| Malory's Morte Darthur (c. 1470) coincided in England with the culmination of almost a century of contested kingship, usurpation, and civil ruin. My dissertation uncovers the political language of the Morte Darthur, describing Malory's entry into the fifteenth-century discourse surrounding the failures of monarchy. I demonstrate that, far from epitomizing ideal rule as readers from Caxton onward have assumed, Arthur's kingship in the Morte is deeply flawed and the conduct of his Round Table knights is dominated by the consequent need to compensate for the inadequacy of the king. My focus on key terms — kingship, counsel, rule, worship, courtesy, treason — which had deep resonances in the medieval conception of governance reveals how the political imagination of fifteenth-century England shaped Malory's Arthurian kingdom. To understand the contemporary meaning of these terms, I cast a wide net, tracing the language shared by Malory and his contemporaries across chronicles and romances, war manuals and battle plans, parliamentary records, rebel manifestos, and gentry letters. By deploying and reformulating fifteenth-century political language, Malory mounts a tacit but persistent critique of Arthurian kingship. |
