The ‘Freynshe booke’ and the English Translator: Malory’s ‘Originality’ Revisited

Felicity Riddy remarks a familiar phenomenon in Malory’s Morte Darthur when she cites a passage at the end of Book 8:¹

The narrator interrupts himself and moves out of the narrative altogether:

And so I leve here of this tale, and overlepe grete bookis of sir Launcelot, what grete adventures he ded when he was called le Shyvalere de Charyot. For, as the Freynshe booke sayth . . .

And he goes on, with grand irrelevance, to describe what the Freynshe book in fact does not say.²

But Malory’s questionable protestations about his use of his source usually go unnoted, reflecting the widespread recognition that translation in fifteenth-century England frequently employed such a rhetoric of accuracy, without always achieving it in practice. Indeed, Catherine Batt refers to Malory’s technique of citation as one of those ‘strategies [that] draw attention to the creativity involved in his reception and transmission of texts’. She goes on to make these observations:

The credentials of the text and the translator are ambivalent, the relation between text, translator and reader not rigidly fixed. The focus is on reading rather than writing. Malory refers to a source-text, but our reaction to the idea of a source is more important than the source itself. A vernacular, instead of a Latin, source, it is for the reader to determine its status: the ‘Frensshe booke’ is mentioned in the singular, which gives the impression of a homogeneous Continental tradition on which one can draw for information, but ‘other bookis’ (unspecified) also influence the translator’s and reader’s attitude to the subject matter . . . If Malory is not a typical romance narrator, neither is he a typical translator, for he is more a critical reader than guardian of an ‘authorized version’. Malory breaks down the authoritative bases of French romance and offers us a text which is the product of the dynamic interchange between the translator-as-reader and the translator-as-writer, the subject matter, and the reader.³

Implicit in Batt’s excellent analysis is an assumption that there is an identifiable, normative ‘typical translator’ in fifteenth-century England, and that a comparison between Malory’s practices and that norm reveal him falling outside it. To claim such norms are identifiable in the practices of medieval translators in this period is not altogether unfounded. But it is perhaps more questionable to suggest that Malory’s attitudes are remote from those practices, and that his ‘strategies’ here are considered and deliberate. I would argue that the boundary-lines which appear self-evident to us between reader and writer, translator and redactor, may for a variety of reasons have been indistinct, if not invisible, to Malory himself. The question this article addresses, therefore, is not what Malory actually did in relation to ‘the Freynshe booke’ he claimed as his source, but what he thought he was doing.

As Meg Roland has recently shown, scholarly debates over reconstructing the ‘genuine’ Morte - and, as a corollary, reconstructing Malory’s intentions – are themselves reflective of historically situated practices.⁴ Even as we acknowledge that ‘medieval literature cannot be understood (does not survive) except as part of transmissive processes – moving through the hands of copyists, owners, readers, and institutional authorities - which form part of other and greater histories (social, political, religious and economic)’,⁵ we have come to recognize that our own critical endeavours are similarly ‘situated’. Indeed, the debate over Malory’s originality was conducted along nationalistic lines, with implicit sociopolitical agendas. It is nevertheless noteworthy that, at one time, within a particular set of critical practices, it seemed self-evident that Malory was a ‘chronicler’, a ‘most unintelligent compiler’, and that in 1929, Eugene Vinaver, future editor of the Winchester manuscript, could still refer to the Morte as a ‘slightly modified and condensed translation of the French Arthurian novels’.⁶ As late as 1963, C. S. Lewis could comfortably write: ‘He has no style of his own, no characteristic manner . . . Whatever Malory’s intentions – if he had any intentions - may have been, it is agreed on all hands that he...