Abstract
The first part of Le Morte Darthur contains rapid, violent changes of chivalry. Uther seems to be primarily a warlord, and Arthur must prove himself first in battle. Then greater restraints on violence are established, helping Arthur to put an end to the civil wars and to build a civil society. Major transitions in chivalric ideals are marked by Arthur’s receipts of Excalibur. The first sword (from the stone) symbolizes might-makes-right chivalry; the second sword (from the Lady of the Lake) marks “blood-feud” chivalry, in which one advances one’s friends and revenges oneself on one’s enemies; and the restoration of Excalibur to Arthur in the fight with Accolon makes it a symbol of the ethical chivalry announced in the Round Table oath. These changes in chivalry affect not just the knights; they have profound effects on knightly communities. They define how former enemies are to be treated and whether they can join the court; they define who must be counted as an enemy.
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Notes
From “Gregory’s Chronicle,” The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century, ed. James Gairdner (London: The Camden Society, 1876; rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1965), p. 166.
Geraldine Heng, “The Feminine Subtext in Malory,” Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Philadelphia: John Benjamin’s Publishing Company, 1990), pp. 283–300;
Dorsey Armstrong, “Gender and the Chivalric Community: The Pentecostal Oath in Malory’s ‘Tale of King Arthur,’” Bibliographic Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society 51 (1999): 293–312.
Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 204;
Juliet Barker, The Tournament in England, 1100–1400 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1986), pp. 109–10.
Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (London: Pandora Press, 1989), p. 18.
Rowena Archer, “‘How Ladies … Who Live on Their Manors Ought to Manage Their Households and Estates’: Women as Landholders and Administrators in the Later Middle Ages,” Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society, c.1200–1500, ed. P.J.P. Goldberg (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1992), pp. 160–61 [149–81].
See P.J.C. Field, “Fifteenth-Century History in Malory’s Morte Darthur,” Malory: Texts and Sources (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S. Brewer, 1998), p. 64 [41–71].
For further examples of fighting women, see Peter Coss, The Lady in Medieval England, 1000–1500 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Company, 1998) pp. 32–33.
Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 171.
Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed As Men in Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (London: Pandora, 1989), p. 148.
Sir Thomas Malory, Caxton’s Malory: Le Morte Darthur, 2 vols., ed. James W Spisak and William Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 140. The passage in Winchester is simply “I wolde prove hit on youres,” (258; VI.3); until the textual history is clearer, it is impossible to know whether Caxton added words or whether the Winchester scribes omitted them.
Wheelwright, pp. 157–59. For an example, see Talhoffer, Fechtbuch aus der Jahre 1467, ed. Gustav Hergsell (Prag: J.G. Calve, 1884), pp. 242–50, translated in Medieval Combat:A Fifteenth-Century Illustrated Manual of Swordfighting and Close-Quarter Combat, trans. Mark Rector (London: Greenhill Books, 2000).
For discussion of a scholastic debate prompted by Aristotle’s remark in the Politics that Plato favored allowing women to serve in wars, see James M. Blythe, “Women in the Military: Scholastic Arguments and Medieval Images of Female Warriors,” History of Political Thought 22.2 (2001): 242–69. The reference in Aristotle comes from Book II, chapter vi; his summary of Plato prompted the debate because the Republic was not available in the thirteenth century.
Thomas Greene, Besieging the Castle of Ladies (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995).
For example, Ramon Lull says a knight should be as fearful of shame as a maiden [Sir Gilbert Hay, The Prose Works of Sir Gilbert Hay, ed. Johnathan Glenn (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1993), p. 34].
Sir Thomas More, Utopia: A Reading Text and an English Translation ed. George Logan, Robert Adams, and Clarence Miller (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 200, 210.
The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, ed. Virginia Cox (London: Everyman’s Library, 1994), p. 42.
Hyginus Eugene Cardinale, The Orders of Knighthood, Awards, and the Holy See (Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Van Duren, 1983), pp. 173–74; François. Velde, “Women Knights,” <http://www.heraldica.org/topics/orders/wom-kn.htm> December 2000.
Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 193.
Pace Martin B. Shichtman, “Percivals Sister: Genealogy, Virginity, and Blood,” Arthuriana 9.2 (1999): 11–20;
Dorsey Armstrong, “Malory’s Morgause,” On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst (Dallas: Scriptorium Press, 2001): 149–60.
For example, James Noble can begin an abstract, “Misogynist that he was, Malory …” and Elizabeth Sklar writes of Elaine of Corbenic is guilty of “unleashing the gynophobia that underpins the romance genre in general and Malory’s rendering in particular; in a damning representation of the consequences of female autonomy, Guinevere, Elaine, and Dame Brusen … short-circuit the patriarchal structure and subvert the stability of the realm.” Interestingly, many of the works that begin by assuming Malory’s misogyny then proceed to demonstrate that certain female characters are more complex than might be expected from that assumption; enough exceptions have been found that the rule of Malory’s misogyny must be reconsidered. See James Noble, “Gilding the Lily (Maid): Elaine of Astolat,” On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst (Dallas: Scriptorium Press, 2001), p. 45 [45–57]; Elizabeth S. Sklar, “Malory’s Other(Ed) Elaine,” On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst (Dallas: Scriptorium Press, 2001), p. 62 [59–70]; for a claim that Malory is not misogynist, see
Ginger Thornton and Krista May, “Malory As Feminist? The Role of Percival’s Sister in the Grail Quest,” Sir Thomas Malory: Views and Re-Views, ed. D. Thomas Hanks (New York: AMS Press, 1992), pp. 43–53.
Browsing through an anthology such as Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, ed. Alcuin Blamires (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) will provide numerous examples, beginning with Jerome (e.g., Adversus Jovinianum and Letter 22, To Eustochium, pp. 67, 75).
See P.J.C. Field, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3rd ed., 3 v. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) p. 1573, n. 991.
Uther’s charge may not have been legally binding: Parliament did not accept Henry V’s wish that Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, be sole protector during Henry VI’s minority on the grounds that a king’s will could dispose of his property but not his right to rule. See R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI, 2nd ed. (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1998), p. 20.
Andrew Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms: The Narrative of Combat in Le Morte Darthur (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S. Brewer, 1997), p. 20.
Beverly Kennedy suggests that the second Excalibur represents blood feud specifically and that the Lady of the Lake is implicitly buying Arthur’s help in killing Balin with the sword. Despite the Lady of the Lake’s subsequent request for Balin’s head, however, I think the circumstances of her giving him the sword suggest a more general symbolism of mutual obligation which can be a positive exchange of favors as well as vengeance. See Beverly Kennedy, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S. Brewer, 1992), p. 223.
Gregory’s Chronicle, p. 173; cf. The Great Chronicle of London, ed. A.H. Thomas and I.D. Thornley (Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1983), pp. 158–59.
Geraldine Heng suggests that Excalibur and Balin’s sword are essentially alike, and that the curse on Balin’s comes from his failure to recognize the sword and scabbard as symbols of feminine power (284–85). Her article, however, is looking at the relations between knights and a fairly undifferentiated “feminine” which tends to collapse differences between female characters. The result is that the Lady of the Lake, who supports Arthur’s laws, is made equivalent to Balin’s damsel, who opposes them. But chivalry does not simply treat women as a class, since its standards can distinguish good women from bad women. Arthur, in dealing with the Lady of the Lake, is responding to a good woman, while Balin is dealing with a bad one. To ascribe all that results to the differences in the two men is to miss the challenge that Balin’s damsel poses to the system of reciprocal loyalties. See Geraldine Heng, “The Feminine Subtext in Malory,” Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing company, 1990), pp. 283–300.
Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 205–06.
See, for instance, Stephen Knight, “The Social Function of Medieval Romances,” Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, History, ed. David Aers (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1986): 88–122;
Dhira Mahoney “Malory’s Tale of Gareth and the Comedy of Class,” Arthurian Yearbook I, ed. Keith Busby (New York: Garland, 1991) p. 169 .
Nyneve’s epithets range from “one of the damesels of the Lady of the Laake” (125; IV.1) to “chyff lady of the laake” (1242; XXI.6), with the majority being the “Damsel of the Lake” or the “Lady of the Lake,” apparently used interchangeably. See Sue Ellen Holbrook, “Nimue, The Chief Lady of the Lake,” Speculum 53.4 (1978): 761–67.
La Suite Du Roman De Merlin 2 vol., ed. Gilles Roussineau (Geneva: Libraire Droz, 1996) 2: 344; English translation by
Martha Asher in Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation 5 vol., ed. Norris Lacy (New York: Garland, 1995) 4: 263.
For a further discussion of “blood,” see Andrew Lynch, Malory’s Book of Arms and the Narrative of Combat in Le Morte Darthur (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 60–74.
Donald Hoffman, “Perceval’s Sister: Malory’s ‘Rejected’ Masculinities,” Arthuriana 6.4 (Winter 1996): 72–83.
Wilfred L. Guerin, “‘The Tale of the Death of Arthur’: Catastrophe and Resolution,” Malory’s Orginality, ed. R.M. Lumiansky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964), p. 255 [233–74].
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© 2005 Kenneth Hodges
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Hodges, K. (2005). Swords and Sorceresses: Creating a Chivalric Community. In: Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403979322_3
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