, 239, 244 Horn Childe 282–83 horse(s) 16–17 n.23, 47, 53, 169, 180–81, 185, 198–218 see also knight-horse relationship Gringalet 47, 199, 213–14 Grissell 215–17 objectification of 205–11 the first steed, Lybeaus Desconnus 199–205, 211 the second steed, Lybeaus Desconnus 205–11 the third steed, Lybeaus Desconnus 211–16 Huail 23 Hugh Despenser 284 Hugh of St. Victor De beatae Mariae virginitate 73 humanization 150 see also dehumanization identity 92, 114 n.15, 115–16, 142, 144, 182–83, 199, 202, 212, 220, 223, 228, 235, 239, 250–52, 266, 274, 281, 283, 288, 290 ideologies of expansion 5, 136 interspecies attachment 211–12 Isidore of Seville classification of duck 289 classification of goose 289 on horses 202 Isolde, Queen (Isode, Ísönd) 148– 49, 230–31, 255, 326 Ither 44–45, 49–50, 55–56, 304, 308 Iwein (Iweyne, Yvain, Ywain) 37, 41, 53–55, 61–63, 65–68, 70–84, 140, 164, 183, 201, 298–304, 308, 315

Knight with the Lion 60 Jacob van Maerlant 152–53 Torec 161–72 Jandrée 102–03, 106 jew(s)  98–99, 102–03 John Skelton “Magnificence” 285 John of Salisbury Policraticus 284–85 Kalogrenant 44, 48, 55, 296, 299, 300–02, 304 Karadin 140–41 kebse 81–82 King Arthur and King Cornwall 274– 78, 284 King Arthur Pendragon (game) 300, 309, 317–22 King Horn 272, 282–83, 295 King-in-Disguise 6, 272–75, 278 kingship 12, 15, 22, 24, 44, 49, 135–37, 271–81, 292–95 king’s two bodies 273–74, 295 knighthood 8–13, 117–20, 168, 200–01, 208, 213, 219–24, 227–28, 234–35, 243–44, 298–300, 305, 308–09, 315, 317–20 see also chivalry nobility of birth (Adel der Geburt) 40–42, 46, 59–60 nobility of disposition (Adel der Gesinnung) 40–41, 46 nobility through virtue (Tugendadel) 40–41 knight-horse relationship 201–05, 209–18 see also horse(s) Lacan, Jacques xii, 258 Lady of the Lake 12, 267, 281, 378–80 Lamorak 227, 269 Lancelot (Launcelot) 12, 95, 155, 161, 169–71, 219–44, 258,

396

INDEX

Lancelot (Launcelot) (continued) 268–70, 291–92, 325–26, 337, 340–50, 352, 354–55, 374–77, 380–84, 388–89 and cross-dressing 238–41 Lancelot Compilation 161–62 Laudine 44, 55, 66–68, 70, 72–84 prostration 65–66, 70–71 law(s) 9–10, 31, 67–73, 75–76, 135–36, 176 n.10, 176–79, 188–89, 370 canon law 68–69, 71–75 and punishment 71 New Law (Christianity) 85–86, 86 n.2, 94, 98, 102–03, 105–07 Old Law (Judaism and/or paganism) 85–86, 86 n.2, 98–99, 102–03 sumptuary 185–89 see also and sumptuary laws under clothing Laȝamon 5 Brut 109–17, 120–22, 124–30 Caligula manuscript 115 Leodegan, King 291, 293 Lodewijk van Velthem 153 Merlijn-continuatie 153–55 lordship 122–23, 173–86, 190–97 bad lordship 174 good lordship 174–76, 190–192, 195–97 loyalty xi, 16, 21–24, 47, 58, 64, 74, 140, 176, 199, 217, 253–57, 270, 276, 281, 285, 291, 320, 387 Lunete 55, 74, 79–82 Lybeaus Desconus 6, 198–99, 204–05, 209, 216–18 Lybeaus Desconus 199–213, 216 treatment of his stedes see knightand-horse relationship Lynet (Lyonet) 229, 248, 252, 259–66, 270 Lynet’s anger 252–55

Lynet’s chiding as training of Gareth 255–58 magic of 264, 266–68 symbiotic relationship with Gareth 258 Lyones 6, 248, 254, 258, 260–67, 270 Mabinogion First Branch 30 Fourth Branch 30 Second Branch 14 n.18, 16 n.23, 21, 30 Mabon (cleric) 210, 216 Mabon, son of Modron 27 Mabonigran 44, 55 Malory, Sir Thomas 155–56, 164, 379 n.83, 379–80, 383 Le Morte Darthur 10–13, 20–21, 31, 33, 111, 122–23, 151–52, 219–25, 231–36, 244, 245–51, 268, 270, 273–74, 278–83, 325–56, 358, 388-90 and textual mouvance 331 classroom editions 326–27, 339 ethical standards of 326–28 critical editions 326–27, 330, 337, 339–40, 342–43 editions of Broadview Morte Darthur 328, 332–33, 346–56 Field, P. J. C., ed. Le Morte Darthur 330, 339, 341–50, 353–56 Modern Library Le Morte Darthur 334 Norton Critical Edition of Le Morte Darthur 339–41, 349–51, 353 Oxford World Classics Le Morte Darthur 334–37,

INDEX

349–50 Penguin Classics Le Morte Darthur 334 Vinaver, Eugene, ed. Malory: Works 337–39, 342–44, 346–50, 354–55 William Caxton edition of the Morte Darthur 328–34, 338–40, 345–50 ethics of editing 328–34 modern edition considerations of appearance of 327–29, 332, 339 Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake 107, 349 social relationships of 330 Tale of Arthur and Lucius 336–37 Tale of Sir Gareth 248–55, 347–48, 388 Tale of Sir Urry 281 Vulgate sources of 273, 280 Winchester manuscript of 328–56 rubrication of 333 n.33, 335 n.38, 338 n.44, 339–42, 350–56 originality of in comparison with sources 333 March of Wales 174, 176–79, 191–92, 196–97 multicultural border region 174 Marcher lords 174, 176–79, 182, 185, 197 marital affection (materialis affectio) 72–73, 80–84 marital equality 73 Mark, King 225, 227–28, 231–33, 280–84 marriage 66, 68–81, 83–84 and choice of partner 76–77 and consent 75–76 and ethics 67–76

397

and law 67–76, 83–84 masculinity 15, 181, 217, 220–23, 230–31, 233–37, 239–44, 245, 248–49, 277 hypermasculinity 180–82, 219–44 toxic masculinity 131 n.2, 388–89 medievalism 314 ‘banal medievalism’ 313 n.55 participatory 322–23 Meleagaunt (Meljaganz) 58–60, 160 n.11, 277 mercy 11, 16, 33, 248, 258–59, 261–62, 270, 336 in Culhwch and Olwen 24–29 Merlin 280, 285–94, 378–79 Miles, Rosalind 373–74 The Child of the Holy Grail 373 n.57 Guenevere, Queen of the Summer Country 373 n.57 The Knight of the Sacred Lake 373 n.57 moderation 6, 38, 42, 51–52, 57 modern historical Arthurian writing 360–86 access to recent academic publications 366–67 and accurate representation 365–67, 377, 379–80 and authenticity 360, 364 and character’s worldview 360, 363, 384 feminist historical romance 375–77 historical fantasy elements 361– 63, 377–84 impact of #MeToo 367, 376 influence of tradition and history 357, 367–68 supernatural elements 378–82 use of magic 377–81 Moldagog 147–49 Mont Saint Michel 142, 145–46

398

INDEX

Morgan (Morgaine) 183, 224, 267, 353, 361, 364, 372, 378–79, 382–83 Morgause 265–67 murder 11–12, 16–22, 26, 44, 228, 246, 269 Museum Wolfram von Eschenbach 299, 309–15, 324 narratives chivalric 42–43 courtier/clerical 42–43 Ness 135 Newman, Sharan Guinevere 380–81 Nicholas Oresme xiv Le Livre de Ethiques d’Aristote xiii, 249 Nine Worthies, The 389–90 Olwen 18–21, 27, 31–33 Otys 207–08 pagan(s)  86 n.2, 93, 99–106, 115, 143, 368, 372 Palomides (Palomydes)  229–30, 337 Paris, Gaston 87–88 parity or slippage between steeds and knights 202, 209–10 Parzival 44–45, 48–54, 296–99, 304–12 Pelleas 267 Pellinore 152, 281 Pentecostal Oath 10–13, 16, 18–19, 21, 24–25, 30–34, 111, 122, 151–52, 155–56, 168, 219–20, 227, 233–34, 237, 243–44, 254–55 Perlesvaus, aka Li hauz livres du Graal 85–108 genre 85–94 Perlesvaus (Perceval)  85, 93, 95, 103, 105–06

Persant of Inde 262 Philip, King 283–84 Piers Gaveston 284 Prose Lancelot 107, 120, 325 Prose Merlin 273–74, 279–80, 283–95 Julius Caesar in 294 punishment lack of Laudine 66, 72–73, 80, 83 of Antanor 49–52 of Cunneware of Lalant 49–54 of Lunete 301–02 queer; queerness xvi, 220–23, 234–35, 238–44 Queste del Saint Graal 107–08, 325 race 132–35, 146 n.52, 314, 370 rape 11, 30–31, 58, 136, 142–47, 152, 254, 304, 370 as chivalric necessity 12, 30 n.73 of Igraine 31 Rauf Coilyear 272, 295 repudiation xvi, 78–82, 301, 308 right to 82 Richard I, King 95, 284 Richard II, King 272 riddarasögur 134–41 Erex saga 134, 136–39, 146, 149–50 Ívens saga 134, 136–38, 140, 146, 149–50 Möttuls saga 134, 136–38, 140–41, 146, 149–50 Saga of Tristram ok Ísodd 137 Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar 134, 137, 141, 146–49 women’s roles in 134–41 Rimenhild 282–83 Robert de Boron 94–95, 99–101 Estoire del Saint Graal 152 Estoire de Merlin 152 roi fainéant 277 Roman van Walewein 156–61, 168, 213

INDEX

Romance Writers of America (RWA) 374 Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA)  374 Round Table 122–27, 222–23, 276–77, 291–93 Saga of Tristram ok Ísodd see under riddarasögur Saint Ursula legend 142–46 Saracen(s) 105, 132–33 Segramors 52–53, 297, 305–06 Shadows over Camelot 300, 309, 315–17, 318, 322, 324 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 5, 173, 179, 388 Sir Orfeo 281–83 Stanzaic Morte Arthur 277, 279 Tarquyn 349–50 Tathal Twyll Golau 22 Tennyson, Lord Alfred 389 Thomasin von Zerklaere Der Welsche Gast 41–43, 46, 48, 57–60, 67, 74, 168 n.16 Tor, Sir 152 Torec 162–72 translation xiii, 5, 8, 23, 47, 88, 112–14, 125–30, 136–37, 249, 286, 338, 344 skopos 5, 112 treason 21–24, 232–33, 292–95 Tristram (Trystram) 147–49, 219–20, 223–27, 229–32, 234, 237 Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar see under riddarasögur Twrch Trwyth 15, 17 Ulfin 287–88, 290 unethical 44–56, 64, 168–71, 177–79, 272–73, 278 n.18, 278–85, 288–89, 295 see also ethical; ethics Uther Pendragon 29 n.72, 31, 117, 318

399

vengeance 204, 229, 257 n.31, 270 Vinaver, Eugene 329–30 Malory: Works see Le Morte Darthur, editions of under Malory, Sir Thomas violence 15, 80, 86, 89–101, 106–08, 123–25, 131–32, 142–46, 221– 25, 229–30, 235–37, 240–44 against animals 199–200, 206–18 against women 12, 44–45 virtue(s) 8–10, 246–52, 319–20 and the doctrine of nobility 39–41 chivalric / knightly 39–41, 43, 47, 118–21, 155–61, 165–68, 222–24, 248, 251, 255 courtly 38, 42, 44–46, 51–61, 64 virtus 245–53, 257–61, 265, 269–70 see also virtues of, and virtue under women Wace Roman de Brut 5, 101 n.71, 118–30, 203 Wagner, Richard 313–14 warrior ethos 118 Wars of Alexander 93–94 Wars of the Roses 21, 222, 272, 279, 295 whiteness 132–33, 150 ethical framework of 132 medieval 131 n. 2 Wiard 283 Wikard 282 Wolfram von Eschenbach Parzival 38, 44, 53–54, 56, 74, 296–99, 304–09, 311–12 Titurel 310–12 Willehalm 305, 310–12, 314 women abduction of  31, 56–57, 161, 388–89 agency of 146, 220, 235–36, 254–66, 358–59, 367–74, 383–84

400

INDEX

women (continued) authority of 79, 364 ethical service to men 252 power of 65–67, 76–77, 79, 83–84, 136, 140, 248, 253, 258–59, 267–70, 357–58, 361, 370–71 role in Old Norse-Icelandic Arthurian texts 134–41, 146–50 ruler of a kingdom 79, 369–72 treatment of 29–33, 44–45, 49–51, 66–69, 123, 139, 149–50, 256–57, 308 virtues of, and virtue 6, 247–48, 257–70 see also virtue(s)

Woolley, Persia Child of the Northern Spring 365, 369 worship, worshyp (honor) 227–28, 230, 233–36, 387 Wrnach the Giant 17–18, 25–26, 28 Ydras 164–65 Ysabele, daughter of King Assentijn of Endi 161 Ysbaddaden 13, 16, 19, 20, 27–28 Žižek, Slavoj 258–59 Zumthor, Paul Essai de poétique médievale 91, 331