Before Malory: Reading Arthur in Later Medieval England

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University of Toronto Press, Jan 1, 2003 - Literary Criticism - 368 pages

Although most modern scholars doubt the historicity of King Arthur, parts of the legend were accepted as fact throughout the Middle Ages. Medieval accounts of the historical Arthur, however, present a very different king from the romances that are widely studied today. Richard Moll examines a wide variety of historical texts including Thomas Gray's Scalacronica and John Hardyng's Chronicle to explore the relationship between the Arthurian chronicles and the romances. He demonstrates how competing and conflicting traditions interacted with one another, and how writers and readers of Arthurian texts negotiated a complex textual tradition.

Moll asserts that the enormous variety and number of existing chronicles demonstrates the immense popularity of the historical Arthur in medieval England. Since these chronicles were the dominant source of Arthurian information for the late medieval reader, they provide an invaluable, and neglected, interpretive context for modern readers of Malory and other later medieval romances. The first monograph to look at the impact of these historical texts on Arthurian literature, Before Malory is also the first to show how canonical vernacular romances interacted with chronicle texts that have since dropped out of the canon.

From inside the book

Contents

Facts and Fictions
3
The Years of Romance
11
The Scalacronica of Sir Thomas Gray
31
Defending Arthur
64
History curiously dytit
81
Adventures in History
123
Making History John Hardyngs Metrical
157
FifteenthCentury Scribes
198
Reading about Arthur
217
Notes
233
Bibliography
325
Index
351
Copyright

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About the author (2003)

Richard J. Moll is an Assistant Professor of English at Villanova University.

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