Before Malory: Reading Arthur in Later Medieval England (review)

In this meticulously researched and admirably clear-headed study, Richard Moll considers the relationship of chronicle and romance traditions in the treatment of Arthurian material 'before Malory' – before, that is, incipiently modern historical methods and Malory's emergence as the definitive source for later interpretations secured the triumph of the Excalibur-brandishing, Grail-seeking 'romance' Arthur. One is at first surprised to acknowledge the absence of prior attempts to address the topic at book length, but reasons for this soon begin to suggest themselves. Though Moll's mastery of the textual and intertextual minutiae and his refusal to argue beyond the evidence they supply are both substantial merits, the result is a work whose general claims are few, modest, and interlarded with lengthy extrapolations on points of interest only to students of the usually obscure text(s) under local discussion.

The introduction and first chapter seek to debunk modern stereotypes to the effect that the later Middle Ages lacked a reliable concept of historical truth or failed to distinguish between historical writing and narrative fiction. While some texts, like the Auchinleck redaction of the Short Metrical Chronicle and Rauf de Boun's Le Petit Bruit, do incorporate romance elements uncritically, the historiographical mainstream consigns bits of Arthurian apocrypha to the two quiescent periods of Arthur's career noted in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae: the twelve years after Arthur establishes dominion over the British Isles and the nine following his victory over Frollo and conquest of Gaul. Beginning with Wace, chroniclers use these lacunae both as repositories for fabulous (or at any rate non-Galfridian) material and as opportunities to articulate their own selective criteria and opinions regarding the veracity of the stories.

For Moll, carving out a space for unsanctioned and possibly fictive narratives in this way puts interpretive and argumentative tools at the historian's disposal: 'the medieval chronicler is able to shape his audience's understanding of the past, and the implications of the past for the present, through the amplification of history with material drawn from romance' (p. 218). It is an attractive and intuitively compelling thesis that does not yield as many useful insights as one would hope when brought to bear on particular texts. Thomas Gray's Scalacronica, the focus of Chapter 2, is treated as an exercise in 'chivalric self-fashioning'; as Gray is a knight writing in Anglo-Norman for an elite readership, there is little room for surprise in this, and Moll's use of 'romance' as the general rubric for Gray's engagement with courtly culture seems less a key to understanding than a reframing of the already understood. Moll does offer some plausible ideas about Gray's selection and handling of romance additions – arguing, for instance, that the inclusion of the Caradoc's mantle passage is intended to prefigure and underscore the role of betrayal in Arthur's downfall – but in the end these do not wholly warrant his reading of the Scalacronica as a fundamentally didactic text of immediate contemporary relevance. The chapter's greatest contribution remains the light it sheds on the intertextual matrix of this little-studied but complex work.

The brief third chapter addresses medieval challenges to Geoffrey's version of Arthurian history, and responses to those challenges from within the dominant Brut tradition. In the former camp are William of Newburgh and Ranulph Higden, whose influential Polychronicon takes Geoffrey to task for his suspiciously expansive and fantastic account of a figure virtually ignored by non-Welsh historians. Thomas Gray defends the Galfridian narrative by returning the allegation of national bias: Bede, chronicler of the Saxons, was unconcerned with British kings, and moreover could not read Geoffrey's putative vernacular source. John Trevisa, Higden's English translator, likewise departs from his original in order to rescue Arthur, echoing Gray on the 'British book' and suggesting that Geoffrey and his rival historians simply attached different names to the same people...