As its title suggests, this chapter deals with the world of the printed book, when the Arthurian story was known in England primarily through Malory's encyclopedic Morte Darthur. Although Caxton's edition of the Morte continued to be reprinted throughout the sixteenth century, the comments of Queen Elizabeth's tutor Roger Ascham in The scolemaster are representative of the mid-Tudor response to Malory. Ascham roundly condemned

The criticism here, as befitted a schoolmaster, was a moral one. Unappealing to readers in the sixteenth century, Catholic and Protestant alike, were the literary accretions rather than the so-called historical realities that lay behind them, and it is with these latter that I shall be concerning myself in this chapter.

It has long been fashionable to maintain that the British history as most fully articulated by Geoffrey of Monmouth fell into disrepute after a brief flowering under Henry VII as a result of emerging humanist methods of research – this is a view most influentially put forward by Sidney Anglo – but recent scholarship has shown just how important the ‘Arthur of history’ was in legal and political circles throughout the sixteenth century.