Abstract
John Steinbeck observes of Malory’s world that: “no moral law obtains.”1 Desire and violence drive the Morte’s narrative and Merlin, as an “interstitial,” culturally diverse character, brings their parameters into question, in an ostensibly ordered but locally unsettling text. In the Morte, the urge to order and historicize has to acknowledge the possibility that moral judgment, the legitimization of violence, and historical recuperation are contingent. This chapter traces some late-medieval ideas of the “historical” Arthurian world as context for Merlin’s function in the Morte. In the Suite du Merlin, the prophet outlines the world’s moral and textual boundaries, whereas in the English Prose Merlin, he mediates more immediate and practical concerns with the communication of counsel and good advice. For a fifteenth-century English audience, Arthur’s potentially multiple significance inevitably provokes negotiation with the variety of extratextual associations he commands, from romance heroism to national dynastic pride. Merlin relates historiography and romance differently from Arthur, and is more complicatedly involved in questions of literary authorization and structure. Caxton’s historicizing preface does not address Merlin’s historical role, perhaps because Merlin’s protean literary and political import demand even trickier negotiation of textual and cultural evidence than Arthur’s case presents. Caxton leaves his readers to engage for themselves with the specificities of Malory’s account, and instead elaborates a complex, arguably historically evasive, cultural background for Arthur. If the preface offers us an Arthurian history without Merlin, it also leaves us to speculate on this absence.
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Notes
John Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, from the Winchester MSS. of Thomas Malory and Other Sources, ed. Chase Horton (New York: Noonday Press, 1993), p. 299.
Elizabeth Kirk, “‘Clerkes, Poetes and Historiographs’: The Morte Darthur and Caxton’s ‘Poetics’ of Fiction,” in Studies in Malory, ed. James W. Spisak (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1985), pp. 275–95 (pp. 286–92). Riddy argues Arthur’s generally assumed fictionality allows Malory to rework Arthurian history (Sir Thomas Malory, p. 43).
William Caxton, The Book of the Ordre of Chyualry, ed. Alfred T. P. Byles, EETS o.s. 168 (London: Oxford University Press, 1926 [for 1925]), p. 122.
Horst Schroeder, Der Topos der Nine Worthies in Literatur und bildender Kunst (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1971). See also Diana B. Tyson, “King Arthur as a Literary Device in French Vernacular History Writing of the Fourteenth Century,” BBIAS 33 (1981): 237–57.
Russell Rutter, “William Caxton and Literary Patronage,” Studies in Philology 84.4 (1987): 440–70.
Elizabeth Armstrong, “English Purchases of Printed Books from the Continent 1465–1526,” English Historical Review 94 (1979): 268–90 (269).
N. F. Blake, Caxton’s Own Prose (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973) p. 69. Kevin Brownlee discusses French examples of the flexible relation of crusading topos to nationalistic impulses: “Cultural Comparison: Crusade as Construct in Late Medieval France,” L’Esprit Créateur 32.3 (1992): 13–24.
Hayden White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. R. H. Canary and H. Kozicki (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 41–62 (p. 50).
“Cradok’s mantle” might suggest, to some English readers, not only the fabliau, but also the loyal knight who, in the Alliterative Morte Arthure, arrives in pilgrim guise, “A renke in a rownde cloke,” to warn Arthur of Mordred’s treachery: Morte Arthure: A Critical Edition, ed. Mary Hamel (New York: Garland, 1984), ll. 3456–556 (l. 3470). (All future references are to this edition, by line number.) In the latter poem, Arthur’s ethical integrity, rather than the community’s sexual propriety, is at issue.
Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis; Together with English Translations of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Churchill Babington and Joseph Rawson Lumby, 9 vols. (London: Longman, 1865–1886), 5:330–39. Higden observes as extraordinary the absence from the writings of so many historians of someone who has reputedly performed marvels such as to kill the Emperor Lucius and make subject the king of France (p. 336).
Boccaccio supplies a moral to the story, to the effect that “in this world only the humble things endure,” but doubts Arthur’s historicity (The Fates of Illustrious Men, trans. and abbr. Louis Brewer Hall [New York: Ungar, 1965], pp. 214–15, 218. Higden himself is skeptical of Geoffrey of Monmouth, while Higden’s translator Trevisa, more sympathetic to Arthur, questions his source’s objections and argues that extravagant accounts of Arthur’s deeds do not necessarily invalidate his historicity (Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, 5:339).
“Introduction: Caxton, Foucault, and the Pleasures of History,” in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. xii–xxiv.
Robert S. Sturges, Medieval Interpretation: Models of Reading in Literary Narrative, 1100–1500 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), p. 219.
Caxton, The Lyf of the Noble and Crysten Prynce, Charles the Grete, ed. Sidney J. H. Herrtage, 2 vols., EETS e.s. 36, 37 (London: Trübner, 1880, 1881), 1:1–3 (p. 2).
Receuil des Chroniques, ed. W. Hardy, Rolls Series 39, 5 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864–91), 1:229–90.
Laurence Minot: Poems, ed. T. B. James and J. Simons (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1989). Poem 7, p.43, on Edward III’s French campaigns.
“The Figure of Merlin in Middle English Chronicles,” in Comparative Studies in Merlin from the Vedas to C. G. Jung, ed. James Gollnick (Lewiston, UK: Edwin Mellen, 1991), pp. 21–39. Merlin says that the first king, the lamb, will appear in A.D. 1215 or 1216. The Brut or The Chronicles of England, ed. Friedrich W. D. Brie, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 131, 136 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1906, 1908), 1:72–76.
On teleology, see Valerie Lagorio, “The Apocalyptic Mode in the Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian Romances,” Philological Quarterly 57 (1978): 1–22.
John Johnston, “Translation as Simulacrum,” in Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 42–56.
Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, foreword Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 82.
Merlin, or The Early History of King Arthur, ed. H. B. Wheatley, intro. W. E. Mead, EETS o.s. 10, 21, 36, 112 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1865, 1866, 1869, 1889), printed in 2 vols., 1:1–3. The Vulgate and Post-Vulgate Merlin contain the same account of Merlin’s origins, derived from Robert de Boron’s Merlin.
On the text’s similarities to Pseudo-Matthew, see Paul Zumthor, Merlin le prophète: un thème de la littérature polémique de l’historiographie et des romans (Lausanne: Payot, 1943), pp. 174–76.
Claude Lévi-Strauss notes that cooking is situated between nature and culture and so reflects both domains (The Origin of Table Manners, trans. J. Weightman and D. Weightman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), p. 489. Significantly, roast meat, which pertains to both raw and cooked states (pp. 479–89) and honey, which is “more than raw” (pp. 479, 256), belong to marked interstitial categories in the analysis.
Cf. Marbod of Rennes (ca. 1035–1123), Liber decem capitulorum: “Woman […] dislodges kings and princes from the throne, makes nations clash, convulses towns, destroys cities, multiplies slaughters, brews deadly poisons.” Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, ed. Alcuin Blamires, with Karen Pratt and C. W Marx (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 100.
An example is the story of the knight who restores a princess to her kingdom, which the moralitas rewrites as Christ saving the human soul for God, whose kingdom is Paradise. The Early English Versions of the Gesta Romanorum, ed. Sidney J. H. Herrtage, EETS e.s. 33 (London: Trübner, 1879), pp. 42–44.
Capgrave, The Abbreuiacion of Cronicles, ed. Peter J. Lucas, EETS o.s. 285 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 97.
Richard Firth Green, “Notes on Some Manuscripts of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes,” British Library Journal 4 (1978): 37–41, points out that British Library MS Arundel 59 is in the hand of scribe who worked for a London stationer during the reign of Edward IV, and made the copy of the English Prose Merlin of which only a leaf is extant, Bodleian Rawlinson Miscellany MS D. 913 (fol. 43).
The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles Blyth, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999).
The Active Policy of a Prince, in George Ashby’s Poems, ed. Mary Bateson, EETS e.s. 76 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trübner, 1899), pp. 12–41 (l. 283).
Andrew Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms: The Narrative of Combat in Le Morte Darthur (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 1997), p. 4.
Helen Cooper, “M for Merlin: The Case of the Winchester Manuscript,” in Medieval Heritage: Essays in Honour of Tadahiro Ikegami, ed. Masahiko Kanno, Hiroshi Yamashita, Masatoshi Kawasaki, Junko Asakawa, and Naoko Shirai (Tokyo: Yushodo, 1997), pp. 93–107 (pp. 96–97). My thanks to Professor Cooper for a copy of her article.
Kate Cooper, “Merlin Romancier: Paternity, Prophecy, and Poetics in the Huth Merlin,” Romanic Review 77 (1986): 1–24.
Elizabeth T. Pochoda’s argument, Arthurian Propaganda: Le Morte Darthur as an Historical Ideal of Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), pp. 105–06, that Malory implicitly condemns Arthurian society for its refusal to see prophecy as imaginative moral engagement with event, is perhaps more apt a comment on the French texts, and on the Suite in particular, where the framework of sin and moral responsibility, and its control, is more explicit.
The phrase “out of measure,” which occurs some fifty times in the Morte, can denote intensity of and/or moral judgment on excessive feeling. See A Concordance to the Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Tomomi Kato (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1974), p. 816.
Jay Clayton reviews desire in narrative, and the term’s historical contingencies, in: “Narrative and Theories of Desire,” Critical Inquiry 16 (1989): 33–53.
Nicholas Doe, Fundamental Authority in Late Medieval English Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
See Rosemary Morris, The Character of King Arthur in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 1982), pp. 24–35.
Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 55–59 (p. 56).
Brut 1:66. On different versions of the encounter, see Rosemary Morris, “Uther and Igerne: A Study in Uncourtly Love,” Arthurian Literature 4 (1985): 70–92.
On rape and the Arthurian, see Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), chapter six. See also my “Malory and Rape,” Arthuriana 7.3 (1997): 78–99.
Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal, ed. Keith Busby (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), ll. 3581–95.
The Continuations of the Old French Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. William Roach, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949–83), 1: ll. 12707–13602.
Jeanie R. Brink, “The Design of Malory’s ‘Tale of Balin’: Narrative and Dialogue in Counterpoint,” Studies in Short Fiction 17 (1980): 1–7.
“Critique of Violence,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 132–54 (pp. 150–51).
See Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 207, on how violence dramatizes selfhood in late-medieval tournament by breaking and remaking boundaries “between friend and foe, same and other.”
Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London: Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 143–68.
Sarah Kay, The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 52–76 (pp. 58–59).
Heng, “Enchanted Ground: The Feminine Subtext in Malory,” (1990) repr. Arthurian Women: A Casebook, ed. Thelma S. Fenster (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 97–113 (p. 101).
Richard Helmholz documents the expectation that absent fathers would pay maintenance for their children, in Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 108–09.
Lisa Jefferson, “Tournaments, Heraldry and the Knights of the Round Table: A Fifteenth-Century Armorial with Two Accompanying Texts,” Arthurian Literature 14 (1996): 69–157 (141–44). The third rule specifies a knight must support “women, widows, orphans and maidens.”
Richard Barber, “Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Court Culture under Edward IV,” Arthurian Literature 12 (1993): 133–55 (149).
The Black Book of the Admiralty, ed. Sir Travers Twiss, 4 vols., Rolls Series 55 (London: Longman, 1871), 1:459–72 (p. 460). In contrast to the Pentecostal Oath, the law on the rape of women is here last in a series of prohibitions concerning desecration and violation, the first of which stipulates the death penalty for desecrating the Eucharist (p. 459). For a further note on BL MS Lansdowne 285, John Paston’s “Grete Book,” see 1:lxxxvi. In English civil law, the Westminster Statute of 1285 mandates the death penalty for rape, but this appears not to have been common legal practice.
John Marshall Carter, Rape in Medieval England. An Historical and Sociological Study (New York: University Press of America, 1985).
Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1975), p. 16. For a counterargument, see Peggy Reeves Sanday’s careful work on “The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape: A Cross-Cultural Study,” in Gender Violence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Laura L. O’Toole and Jessica R. Schiffman (New York: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 52–66.
“Felaw” argues that the individual’s attainment of inner peace is a solution to civil war: A Familiar Dialogue of the Friend and the Fellow, ed. Margaret S. Blayney, EETS o.s. 295 (London: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 16.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 141–64 (pp. 144–45).
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© 2002 Catherine Batt
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Batt, C. (2002). Desire, History, Violence: Merlin’s Narratives. In: Malory’s Morte Darthur. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11183-8_2
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