Before Malory: Reading Arthur in Later Medieval England
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...
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All modern renderings of the Arthurian legend must contain--or at least not contradict--crucial elements of the story as told by Malory in order to be considered authentic, points out Moll (English, Villanova U.). Before Malory however, that is before his work became the standard, there was another Arthur, one of the chroniclers. Both romance writers and chroniclers assumed Arthur was a historical figure, he says, but the former had little concern for what was fact and fiction, whereas the latter attempted to make their accounts as historical as possible, and so patterned them on what was accepted as history at the time. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Preface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Facts and Fictions3Ch. 1The Years of Romance11Ch. 2The Scalacronica of Sir Thomas Gray of Heton31Gray's Autobiographical Prologue as Chivalric Self-Fashioning35Arthur and the Chivalric Past45Ch. 3Defending Arthur64Thomas Gray's Defence of Arthur67John Trevisa's Polychronicon72Ch. 4History curiously dytit81Andrew Wyntoun on Huchown's gret Gest of Arthure88The Alliterative Morte Arthure97Ch. 5Adventures in History123The Awntyrs off Arthure125Sir Gawain and the Green Knight140Ch. 6Making History: John Hardyng's Metrical Chronicle157Hardyng's Adventurous Knights166Ch. 7Fifteenth-Century Scribes198Robert of Gloucester, Arundel MS 58199The Prose Brut: The Trinity/Cleveland Abbreviation and Lambeth Palace Library, MS 84210Conclusion: Reading about Arthur217Notes233Bibliography325Index351
