This teaching anthology collects texts from the vast archive of medieval Arthurian literature. It includes selections from mainstream canonical authors, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Malory, and more peripheral works, such as the Melech Artus (a 12th-century Hebrew text) and the Dutch Morien (featuring a black knight). Characters and authors showcase the diversity of race, religion, gender, and gender orientation of the Arthurian tradition. The anthology and its accompanying website offer a variety of genres, ranging from visual art to historical chronicles and from romance to drama. Arthurian works, while concentrated in England, France, and Wales, are found across medieval Europe, and thus this anthology includes texts from Iceland to Greece. The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Arthurian Literature is ideally suited to teaching: it includes full texts, such as Chrétien de Troyes’ Knight of the Cart, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for classes that wish to study a whole work in depth; it also includes shorter excerpts of parallel incidents, such as the Uther and Igraine story, so that students can compare a story’s treatment by different authors. Marginal glosses assist students with the Middle English texts, while introductory notes and explanatory footnotes give students necessary background information.

The past generation has been an extraordinarily active one in medieval drama scholarship; our appreciation of the range of medieval drama has been significantly broadened, and our understanding of certain medieval genres—most notably, biblical drama—has been fundamentally altered. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature has been widely praised for the degree to which it has taken this scholarship into account in its selection of and presentation of medieval plays. Now Broadview launches a new anthology that takes those plays as its base while expanding very substantially beyond them to represent the full range of drama in English (and, where strong connections exist, in French, Latin, Cornish, and Welsh as well) through to 1576. In all, over forty plays are included. Each work has been fully annotated and is prefaced by a substantial introduction. In many cases the language is to some extent modernized in order to make the plays more accessible to readers today.

The focus of this book is medieval vernacular literature in Western Europe. Chapters are written by experts in the area and present the current scholarship at the time this book was originally published in 1996. Each chapter has a bibliography of important works in that area as well. This is a thorough and reliable guide to trends in research on medieval Arthuriana.

Arguably no medieval English literary work has had as far and wide a reach as Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur; among the many adaptations are Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot. It might also be argued that the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century tradition of fantasy literature—from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to George Lucas’s Star Wars and beyond—owes much to the Arthurian tradition, rooted in English most strongly in Malory’s Morte Darthur. Yet there has been no edition that draws on the results of the past generation’s scholarship while presenting Malory’s work in a form that is at once true to the original and accessible to the modern reader. This new edition, which expands on the revised and expanded selection of Malory material that will be included in the third edition of The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, is all of those things. The extensive selections include most of the material concerning Launcelot, and all of the Morte’s two final tales; the language has been partially modernized to make the text accessible to the modern reader, while retaining the flavor of the original; the text has been carefully prepared from the Winchester manuscript; and the annotations are extensive.

Arguably no medieval English literary work has had as far and wide a reach as Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur; among the many adaptations are Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot. It might also be argued that the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century tradition of fantasy literature—from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to George Lucas’s Star Wars and beyond—owes much to the Arthurian tradition, rooted in English most strongly in Malory’s Morte Darthur. Yet there has been no edition that draws on the results of the past generation’s scholarship while presenting Malory’s work in a form that is at once true to the original and accessible to the modern reader. This new edition, which expands on the revised and expanded selection of Malory material that will be included in the third edition of The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, is all of those things. The extensive selections include most of the material concerning Launcelot, and all of the Morte’s two final tales; the language has been partially modernized to make the text accessible to the modern reader, while retaining the flavor of the original; the text has been carefully prepared from the Winchester manuscript; and the annotations are extensive.

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This first comprehensive treatment of Arthurian literature in the English language up until the end of the Middle Ages is now available for the first time in paperback. English people think of Arthur as their own – stamped on the landscape in scores of place-names, echoed in the names of princes even today. Yet some would say the English were the historical Arthur’s bitterest enemies and usurpers of his heritage. The process by which Arthurian legends have become an important part of England’s cultural heritage is traced in this book. Previous studies have concentrated on the handful of chivalric romances, which have given the impression that Arthur is a hero of romantic escapism. This study seeks to provide a more comprehensive and insightful look at the English Arthurian legends and how they evolved. It focuses primarily upon the literary aspects of Arthurian legend, but it also makes some important political and social observations.