Previous contributors to this collection have explored the death and dying themes in a variety of ways: death as wielded by kings and as recorded in the lexical text of Historia regum Britannie, death as a thematic concern of characters, authors or audiences, and the death and dying of sundry Arthurian characters. Often, of course, these approaches and topics overlap. I wish to continue this interconnection and variety of death by combining these approaches with two new subjects: the problem of knights who die but do not stay dead in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur; and the manner in which the bibliographic or manuscript text of the Morte announces those deaths.

Certain innovations in the Morte Darthur can be traced to Sir Thomas Malory's inclination away from the romance-world of his sources. What he inclines toward is less easy to name; ‘tragedy’ – if generic taxonomy is required – comes closest. Malory's book is much more preoccupied with death and ‘unhappe’ than its sources. Several of the Morte's innovations, both in its adaption generally and in the Winchester manuscript particularly, combine to alter radically the way of chivalric death. I will concentrate here on three such features. One is the consistent naming of knights who are anonymous in the source texts, a technique that increases the official population of the book. While this practice invests the book with new personages, it also invests it with new deaths; and there is a profound difference – as will be discussed below – between the death of an unnamed knight and that of a named one.

Popular romance and medieval national identity

‘Who are the English; where do they come from; what constitutes the English nation?’ Such were the questions regarding Englishness that Thorlac Turville-Petre posed in 1994 when he observed that ‘the establishment and exploration of a sense of a national identity is a major preoccupation of English writers of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries’. Turville-Petre's work, which found its most expansive form in his seminal study England the Nation, established medieval English nationalism as a vibrant field of interest, and has led to the proliferation of studies of the development of medieval Englishness over the past decade or so. Important work by scholars such as Siobhain Bly Calkin, Geraldine Heng, and Kathy Lavezzo – amongst others – illustrates the degree to which the study of nationalism has become embedded within the practice of medieval scholarship.

However, the validity of attempting to discern the origins of the English ‘nation’ within the literature of the medieval period has not been without its critics. Can one read the beginnings of English ‘nationalism’ – in the classic Andersonian sense – in such pre-modern texts? Views on the issue have been polarizing: while many scholars have been quick to take up the search for a nascent medieval English national identity, others have remained more cautious. Derek Pearsall, in a response to the profusion of identifications of medieval national sentiment appearing in the late 1990s, comments that ‘while particular circumstances produced a momentary surge in assertions of Englishness around 1290–1340 and again in 1410–20, there was no steadily growing sense of national feeling’. The debate seems – in essence – to be over what medievalists mean when they use terms such as ‘nationalism’ and ‘national identity’: are they implying ‘momentary surges’ or a ‘steadily growing’ sense of national identity? The question of whether nationalism can indeed be identified as a developing discourse in medieval English texts is further complicated by the postulated post-medieval origins of nationalism itself. Benedict Anderson, in his influential Imagined Communities, sums up the view that it was the Enlightenment that engendered nationalism: ‘in Western Europe the eighteenth century marks … the dawn of the age of nationalism’. In response to such periodized objections, medievalists have been quick to dismantle Anderson's temporally-constrained formulation, and have argued for studies on ‘the discourse of the nation’ to be extended back beyond the traditional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century origins of the modern nation state. Diane Speed, arguing the case for the presence of medieval nationalisms in romance, considers ‘that it could be reasonably taken back to the literature of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, especially to the early romances’.

BY WAY OF introduction, I would like to look again at one of the most well-known words in the alliterative Morte Arthure. In the proem, just when the poet turns from the Almighty to his earthly listeners, he gives this indication of his subject matter:

In apposition to the ‘elders’ are their deeds, which the poet calls ‘awke’, in Edmund Brock's gloss ‘perverse and contrary’, in Krishna's ‘strange, perverse’. It is a rare usage, but Malory's employment of the word in his ‘Tristram’ section is instructive: ‘And therewithal sir Trystrames strode unto hym and toke his lady from him, and with an awke stroke he smote of hir hede clene’. In his glossary to Vinaver's edition, G. L. Brooke supplies ‘back-handed’ for awke, and for awkewarde (at 230:10, also describing a sword-stroke) ‘with a backward stroke’. ‘Awke dedys’, then, according to the alliterative poem's argument, play out over the total genealogy of the elders in question, which genealogy, we should recall, is not only Arthurian, but, as indicated in the poem's concluding lines, also Trojan:

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.

Introduction: Exemplarity and Fifteenth-Century Literary Production

Since Malory's translation served not only a linguistic but a cultural demand, the Morte must be read not only in the context of its French sources, but as continuous with the Winchester manuscript itself. This chapter will analyze the extent to which the manuscript's ‘exterior’ tokens of literary value can help us historicize the emergence of Malory's book. As we shall see, such an analysis must also expose aspects of Malory's text that are little suited to the uses urged by those exterior tokens.

That ‘unsuitability’ has a history of its own. For example, the struggle of a knight to be, or become, identical with himself is found in Chrétien's Percival; it is refined (highly) into comedy by the Gawain-poet; and it is also the struggle of Malory's knights, especially Lancelot, who are doomed to serve both truth and honor, virtues whose paths are rarely the same.

Introduction: The History of the Roman War

The production history of the Brut, as Professor Radulescu has shown, gave the late medieval gentry a point of focus for self-fashioning and political debate: it gave them books to own and annotate, leaves on which to inscribe their names and arms. Within just this context of book-ownership and book-use, the chronicle tradition of Arthur's Roman War gave both Malory and Caxton a particular place to express anxieties about England's political continuity, the civil costs of war (and peace), and the logic of monarchical succession – anxieties, in short, about England's constitution. It is important to remember, however, that the times of Malory's and Caxton's respective encounters with this narrative were at opposite ends of the Morte's production continuum. At the earlier end lies Malory's adaptation of the fourteenth-century alliterative Morte Arthure. Whether or not Malory's version of Arthur's war with Emperor Lucius was, as Vinaver argues, the first written of the Morte's sections, it is among the very earliest.

Introduction: Locating Fifteenth-Century Historiography

Anachronistic characterizations of the Morte Darthur's historiographical content have been made in passing by many a distinguished medievalist. One critic writes: ‘It is well known that from the late twelfth to the early seventeenth centuries practically all Englishmen thought that Arthur was a genuinely historical figure; and it is clear from the general situation and from his own remarks (e.g. Works, 1229) that Malory shared this view.’ Another: ‘… for history (and the Arthurian romances were considered as such) the fifteenth-century was an age of prose’. Neither critic claims to have proved the argument, being busy enough with different questions; nevertheless, such formulations can form a critical inheritance which all too easily goes unquestioned. A later critic, for example, writes: ‘Before turning to the political bias which informs Malory's reading of the story, we need to establish the fact that for the Middle Ages and especially for the later English Middle Ages, the Arthurian story claimed the status of history.’ The critic seeks to establish this fact by yoking Malory's understanding of historia to that of the twelfth-century historians, thus eliding some three hundred years of change in historiographical theory.

Introduction: Memory and the Book

Because Malory's book is a composite of different texts and traditions, consistency in the Morte Darthur is frequently at odds with local necessity. In Chapter 3 I argued that the making exemplary of Malory’s whole book, a task carried on at many levels and at different times in the book’s production history, was attended by the application of certain external features such as marginalia and rubrication.

This book seeks to place the production of Malory's Morte Darthur – in both its manuscript and printed form – in the context of political and literary culture in the second half of the fifteenth century. That historical context will be defined here by especial consideration of the social practice which underwrites all particulars connected to literary production, that is, reading. ‘Texts come before us’, Fredric Jameson writes, ‘as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or – if the text is brand-new – through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions.’ Thus, all reading is ‘social reading’: one is never quite alone when one is doing it. This is true not only of our reading, of course, but also that of Sir Thomas Malory and his contemporaries. The objects of my inquiry, then, include the things both written and read by Malory and his contemporaries: books (not only texts but codices), political events (whether witnessed in the fifteenth century or chronicled from earlier times), literature (both fifteenth-century English and that of earlier periods and other languages). By way of introduction I would like, first, to offer a historical anecdote which demonstrates the immediacy of the relationship between literary culture and social practice in Malory's time; after this, I will indicate something of the critical methods which inform the chapters that follow.

The Battle of Nibley Green

At the very time Malory was finishing his book, two prominent families, the Talbots and the Berkeleys, were entering the final and bloodiest stage of their fifteen-year dispute over the ownership of some manor houses in Gloucestershire.

And what a nightmare that would be! Thus the possibility of adventures is the element most carefully tended by authors of romance. The technique of interlace provided that no one adventure in the Vulgate Cycle would end without another remaining in the balance. Malory's de-interlaced version keeps the possibility alive by means of architectural innovation and strategically oblique prophecy. In either method, theoretically, the necessary conditions for adventure can be maintained world without end. Even so, whether in Malory or in the Vulgate, there is a structural point at which Arthurian adventure must disappear, and that point is the conclusion of the Lancelot-and-Guinevere drama. That conclusion may be considered either the demise of the characters themselves, or the deadly malaise which permeates the Mort Artu generally; one could also speculate from this point as to the end of the genre itself. In any case it is the era beyond which Arthurian narrative may not progress. Accordingly, the author of the French Mort provides for the non-continuation of the story so that it might not be amended: