Abstract

This article counterposes the Alliterative Morte Arthure with the late fourteenth-century court of Richard II to explore the politics of royal friendship, patronage, and chivalric noriture, arguing that the poem responds to the contemporaneous politicization of the king's love. The Morte Arthure pursues the disastrous consequences of the politics of friendship for Arthur and his court as a way of thinking through the passionate political coalitions whose repeated engagement brought down the Lords Appellant, the protégés of Richard II, and eventually the king himself.

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