‘But rather I wolde sey: here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff’: Malorian and Scholarly Retraction

Late in life or late in their work, medieval writers could resort to retraction to soften the more brazen or less certain aspects of their work. Within the capacious ‘grete boke’ of Le Morte Darthur, Thomas Malory suggests but then retracts certain ideas, such as the nature of love or loyalty. He also contests his sources, contradicts earlier plot lines, and presents characters who take unexpected actions or change sides. This special volume explores and even celebrates the retraction: within Malory’s text, in Arthurian scholarship over the last century, and in our own work as scholars. The best-known examples of authorial retraction come, of course, from Boccaccio and Chaucer, both of whom retracted the ‘worldly vanities’ of their respective works purportedly upon their death beds. Many of the scholars contributing to this volume have had long careers in Arthurian literature; the idea of retraction as reconsideration opened up the possibility of approaching our work with a bit of humility, fortunately not of the death-bed variety, but to harvest, as Chaucer wrote, ‘newe corne’ from ‘olde feldes’ and to create ‘out of olde bokes . . . newe science.’¹

‘“But rather I wolde sey”’ began as a roundtable of Malory scholars at the International Arthurian Congress, held in Wurzburg in 2017, and continued at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in 2018 (see photos, below). As conveners, we invited Arthurian scholars to take a second look at work they published, at critical modes that had framed scholarly debate, or at aspects of Le Morte Darthur itself that suggest retrospection or reconsideration, perhaps even an outright retraction. While a few scholars declined our invitation, quite a number of our colleagues were intrigued by the opportunity to rethink their thinking. Their open-mindedness and desire to keep learning is an impressive attribute of their approach to scholarship. Frankly honest and spirited discussions followed both panels and have led to this current collection of essays.

In Under Another Sky, classicist and journalist Charlotte Higgins elegantly writes about the substrata and interweaving of imperial Roman culture with Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and subsequent British culture. She quotes the early twentieth-century Romano-British scholar R.G. Collingsworth, who suggested that his writing on art was ‘the best example I can give to posterity of how to solve a much-debated problem in history, not by discovering fresh evidence, but by reconsidering questions of principle.’² In this collection, scholars who have devoted much of their career to Malory studies adopt Collingsworth’s example by reconsidering questions of principle and engaging in a lively reconsideration of Arthurian work with fresh perspectives and seasoned scholarly practice. Michael Twomey notes in his essay in this volume that, ‘in a broader sense, one could say that all scholarship and criticism begin in retraction, in that every new contribution implicitly retracts what came before it, without ever removing it from the scholarly or critical record’ (11). Not surprisingly, many of the scholars in this collection turn to the concluding passages of Malory as the characters that have held our hopes ‘pass oute of thys worlde’ (827.16).

In a way, Twomey’s contribution undergirds this entire collection. He explains the Augustinian notion of retraction as reconsidering or reexamining a work in contrast to the post-Chaucerian notion of withdrawing it. He further identifies retraction as the process by which Arthurian authors expanded the corpus: through ‘palinode,’ which involves a single author countering his/her own earlier view, as Chrétien does in Yvain; through ‘recreation,’ which is when an author creates a new narrative about existing characters, as did the Gawain-poet; through ‘adaptation’ which is an alteration of an existing narrative, as demonstrated by any of the post-Chrétien Grail continuations; or through ‘supplementation’ which is an addition to an existing narrative, as when Malory brings pillars and robbers onto the field after Arthur’s final battle. According to Twomey, the logic of those innovative forms of retractions lead to a ‘both/and’ view of literary composition which allows renewal...