A New Companion to Malory ed. by Megan G. Leitch and Cory James Rushton (review)

A New Companion to Malory contains fifteen essays along with a detailed introduction and other front matter. The first five essays (by Catherine Nall, Ralph Norris, Thomas H. Crofts and K. S. Whetter, Megan G. Leitch, and Siân Echard) discuss the text(s) and contexts of The Morte Darthur. The next seven essays (by Cory James Rushton, Dorsey Armstrong, Amy S. Kaufman, Andrew Lynch, Lisa Robeson, Raluca L. Radulescu, and Meg Roland) offer multiple contrasting and complementary approaches to Malory. The final three essays (by Rob Gossedge, Masako Takagi, and Daniel Helbert) consider Malory’s several afterlives. Each essay is a model of scholarly inquiry intent upon illuminating one or more facets of a key Arthurian text that never exhausts our capacity for such inquiry.

The current volume is a worthy successor to the 1996 A Companion to Malory (Boydell & Brewer) edited by Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards. It does not replace that earlier collection so much as build upon it in light of the elevation of Malory’s work to canonical status in areas both curricular and critical, and of the publication in 2013 of P. J. C. Field’s two-volume critical edition of the Morte (D. S. Brewer). Further, A New Companion offers readings of Malory by established and emerging Malorian scholars appropriate for both undergraduates and new postgraduates interested in this foundational Arthurian text. These readings engage both long-standing questions and new critical approaches to provide up-to-date guidelines for reading, teaching, and writing about Malory.

Thus Amy S. Kaufman seeks to balance Malory’s perceived misogyny and the multi-faceted representations of women within the text of the Morte. Ralph Norris and Cory Hames Rushton bring fresh perspectives to the vexing problem of what if any sources Malory may have used for different sections of the Morte. Thomas Crofts and K. S. Whetter suggest connections between Malory’s status as author and later editions of his work; Siân Echard compares print editions of the Morte; and Megan G. Leitch links Malory’s great work to other contemporary long-form prose romances. Meg Roland attributes to Malory a wider world view than what one might suspect from someone generally thought of a ‘knight prisoner’, while Catherine Nall and Lisa Robeson ground Malory in domestic chivalric concerns, social movements, and politics. Building upon earlier work by Thomas Hanks and Janet Jesmok in their 2013 Malory and Christianity (Medieval Institute Publications), Raluca L. Radulescu revisits Malory’s religiosity.

In offering a series of approaches to Malory’s literary artistry, A New Companion provides formal readings of the text of the Morte (by Cory James Rushton), an examination of Malory’s approach to character (by Dorsey Armstrong) and gender (by Amy S. Kaufman), as well as to what we now call the ‘affective turn in literary studies’ (by Andrew Lynch). The collection complements these essays with three discussing the post-medieval and early modern Malory. Continued Japanese interest in, and important contributions to, Malory scholarship are catalogued by Masako Takagi. Rob Gossedge details the cultural roles Malory played in twentieth-century Britain, while Daniel Herbert shows how nineteenth-century America freely engaged with the Morte.

If I have a quibble with A New Companion, it would be with the absence of an essay (or essays) devoted to Malory’s legacy in all manner of modern and post-modern non-print media, which further attests to the continued canonicity and popularity of the Morte in multiple forms of high and low culture. Filmmakers, for instance, are quick to cite Malory as a putative source when even the most casual readings of their films suggest otherwise. So too, the overwhelming and increasingly diverse Malorian presence in paintings, sculptures, music, theatre, television programming, juvenilia, comic books, video games, advertisements, political discourse, brands of food and beverage...