Errata

The opening paragraph of Eve Salisbury’s ‘Lybeaus Desconus: Adaptation, Transformation, and the Monstrous Feminine’ (Arthuriana 24.1 [2014]: 66–85) was misprinted. The corrected paragraph should read:

Lybeaus Desconus is a tale about a mysterious outsider—the Fair Unknown—who comes to King Arthur’s court to prove himself worthy of inclusion. Like Perceval, this would-be knight is raised in the wilderness by his mother; his status as Sir Gawain’s illegitimate son is unknown even to himself. When Arthur asks him to state his name publicly, the youth announces the only name he knows—Bewfiz (Beautiful Son)—a term of endearment identifying him exclusively as his mother’s child. Such a name proves troublesome in a realm predicated upon androcentric codes of conduct and ‘proper’ names. Thus in a gesture that overrides the mother’s dominion over her son, the youth is dubbed ‘Lybeaus Desconus’ by the king and provisionally enfolded into the chivalric community. In the legitimizing world of the Arthurian court to which he is only tangentially related, the illegitimate son of Gawain stands in a precarious position between kinship and disenfranchisement.

Arthuriana regrets the error.