Volume 13, Issue 1

Arthurian scholarship predominantly deals with medieval works; in recent years, however, a new field of study has opened up focussing on the reception of the Matter of Britain after the medieval period. It is difficult to survey post-medieval Arthurian works and their contexts because, in comparison, there are far more sources to be taken into account and these tend to cover a much longer period. Scholarly writings are also difficult to survey because they often focus upon single works. To bring structure to this complex situation, this article first offers an overview of certain Arthurian works since Malory that are useful as reference points for orientation. It then lists four characteristics that unite Arthurian reception: Plenitude, seriality, recognisability and the primacy of narrative. Finally, the hypothesis is put forward that the history of reception is characterised by a recurring engagement with certain problems. Four problems are reconstructed as examples: History, community, love and the marvellous.

This paper, focusing on the Roman de la Dame à la Licorne et du Beau Chevalier , tackles the question of its use of intertextuality. This romance, a patchwork in which nothing – from its broader narrative to its very words – is original, has often been criticised for its banality. This paper contests such a judgment and analyses the working of this poetics of intertextuality. Beginning with what makes it possible, it brings out two writing principles which allow the Roman to incorporate so many quotations while still remaining coherent: the episodic nature of the plot and its pastiche of the Matter of Britain. This pervasive pastiche causes the reader to have a constant sense of déjà vu, an intertextual vertigo brought about by how many possible hypotexts the Roman has. Hence the idea that the Roman uses intertextuality, not out of clumsiness, but in order to plunge the reader into this state: there is an aesthetic purpose of intertextuality. All the more so as these hypotexts are sometimes suggested only to be distorted by the Roman , in some cases to a purely parodic end, in others to serve an ideological discourse about courtly love that aims at updating it.

Studying the reception of Arthurian literature in periods or genres that have a reputation for not being very Arthurian is not just a paradoxical project. The scarcity of Arthurian references in the French novels of the 1880s–1940s, which contrasts with the many well-known revivals of the second half of the twentieth century, must however be qualified by taking into consideration two groups of work: Wagnerian novels and Celtic novels. This article constructs and studies this double corpus, and interprets its current neglect in terms of literary canons.

This paper investigates the construction and function of landscape in Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–85), with particular attention to the poet’s symbolic use of space and its visual counterpart in Gustave Doré’s illustrations. Departing from previous Arthurian narratives that treat setting as a static backdrop, Tennyson transforms landscape into a dynamic, psychological mirror that externalises the internal conflicts of his characters and reflects the moral disintegration of Camelot. The poet employs the idyll form not merely for its structural utility but to stage moments of heightened introspection through painterly description. The resulting ‘geography of the mind’ reconfigures Arthurian space as simultaneously real and imagined, historical and mythical. This study also examines Doré’s visual interpretations, focusing on the techniques through which he interacts with – and at times even disrupts – Tennyson’s authorial voice. A close analysis of the dynamics between word and image reveals in fact how Doré’s illustrations, his use of chiaroscuro and sublime grandeur, do not simply reflect the poems but represent an alternative, at times competing, vision of the Arthurian myth, shaped by nineteenth-century visual culture and book production practices. Together, the poet’s verse and the artist’s intersemiotic translations offer a multilayered reflection on the Arthurian legends, Victorian identity, and the blurred boundaries between dream and reality, past and present.

This paper examines the alleged analogies between the true story of St. Galgano from Chiusdino (d. 1181) – a young Tuscan, probably belonging to the warrior aristocracy, who decided to live as a hermit – and the famous Arthurian episode of the sword in the stone. Galgano’s sword, still embedded in the rock in the Round Church of Montesiepi, along with the similarity between the name ‘Galgano’ and that of King Arthur’s nephew, Gawain, first prompted comparisons between the story of the saint and the Arthurian legend. This analysis seeks to re-examine these and other supposed parallels to reconsider the hypothesis of a contact and a possible influence between the historical episode of Galgano’s conversion and the literary account of Arthur’s election by divine will.

King Arthur’s reputation as a great warrior is based mainly on his military victories as an army commander on the battlefield, but there are also individual victories where Arthur triumphs in one-on-one combat, either on horseback or on foot, as a heroic fighter for a good cause. In the French romance tradition, the story of King Arthur killing the cat of Lausanne is part of the campaign against Roman Emperor Lucius, who demands that Arthur pay him tribute. As a visual motif in medieval art, Arthur’s fight with the monstrous cat did not enjoy a widespread popularity, which might explain why its visual tradition has not yet been studied in a comprehensive way. However, it is an important motif that visually demonstrates King Arthur’s virtue and power. Apart from text illustration in Arthurian prose romance, the motif functioned – at a higher level – as an example of the fight of good against evil. Rulers identified with Arthur, and the fight with the monstrous cat was used in the context of personal propaganda. This article studies the visual motif of King Arthur fighting the terrible cat across art forms, regions and centuries. It starts with its well-known but problematic first appearance on a floor mosaic in Southern Italy in the twelfth century, moving towards the West, where it occurs in other art forms and cultural contexts, up to modern comic books. This iconographic study on the motif leads to new interpretations, presents formerly undiscussed and unpublished manuscript illumination, reflects on a lost Romanesque mural painting, dismisses a sculpture from the Arthurian art canon, and suggests a new medieval representation of King Arthur’s heroic fight against the monstrous cat.

This article argues that the way in which late medieval historical chronicles known as the Prose Brut developed in English in the fifteenth century was key to both how Arthurian tradition changed to accommodate the political agendas of the Wars of the Roses in England and the shaping of readership of Arthurian romance among all the social classes. Originating in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae , the ‘Brut’ chronicles were added to by numerous named and anonymous writers, and became the best-selling secular narrative in the vernacular in fifteenth-century England. With more than 200 extant manuscripts and 13 printed editions between 1480 and 1527, the Middle English Prose Brut ( MEPB ), as it is known among specialists, was likely the most widely commissioned Arthurian narrative late English audiences would be aware of, more so than the 25 extant manuscripts that contain English Arthurian romance, mostly associated with London, and even if we also consider the numerous manuscripts of French romance in circulation in England at the time. What this tells us is that Arthur’s figure would have been by far better known from historical writing, so widely spread to be ubiquitous in the town as in the countryside, judging by the quality, distribution, and social class background of owners and readers of chronicle manuscripts, than from Arthurian romances alone. I argue that the chronicles that included the story of Arthur, such as his rise and fall, his deposition at the hands of one of his own blood, were deemed useful tools to develop politically-inflected thinking around contemporary events taking place in the fifteenth century, by the upper and middle classes, who played important roles in events of national importance. If one knew about Arthur in fifteenth-century England, it would have been from a history book, not from a courtly or even what we now call a popular romance. MEPB speaks to us as Arthurian specialists not necessarily about new stories of Arthur, but rather about continuity, as well as acceptance of the role played by the writing of change into the seemingly unchanged story of time.