Volume 27 of Arthurian Literature ranges from early Celtic sources and analogues of Arthurian plots to popular interest in King Arthur and chivalry in sixteenth-century London, from the Vulgate CycleMort Artuto Tennyson’sIdylls of the King,and includes discussion of shape-shifters, loathly ladies, attitudes to death and funerals, treason and Scottish politics. In the first essay Emma Campbell discusses commemoration in the Vulgate CycleMort Artu,arguing that the funerary epitaphs described there can only be partial representations of their subjects, just as theMortitself cannot offer full closure to the Arthurian legend. Andrew Lynch also deals...

Commemoration – insofar as it is a conduit for private remembrance and public mourning – is situated between individual and communal fields of memory and marks their point of overlap. Commemoration is also situated at the intersection of individual and communal in another sense: it incorporates individual life – and death – into the public sphere and provides the means of celebrating it as exemplary. Yet, because of this peculiar status, commemoration poses the problem of what – or whom – one picks out as worthy of memory. As Judith Butler has pointed out, one of the primary functions of commemorative discourse is to designate individuals...

From early on, King Arthur’s ending presented a problem for Arthurian writers of the Middle Ages. Arthur’s warfare abroad, whether in his chronicle march on Rome or romance campaign against Lancelot, is halted by Mordred’s rebellion. Thrown from Fortune’s wheel, he never fully regains ascendancy and his actual ending in (or after) battle is uncertain, a gap in the record. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote confusingly that Arthur was ‘mortally wounded’ in his last battle, yet that he was taken to Avalon ‘to have his wounds healed’.¹ The twelfth-century Anglo-Norman poet Wace wrote: ‘Merlin said of Arthur, rightly, that his death...

In 1299 Edward I held a great feast to celebrate his second marriage. The king took the opportunity to organize a recreation of the Round Table with selected knights taking on the roles of Arthurian heroes. When the first course had ended a page called for silence and Edward, in the role of Arthur, declared that he desired to hear news before he ate any more. A blood-spattered squire then entered and accused the court and king of cowardice, calling down a curse on them unless they avenged the treatment he had suffered at the hands of the Welsh. The...

The analogues of Chaucer’sWife of Bath’s Tale(WBT) were classified at the end of the nineteenth century by Clouston and Skeat, who accepted as an analogue any story that told how someone took on a monstrous form and recovered his or her original shape.¹ The subject might be male or female or young or old, and might not even be human.² He or she might have become a dragon, a snake, a crocodile, or a frog, been made so ugly as to seem of another species, or been turned into something spine-chillingly indistinct. They even included a story from...

The Weddyng of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell,¹ hereafterDame Ragnell,dates from around the middle of the fifteenth century and is a text that excites divided opinion among eminent Arthurian scholars, especially in relation to its comedy. Stephen H. A. Shepherd, himself a supporter of theDame Ragnellpoet’s comedic abilities, provides an overview of this ambivalence; P. J. C. Field describes the verse as doggerel yet notes that its rhythms have a cheerful effect, while Donald B. Sands classifies the poem as a burlesque with deliberate humorous effects that is, nonetheless, the product of an indifferent artist.² A...

The insistently articulated lexicon that surrounds theMorte Darthur’s numerous references to betrayal communicates a powerful concern with treason and its relationship to the chivalric community. Criticism assessing theMorte Darthur’s key words and concepts has attended to the rhetoric of ideals and their role in discourses of community. Jill Mann provides an inventory of crucial terms central to understanding connections between knights: ‘aventure, worship, body, departe, hole, togidir, felyship’.² Following Elizabeth Archibald’s elucidation of Malory’s ideal of fellowship, recent scholarship has deepened our understanding of how communities within theMorteare shaped.³ These approaches have, however, focused primarily on...

Lancelot of the Laik, a fifteenth-century Scottish romance, is uniquely situated within the context of Arthurian romances and the mirrors for princes tradition.¹ A passage within this poem gives direct advice to Arthur dealing with the administration of justice and the need for generosity, advice commonly found within the mirror for princes genre. These texts advised kings on proper behaviour and the governing of their realm and were especially popular from the twelfth century to the fifteenth century throughout Western Europe. Some of the texts used stories of kings from biblical and classical periods as positive or negative exempla for...

The popular reception of King Arthur in the early modern period did not depend solely on texts. While Edmund Spenser ensured that King Arthur would play a role in early modern England’s literary high culture even as historians debated his historicity, there is evidence that Arthur remained important more popularly, not just as entertainment but as a way of expressing the martial and social aspirations of a broad class of society. Prince Arthur’s Archers, a group of London archers who assumed Arthurian identities, flourished. The ease with which they adapted Arthurian materials for their own use shows the continued vitality...