Introduction: The Alliterative Morte Arthure in Context

Judging from the critical debate that has developed around the poem in the last century or so, the Alliterative Morte Arthure seems to be one of the most consistently elusive works of fourteenth-century English literature. Problems, controversies and debates seem to crop up at every turn, variously concerning dating, textual transmission, topical allusions, its single manuscript witness, its relationship to both earlier and later works—but also more fundamental issues concerning the tone, mode, genre and meaning of the work. Recent scholarship has come to agree on some of these questions, but has equally stressed the work's refusal—or inability—to resolve the ethical, moral and political questions it addresses. One of the few and ultimately frustrating conclusions that may be drawn from the poem's tenacious ambivalence is that the poem may well have been designed to do exactly that: avoid resolution and trigger debate.

This lack of resolution itself must be seen as an indicator of a state of crisis and doubt in which the poem was produced, endlessly revised and reworked over a lengthy period of time, as suggested by its most recent editor. For a text so strikingly ambivalent, hesitant and divided against itself, the context, or rather the plural 'contexts' in which the poem was produced, reproduced, placed and read, are thus likely to play a crucial part in allowing the reader to negotiate at least a temporary, tentative understanding of the poem. Most immediately the poem's historical context may be mined for a wealth of tensions, issues and debates that are both refracted within the poem, but to which the poem itself also actively contributes—inconclusively, as it happens, plagued by the anxiety of constant revision and rewriting against an equally opaque and puzzling context of the reign of Richard II. Two partially overlapping historical contexts, or rather forcefields, are therefore explored in the present collection: the domestic and the European. Christine Chism discusses the poem as developing the politicization of chivalric brotherhood, a conspicuous feature of political life in Ricardian England, while Marco Nievergelt explores the poem's use of crusading rhetoric in the light of the English and European revival of crusading, the Great Schism and the Hundred Years War in the period 1381-1400.

But even more importantly, context is not merely something that the poem brings with it, but equally something that we, as readers, along with other readers throughout the poem's history, bring and have brought to the poem. Robert Thornton, as the first documented reader of the poem, becomes an unavoidable interlocutor in our own dialogue with the text, providing us with the sole manuscript witness that itself becomes an additional context for the poem, as explored by Thomas Crofts in the first article in this collection. The extent to which the physical context may shape, obstruct or participate in our own encounter with the poem is also the subject of John Carlson's discussion. Does a modern, digital hypertext edition of the Morte simply provide a conveniently accessible physical context for us to explore the poem, or does the digital format also affect and transform the analytical context through which we perceive and understand the work? The context within which both we and medieval readers alike are likely to place the poem, however, is also determined by much more abstract yet no less powerful notions of genre, which shape our reactions to a narrative that is itself highly self-conscious about its multiple, problematic generic affiliations. As Kevin Whetter submits, thinking about the poem in terms of genre is not merely a question of literary categorization, but reveals how genre functions as an ideologically charged context through which we discover the poem.

Spanning from discussions of physical and textual context to the exploration of the wider contemporary political and religious climate in England and Europe, it is hoped that the present collection will give some idea of the wide range of multiple, complementary—albeit at times contradictory—'contexts' that remain to be tapped in the future. In this sense, although it is not so by design, it is surely symptomatic that...