Introduction: A Note on a ‘Note on Editions’

All Malory criticism must, even if provisionally, deal with the question of the author's identity. Even in studies which do not confront the question directly, and even in those which (perhaps rightly) profess indifference to the question of which Thomas Malory wrote the Morte Darthur – even in these a position is taken. Its readers, not excluding the present one, refer habitually to ‘Malory's text’ or ‘Malory's book’ in the singular as if it were possible to consider the Winchester manuscript and Caxton's 1485 edition one ‘book’. Malory criticism since 1934 is really a narrative of at least two texts resolutely not being the same book. In her study, The Genesis of Narrative in Malory's Morte Darthur, Elizabeth Edwards appreciates this fact fully, nor would she have her readers overlook it: ‘I prefer to preserve the contradictions [within the Morte Darthur]’, she writes, ‘rather than to neutralise them.’ These contradictions are at the same time narrative and codicological.