2007-08 AM Le Morte Darthur (1485)

Topics

Those who are planning to join the seminar may contribute thoughts on what they'd like to see done in the following list:

• Sources in Europe's mythology and history
• The renaissance of chivalry at the beginning of the modern era
• The text which shaped our view of the medieval world: Malory's King Arthur and Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889).
• From Fantasy to video game Arthur's table round in modern culture

Texts

I originally intended to base the seminar on Caxton's fist edition published in 1485 as offered by EEBO:

• Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (London: William Caxton, 1485)

A modernised-spelling version of Caxton's edition - and that speaks against it - is offered as a Penguin classic:

• Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur. Ed. Cowen, Janet (1970). Introduction by Lawlor, John. 2 vols. London: Penguin. ISBN 0-679-60099-X, ISBN 0-14-043044-X.

The original spelling Caxton text is offered on the internet in the University of Michigan's "Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse":

• Presentation with links into the individual chapters
• Full Text Download

The best alternative is the Winchester Manuscript as published in the critical Norton edition. The problem is here the wild layout (an attempt to reproduce graphical aspects of the original handwritten text) and the fact that the manuscript remained unknown till its rediscovery in 1934. I favour Caxton's text, as it was actually read - it is the text which unfolded the influence we will be interested in.

My recommendation is the Penguin-edition for easy reading or, better (though regrettably neither annotated nor available as a book) the University of Michigan's html-Web-edition.