Arthurnet: You say Briton, I say Breton....

Twelve years ago—or is it thirteen now?—I wrote a fateful post on Medtextl, the email discussion list for Medieval Texts, Philology, and Codicology. Someone had asked whether the intimacy between Lancelot and Guinevere in Chrétien de Troyes’s Knight of the Cart qualified under the description of ‘amor purus’ by Andreas Capellanus in his De arte honeste amandi. I pointed out that ‘amor purus’ was basically heavy petting and that Lancelot did seem to have gone all the way with Guinevere (though Chrétien leaves the details to our imaginations). Bonnie Wheeler liked this post and, on the basis of it, asked me to start a discussion on Arthurian Sexualities on the Arthurnet list, and then to take over moderating Arthurnet.

The Arthurnet email discussion list and its archives go back to October 1993.¹ At its inception, Deborah Everhart of Georgetown was the moderator. It is interesting to look at the first week of the archives: there are test messages from the administrator at Memorial University Newfoundland (MUN), whose servers house the list and its archives, and a discussion of ‘Arthur’s historicity’ with posts from four different people, all with .edu at the end of their email addresses. By the following week there were at least 8 different threads, but those postings were still, all but one, from university faculty. Mostly the discussion involved approaches to teaching an Arthurian literature course, or matters of texts, philology, and codicology. The very first thread, on Arthur’s historicity, focused on the question, ‘why do our students want Arthur to have been historical?’

Deborah was evidently ready to move on in 1995 and handed the list over to me with no qualms. Since then I have occasionally heard reports that some quirky strangers—Society for Creative Anachronism enthusiasts, people who thought they had known King Arthur in previous lives, and so on—had intruded on the list before I came along. Looking through the archives, I can see a few cranky people—a poster who is delighted to find that Arthur must have known the Tarot, since he dreams about a Wheel of Fortune…another who is hoping to write a thesis about how Morgan le Fay represents the characteristics of Irish goddesses…but most of the hobbyhorses seem to have been made of respectable ivy-covered bricks and mortar.

I am not sure what Bonnie Wheeler was hoping for when she asked me to become the list moderator. On the one hand, the professional members may have been asking her for a moderator who could keep the intruders under control; if so, they must have been disappointed. I have sometimes omitted to post something sent to me, but it has oftener been a sharp aside from an .edu address than a silly proposal from an esoteric newbie. On the other hand, I do have a high tolerance for silly proposals, and perhaps Bonnie wanted someone who could be patient with—interested in—those that were cropping up on the list. And, in fact, there was a sense in which I needed Arthurnet—I had a lot to learn and also a need to teach.

My background is mostly in French literature, though I had taught writing-intensive courses in English departments for many years. At the time I took over Arthurnet, however, I was settling into what has become my job at the University of Florida: running the language labs. (I was surprised, a few years later, to find at a convention of language lab directors that quite a few of them were medievalists—that list of languages we study is impressive, I guess, and the job is so peculiar that there is rarely a trained person applying for it.) However, in the early 90s I did give a spate of papers on different medieval topics at various conferences, and I was working on a translation of Marie de France’s Lais. Arthurnet came along at a good time for me, an opportunity to learn and teach which I really needed. Last summer for the first time in many years I got into the classroom...