The life and times of Sir Thomas Malory (review)

Reviews 247 produced by women rather than relying on male accounts of their activities. She succeeds in her stated aim of 'asking the women themselves' about their legal and economic conditions (p. 19). The real strength of the book is that as well as describing these underresearched subjects and firmly grounding the work in primary sources, the implications of these discoveries are explored. Erickson analyses the motivations for particular legal and economic activities and she fits the undertakings of women sympathetically into the background of early modem England. For this reason, Women and property in Early Modern England is an excellent reference book for women's legal and economic history and also a thought-provoking historical inquiry. E m m a Hawkes Department of History University of Western Australia Field, P. J. C, The life and times of Sir Thomas Malory (Arthurian studies, 29), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1993; cloth; pp. x, 218; R.R.P.£29.50. A bold tide such as this raises certain expectations in the reader. What it does not reveal is what is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this book: the deconstructive stalking of the learned and astute archivist by the practised and subde reader of romance. Because the 'identity' of Sir Thomas Malory is a complex configuration of the 'real life' person and the author of the Morte Darthur, Field's book is both biography and a critique of the pretensions of biography to elucidate a fictional text, or at least, of this biography. Assertions of identity are made, but are repeatedly undercut or tempered, much as if the author of the Morte Darthur had been himself one of his own knightly heroes. In what can be read as an allusion to the means of knighdy identification in medieval Arthurian romance, Field concludes his quest for Malory's identity with his arms, and has to disappoint us. Not only can w e not rely on the coat of arms to disclose identity, but even more disconcertingly, w e do not know precisely what it was. The book begins with a confident case for identity. Chapter One surveys the 'competitors' for the role of author of the Morte Darthur. Field devotes most of the chapter to disproving the most substantial anterior case for identity, that made by William Matthews in The ill-framed knight, for Thomas Malory of Hutton in Yorkshire. Noting that Matthews' thesis 'has 248 Reviews been widely accepted', Field rescrutinizes the documents used by Matthews to disprove the case for the 'Yorkshire Malory' and, in Chapter Two, to prove by exclusion that only one of the known Malorys, Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, could have written the Morte Darthur. The proof adduced by Field from genealogies and record evidencerestsheavily on the seriousness with which late medieval people treated knighthood. Because it was an expensive burden, it was not entered into lightly. If inherited or acquired, it would generally be noted in records, as it was an important means of establishing legal identity. Field shows that the Yorkshire Malory was not a knight and therefore could not have written the Morte Darthur. By contrast, the Yorkist exclusions from pardon of 1468-70 and the Morte Darthur itself establish that Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel alone could have written the text. Later chapters leave such certainty behind as they incorporate the more complex real/fictional identity of Sir Thomas Malory. Chapters Three and Five deal in the realm of the possible: what Malory may have known of his ancestry and what circumstances may have influenced him in his formative years. The prevailing note is one of caution. For example, Field devotes several pages to the career of Sir Robert Malory, Prior to die Hospital of St John of Jerusalem in England from 1432 to 1439 or 1440. However, while noting the increased emphasis in the Morte Darthur, by comparison to its sources, on the Crusades and the defence of Christendom, he concludes that actual influence of Sir Robert on Malory cannot be proved to have existed. Chapters Six to Eight piecetogetheran account of Malory's turbulent political fortunes. A significant achievement is the challenge to what has been the most popular...