In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • How to Be a Man:Malory and the Moral Paradox
  • Marie Wallin

One of the most vexed questions in Malory scholarship in the twentieth century has been the so-called moral paradox. Critics have tried to come to terms with the perceived differences in morality between, on the one hand, the chivalric and pious nature of Le Morte Darthur and on the other, the doubtful life ethics of its probable author, Sir Thomas Malory of Warwickshire, who stood accused of burglary, kidnapping and repeated rape. How could such a "scoundrel," as R. S. Loomis puts it, have composed one of the world's greatest chivalric romances?1 The apparent discrepancy between life-records and literary work has generated attempted solutions ranging from alternative candidates for authorship to speculation about the raped woman's truthfulness as well as the accuracy of the historical documents recording the charges against the Warwickshire man.

Catherine Batt has criticised this line of inquiry and the attempts made by several male critics, primarily Edward Hicks and C. S. Lewis, to explain away the rape charges, as "an artefact of the humanist approach," arguing that "the latter has created both this problem situation and its concomitant alarm over the unlikelihood of being able to solve it."2 While I agree that a teleological notion of authorship is partly what leads critics to strive for concordance between the two images of Malory (and I agree with the general argument of Batt's article in itself), I would nevertheless suggest that reasons for the critics' intense interest in Malory's life records are more complex than simply an outdated mode of authorship. The exceptional instability of the textual situation of Le Morte Darthur leaves the critical tradition with little other choice than the drawing of textual and creative boundaries based on a concept of Malory as the one unifying and stabilizing factor in terms of morality or ethics. Read as varying versions of masculinity, Malory's ethics become a means of establishing authority in a bewildering array of textual witnesses, a guide to the correct versions of both life and creative work. [End Page 105]

A brief recapitulation of the textual history of Le Morte illuminates just how peculiar the situation is. For five hundred years, only the Caxton version of Malory's text was known; this was printed in 1485 under the title Le Morte Darthur. In 1934, a manuscript version was discovered at Winchester College, referred to as the Malory Manuscript or the Winchester Manuscript (now London, BL, Additional MS 59678). Although at the most a mere fifteen years apart in age, the two textual witnesses stand on different sides of a number of fundamental cultural changes. By conventional periodization, the manuscript is a product of the Middle Ages while the printed book overleaps the Great Vowel Shift into the early-modern era; the two witnesses also stand on different sides of the introduction of printing in England.3 In her discussion about the uncertain and complex relation between the two witnesses and about their seeming place in scribal versus print traditions, Felicity Riddy notes, "Other fifteenth century manuscripts have survived which have been marked up as printers' copy-texts (which the Winchester manuscript was not), and we know of prints being used as copy-texts for hand-written books, but the Morte Darthur belongs to the transition in a way that none of these does."4 The manuscript revealed the extent to which Caxton had altered the language of the text in his printed edition of Le Morte Darthur in 1485; in his preface to the book, Caxton himself claims he has printed it according to "a copye unto me delyverd,"5 something which has led to endless speculation about what this copy may have looked like or to what extent the alterations may have been Caxton's own. This has led critics to ponder questions of authorship, of originality, and even whether Le Morte Darthur should be viewed as Malory at all or as a different book altogether.

Beyond modes of production and dialect, the manuscript also differs from the print in other ways. Of particular interest to critics has been the so-called Roman...

pdf