"God may well fordo desteny": Dealing with Fate, Destiny, and Fortune in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur and Other Late Medieval Writing

The idea that what happens to people, and what people do, are determined by forces external to themselves was current in the Middle Ages for a number of reasons. These included the vogue for judicial astrology, which suggested that the planets and the stars control both people's conduct and their experiences; people in the Middle Ages were also exposed to texts written in classical antiquity, which posited a world conditioned by the workings of Fate, or the Fates. People who wrote in the Middle Ages often combated the world view subscribed to in such systems of thought. They did so by affirming against it the lesson of Christian theology that the will possessed by human beings is free, and that it is this that determines what happens to people. Following the teachings of Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae, they sometimes redefined the concept of Fate, and that of Fortune, assimilating them to Christians' understanding of what it is that determines what happens to individuals. But in some cases, what was asserted instead was God's ability to overpower anything that had been ordained by some predetermining force. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, as this article discusses, participates in a wider late medieval engagement with the notion that events have been predetermined, associating this idea with the pagan world with which Christian theology of the patristic era identified it. Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, the article argues, contends with the same notion. Malory's text invokes the claim made by other late medieval writers that God can overrule something that has been predetermined, but it simultaneously suggests that what is to happen has been determined by the individuals to whom it is to happen, not predetermined at all. Malory's interest in the subjects of Destiny and Fortune, the essay proposes, is more complex than has been assumed.