Arthurian romance is quintessentially a literature of mobility; not only a literature of the transportive and ephemeral nature of love, but also an apex of unnamed long-distance economic networks. These networks provided an understructure for the Arthurian corpus, one that reinforced an appetite for global luxury goods and that fuelled an economy of pleasure. While narrating the physical mobility of knights and the emotional mobility of the desire for, attainment and loss of love, Arthurian romance also celebrated and accelerated the exchange of prestige goods through the networks of the Global Middle Ages. The acquisition and ephemerality of material objects and literary motifs from diverse cultures links the local and imaginative spaces of Arthurian narratives with global commerce.

While Arthur functioned as a point of reference and a hero to be emulated in early medieval Welsh texts, the rise in interest in utilising King Arthur and the values he stood for in visibly political ways becomes evident in the period following the twelfth century. Appropriations of the symbolism from Arthurian stories ranged from objects, performances, ceremonies, events (such as Arthurian-themed tournaments and pageants) and displays. This chapter interrogates the social and political uses of these varied instances of Arthurianism, linking them, where possible, to their Arthurian literary sources. It aims to show, selectively, the breadth of inspiration drawn from Arthurian legends across Europe for daily life, particularly among those who had urgent and real benefits to reap from association with the legendary king.

This chapter studies the significance of King Arthur’s status as a military fighter and as a leader of warriors in both medieval and modern literary contexts. First exploring the militarist and imperialist version of King Arthur that was appropriated and expanded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the essay shows how aggressive Arthurian militarism was consistently haunted by anti-imperialist critique, particularly within late medieval romances of the Old French tradition (such as Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval) and late medieval English work (particularly, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). After analysing the ambivalence of Arthurian militarism within Malory, the essay shows the modern deployment of Arthurian militarism by figures such as Spenser and Tennyson. The essay closes with comparison of ghostly, late medieval warnings about the ill fruits of militarism in the Awntyrs off Arthure with Kazuo Ishiguro’s contemporary portrait of the endemic nature of violence in the Britain shaped by Arthurian militarist culture.

This chapter offers a brief overview of patterns in approach, tone, theme and characterisation in North American engagements with the Arthurian legend since 1900. It considers retellings of the medieval romance and historiographic traditions alongside adaptations in multiple modes and media that are not especially interested in the earliest iterations of Arthur’s story. Paying particular attention to the perspectives from which these texts are told, the chapter considers how the diverse nature of these reimaginings challenges audiences to consider what exactly makes a text Arthurian while also acknowledging that the legend’s flexibility is central to its enduring popularity.

The seventeen French Arthurian romances in octosyllabic rhymed couplets considered in this chapter were written between the end of the twelfth century, or beginning of the thirteenth century, to the end of the fourteenth century, and with few exceptions are limited to northeastern France, Flanders and England. This chapter does not propose to study each of the seventeen romances, but to offer an overview, with the aim of situating them in a broad literary and cultural landscape. Textual culture will be the focus, seen as the meeting point between the text (romance) and manuscript, and between text typologies and typologies of text transmission.

This chapter discusses the long Arthurian section of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Latin history of Britain, the De gestis Britonum (or Historia regum Britanniae). It sets Arthur in the context of Geoffrey’s focus on the strengths and weaknesses of a long line of British kings, starting with Brutus, the Trojan refugee who follows the goddess Diana’s prophecy to settle the island of Britain. The Britons are shown to be imperial and formidable, but also subject to internecine strife. British kings sometimes make disastrous decisions because of their own desires. Arthur is a paragon, a perfect king, and the narrative’s lingering over his reign and his victory over the Romans can make readers forget the larger pattern that governs Geoffrey’s history. But at the height of success, he is betrayed by his nephew, and while he wins his final battle, he is fatally wounded: all kings must, in the end, die.

Arthur emerges into history in the Historia Brittonum, written in North Wales in the ninth century. That is, though, a problematic work as regards establishing the ‘original’ text, its author’s purpose and its claim to historicity. Arthur’s inclusion as a ‘British’ hero who defeated the Saxons twelve times is compared to other war-leaders this author included, with attention drawn additionally to the geographical spread of these conflicts, likely borrowings from earlier works and the (probable) ‘Roman’ origin of the name. Overall, it is suggested that Arthur’s portrayal herein was, at best, heavily fictionalised. He emerges as a primarily literary figure, rather than historical, who was developed as a means of asserting the Britons had shown courage and military prowess, and received divine support, in their long struggle with the Anglo-Saxons, pushing back against their negative stereotyping in influential works by both Gildas and Bede, which were both still circulating.

Commencing with the Welsh Peredur and Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal, this chapter traces the material dissemination of Grail romances across Northern Europe from the late twelfth century through to c.1550. Comparing and contrasting print and manuscript traditions from a book historical perspective, the geographical coverage includes France, England, Wales, Germany and the Low Countries, as well as Northern European territories into which Grail literature appears not to have entered, such as Sweden and Norway. In addition to setting out a clear chronology of Grail text dissemination and publication, the study shows how the proliferation (or not) of Grail book production over time offers insights into the cultural and sociopolitical contexts in which the literary motif of the Grail could be employed to greatest effect.

This chapter selectively draws on medieval and post-medieval Arthurian material to consider how, across time, children figure as the subjects of, and the audience for, Arthurian literature. Viewed in the context of medieval education, French romances use accounts of childhood and of enfances (knights’ youthful exploits) to explore ethical and narrative concerns, while some of their central tropes resurface in the Morte Darthur, which is relatively more diffident about childhood and youth per se, to illuminate important aspects of Malory’s art. The chapter outlines some of the culturally influential Anglophone Morte-inspired Arthuriads written for children from the nineteenth century onwards and Arthurian treatments in other child-focused texts, including fantasy writing, novels set in the fifteenth century and in Roman Britain, and Grail-inspired young adult fiction. Arthurian children’s literature, constituted by extraordinary conversations between writers across time and genre, cumulatively exemplifies the nature and creative power of Arthurian intertextuality.

This chapter surveys the history of Arthur, his court and his legacy in comics and gaming. While these media sometimes tell part or the whole story of Arthur, more often they produce sequels that borrow from the tradition or integrate Arthur into other fictional worlds (or both).

By 1230, with the Lancelot-Graal Cycle, the contours of the Arthurian universe and the chronology of events leading from the invention of the Grail to the disappearance of the emblematic king were given their first definitive form. However, in French, other medieval works continue to use the same characters and events to recount what happens after, before or elsewhere. With the Prose Tristan, the Cycle of Guiron le Courtois and Prophéties de Merlin, Arthurian prose romance enters a new phase, characterised by complex rewriting and a multiplication of versions and particular redactions. This chapter offers an assessment of the three works, taking into account the most recent critical debate.

The emergence of vernacular French prose at the dawn of the thirteenth century gave rise to a new form of Arthurian romance. Prose allowed the development of lengthy cycles of interconnected romances that functioned autonomously while also forming an overarching story. The most popular of these cycles, the Vulgate or Lancelot-Grail Cycle, became the canonical version of the Arthurian narrative for the rest of the medieval period, influencing subsequent texts in the French-speaking world (Guiron le Courtois, the Prose Tristan, etc.) and beyond (the Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation, Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, etc.). This chapter details the circumstances that made the Vulgate Cycle possible, its inner workings and dynamics, popularity, audience and legacy. It ends with a survey of the Post-Vulgate texts that were composed shortly after the initial cycle and examines the hypothesis of a ‘Post-Vulgate Cycle’ that may have connected them.

The twentieth century saw a considerable number of rewritings and adaptations of the Arthurian legend, in as many styles and purposes as there were writers, cultures and national heroes. Two main and sometimes paradoxical tendencies appeared: a quest for a supposedly deeper historical knowledge, and a need to popularise Arthurian themes. As Nazis launched their own quest for the Holy Grail, a subsequent need to re-enchant the world was expressed throughout the century. By adapting medieval texts to insist on their modernity for a contemporary readership, authors, artists and creators insisted on the universal aspects of the Matter of Britain, using it to emphasise the disillusionment in our modern Western societies, or on the contrary to expose the alleged wonders of an immutable human nature. The twentieth century confirmed this wide malleability, as Continental Europe regularly found in King Arthur a symbol of its own preoccupations.

This chapter examines various ways in which Arthur and Arthurian legend have been visualised between 1500 and 1800; not confined to manuscripts, it offers a cross-medium account of the legend’s visual representation, including physical installations, engravings, antiquarian juvenilia, as well as architecture and applied art. It examines the ways in which these visualisations present their narratives and how the figures are defined. This chapter also explores how Arthurian figures are identified and located within history, notably by devices including heraldry and architecture, and how these devices are employed to afford various senses of the antique, status and significance.