Abstract
The celebration of Arthurian chivalric cohesion through the healing of Sir Urry declares embodiment the site of chivalric value, and Urry’s partial imitation of Gareth articulates a faith in Arthurian narrative, but the episode also suggests that the Arthurian tales, “rehearsed” in parvo in the roll call of the knights, find coherence, not (as in the French romances) by virtue of their juxtaposition in a fully authorized narrative, or through their replication of similar trajectories, but primarily through an unexplained act of grace. The Urry episode reassuringly remakes the chivalric and Arthurian body, but this ritual remaking is in tension with the suggestive image of the weeping Launcelot, which detail problematically constitutes the means to our apprehension of the hero’s selfhood. The terms of our narrative engagement with this episode make it impossible, then, for us to recuperate it as a straightforward divine endorsement of the Arthurian world. Other sequences in the post-Sankgreal section of the Morte invite further examination in terms of displacement and defamiliarization, even as they urge engagement and commemoration. The May passage, as we saw in the preface, intimates that the very tropes and readerly training that supposedly allow us access to the narrative will frustrate our sympathies. I want to use Chaucer’s Prologue to the Legend of Good Women as a specific reference point for examining Malory’s conceptualization, in the May passage, of Arthurian legend as a means to recognizing the difficulties of understanding the past in ways that can change or shape our present.
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Notes
Sheila Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 13.
Lisa J. Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 89, writes of the “distortion and oversimplification” that result from the task prescribed the narrator as symptomatic of “the moral exemplum in its worst, most limited form.”
On the God of Love as exemplifying the tyrannical wishes of the unsympathetic male reader, see James Simpson, “Ethics and Interpretation: Reading Wills in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 73–100 (86–87).
Susan Crane, “Maytime in Late Medieval Courts,” New Medieval Literatures 2 (1998): 159–79 (178–79).
See, for example, George Saintsbury’s (admittedly curious) remark that Guinevere is “the first perfectly human woman in English literature” (on the strength, it appears, that her jealous loyalty to Launcelot cancels out her wifely infidelity), in The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1897), p. 124; or C. David Benson’s claim that Malory is emotionally engaged with his characters, with whom modern readers identify: “The Ending,” p. 221.
A. C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 120–39 (p. 136).
Sturges, “The Epistemology of the Bedchamber: Textuality, Knowledge, and the Representation of Adultery in Malory and the Prose Lancelot” Arthuriana 7.4 (1997): 47–62 (60–61).
Compare 3:1228.30–1229.23 with John Warkworth’s explanation, in his Chronicle, of popular ignorance and love of novelty as a reason for Henry VI’s reversals: Three Chronicles of the Reign of Edward IV, intro. Keith Dockray (Gloucester, UK: Sutton, 1988), pp. 11–12.
Sarah Kay, “Adultery and Killing in La Mort le roi Artu,” in Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s, ed. Nicholas White and Naomi Segal (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 34–44 (p. 43). Kay perhaps overstates her case (p. 36) as, when Guenièvre is caught, Agravain and his brothers specifically declare that her adultery “par droit” (“in justice,” “by law,” though Lacy translates “proper”), demands a shameful death, “car trop avoit fet grant desloiauté, quant ele en leu del roi qui tant estoit preudom avoit lessié gésir un autre chevalier” [for she had committed a very disloyal act when she let a knight other than the most noble king sleep with her](Mort 121; Lacy 4:122). The Mort makes clear, however, that coercion, rather than clear legal guidance, is involved; the barons agree to the sentence “a fine force,” of necessity, because the king wants it.
R. Howard Bloch, “The Death of King Arthur and the Waning of the Feudal Age,” Orbis Litterarum 29 (1974): 291–305 (292).
Louise Fradenburg, “Introduction: Rethinking Queenship,” in Women and Sovereignty, ed. Louise Olga Fradenburg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), pp. 1–13 (pp. 4–5). On the barrenness of adulterous queens in literature as means to displace women’s power, see Peggy McCracken, “The Body Politic and the Queen’s Adulterous Body in French Romance,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 38–64.
Robert L. Kelly, “Malory and the Common Law: Hasty jougement in the ‘Tale of the Death of King Arthur,’” Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 22 (1995): 111–40.
Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 108, 210.
Kelly, “Malory and the Common Law”; E. Kay Harris, “Evidence against Lancelot and Guinevere in Malory’s Morte Darthur: Treason by Imagination,” Exemplaria 7.1 (1995): 179–208.
The Statutes of the Realm, 9 vols. (London: Record Commission, 1810–28), 1:319–20. Also cited in Kelly, “Malory and the Common Law,” 123–24.
Claire Vial, “Images of Kings and Kingship: Chaucer, Malory, and the Representation of Royal Entries,” in “Divers toyes mengled.” Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Culture in honour of André Lascombes. Ed. Michel Bitot, with Roberta Mullini and Peter Happé (Tours: Université François Rabelais, 1996), pp. 43–54, comments (p. 54) on the “relative absence of ‘royal religion’” in the Morte. There is even an element of “antiritual,” when Guinevere later evades Mordred by pretending to prepare for the practicalities of the public legitimization of the wedding she is resisting (3:1227.15–16).
On this last point, see Herbert Marcuse, “The Ideology of Death,” in The Meaning of Death ed. Herman Feifel (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), pp. 64–76 (p. 74).
R. C. Finucane, “Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion: Social Ideals and Death Rituals in the Later Middle Ages,” in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (London: Europa, 1981), pp. 40–60 (pp. 40–41).
On the unfathomability of this world, see Karen Pratt, “La Mort le roi Artu as Tragedy,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 30 (1991): 81–109 (92).
Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England 1066–1550 (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 65, notes a fifteenth-century audience would have been familiar with the funeral rites and liturgy as Malory describes them.
Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 174. Malory shows little interest in the College of Heralds’ forms of surveillance and organization of aristocratic funerals that were to become, as Gittings has claimed (p. 178), part of the machinery by which the crown controlled its subjects.
Robert L. Kelly, “Penitence as a Remedy for War in Malory’s ‘Tale of the Death of Arthur,’” Studies in Philology 91.2 (1994): 111–135 (111, 113).
Derek Brewer, “Death in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur,” in Zeit, Tod und Ewigkeit in der Renaissance Literatur 3, ed. James Hogg (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1987), pp. 44–57 (p. 57).
Alan J. Fletcher, “King Arthur’s Passing in the Morte D’Arthur,” English Language Notes 31.4 (1994): 19–24 (23).
Roberta Gilchrist provides some notes on nuns’ tombs, in Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 56–61.
Frederick J. Furnivall, The Fifty Earliest English Wills in the Court of Probate, EETS o.s. 78 (London: Trübner, 1882), pp. 116–19 (p. 117).
“A Disputation,” in Middle English Debate Poetry: A Critical Anthology, ed. John W. Conlee (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1991), pp. 50–62 (ll. 86–97).
Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: British Museum, 1996), p. 150.
Karen Cherewatuk traces hagiographic associations for Launcelot’s representation in: “The Saint’s Life of Sir Launcelot: Hagiography and the Conclusion of Malory’s Morte Darthur.” Arthuriana 5.1 (1995): 62–78.
Daniell, Death and Burial, pp. 42, 44; College of Arms MS I.7.f.7, in Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III and Henry VII, ed. James Gairdner, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1861), 1: 1–8 (2).
For examples, see F. H. Cripps-Day, On Armour Preserved in English Churches (London: privately printed, Chiswick Press, 1922); F. H. Cripps-Day and A. R. Duffy, Fragmenta Armamentaria, 5 vols. Vol. 5, Church Armour (Frome, UK: privately printed, Butler and Tanner, 1939).
C. L. Kingsford, The Grey Friars of London. British Society of Franciscan Studies 6 (Aberdeen: University Press, 1915), pp. 70–133 (p. 93).
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© 2002 Catherine Batt
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Batt, C. (2002). Displaced Persons: Readers, Love, Death, and Commemoration. In: Malory’s Morte Darthur. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11183-8_6
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