Contested Language in Malory’s Morte Darthur: The Politics of Romance in Fifteenth-Century England by Ruth Lexton, and: Mapping Malory: Regional Identities and National Geographies in Le Morte Darthur by Dorsey Armstrong and Kenneth Hodges (review)

Contested Language in Malory’s Morte Darthur, by Ruth Lexton, and Mapping Malory, by Dorsey Armstrong and Kenneth Hodges, each explores history and national identity in the Morte Darthur but from very different perspectives. Lexton examines the Morte Darthur against the “commonly held political lexicon” employed during the Wars of the Roses (p. 1) and finds Arthur’s kingship sorely lacking. Armstrong and Hodges see Arthur as an expansionist king of a composite monarchy whose rule confronts issues of “sovereignty and conquest, acquiescence or rebellion, local custom confronting cosmopolitan chivalry” (p. 17). Both works begin with the methodology of political historian J. G. A. Pocock, both offer imaginative readings of Malory, yet neither is fully convincing.

Lexton mines the “contested terms” of her title from chronicles, manuals of governance, parliamentary roles, and gentry letters, and uses them to examine the Round Table’s governance. The first and second chapters address Arthur’s rise to power. In the first, Lexton focuses on the terms commons, justice, and true to indict Arthur’s ascension to the throne. She argues that the king’s reliance on the commons aligns him with the fifteenth-century chroniclers’ depiction of usurpers and that his coronation oath omits references to the law that an English king was expected to uphold. Lexton anticipates tyrannical behavior and finds it in Arthur’s military action against the rebel kings, which she describes as “a landgrab,” a “wrongful war,” and “unjustifiable expansionism” (p. 39). The second chapter examines “counsel” and “advice” and manuals of governance. Here Lexton posits the Roman War as the high point of Arthur’s rule, but claims that, otherwise, he and his morally suspect counselor, Merlin, never provide adequate executive leadership. The king uses the Pentecostal oath to force himself into a system of governance already set up by the knights. Against the reading of the king as chivalric exemplar, Lexton depicts an Arthur who vacillates between the roles of knight and king and who lacks personal integrity. Problematically, she ignores the praise of the knights who “seyde hit was myrry to be undir such a chyfftayne that wolde putte hys person in adventure as other pour knyghts ded” (The Works of Sir Thomas Malory [1990], p. 54), an idea repeated at times throughout the Morte, including in Mador’s insistence-cum-acknowledgment that Arthur is a king and a knight (p. 1050). These and other positive remarks would surely have resonated with Malory and his original audience.

Chapter 3 turns to the topics of “worship” and “disworship” as evidenced in gentry letter collections and applied to the career of Lancelot. Chapter 4 addresses “courtesy” in courtesy manuals and household ordinances and “The Tale of Sir Gareth.” Lexton finds that both Lancelot’s displays of prowess and gentry acts of “quotidian worship” are performative, public, and best when done for the collective good: the service of other knights or the family (p. 85). Because of Arthur’s passive leadership, Lancelot becomes responsible for the Round Table’s wholeness. Such a view has merit, but when Lexton claims that the queen’s role in judging worship “points up the lack of masculine direction from Arthur” (p. 99) or criticizes Arthur for withdrawing from the middle tales, she ignores the conventions of romance and courtly love. Her analysis of “The Tale of Sir Gareth” in the fourth chapter likewise downplays romance convention and suffers from an overzealous commitment to the book’s thesis...