The theme of love in Malory¡¦s Le Morte Darthur has long been considered to be confusing and inconsistent. This thesis aims to analyze Malory¡¦s treatment of love in the two knights addressed as truest lovers: Launcelot and Tristram. Launcelot, as the central figure of the whole book, demonstrates well Malory¡¦s ideal about chivalry and about love, while the Tale of Tristram is neglected as an analogy which foreshadows Launcelot¡¦s adulterous relationship. I will survey these two knights¡¦ love stories with Malory¡¦s terms of ¡§virtuous love¡¨ and ¡§true lover,¡¨ and point out that although both of them are truest lover, their loves differ, so as to demonstrate the essence of love in Malory¡¦s work. Chapter one and two will focus on the love stories of Tristram and of Lancelot. Tristram, as a young knight, who first loves passionately, ¡§sone hote sone colde,¡¨ later establishes a stable relationship with la Beale Isode. The young couples, however fails to reconcile the conflict of love and moral and eventually die because of the jealousy husband, King Mark. On the contrary, Launcelot, as an elder knight, keeps faithful to Guinevere, his first and last love, refusing every suggestion of marriage with other worshipful ladies, truly repenting his sin after committing one. Chapter three will examine the definition of ¡§virtuous love¡¨ in May Passage, which reveal Malory¡¦s ideal of love, a long-lasting love, chaste and faithful, correspondent with Christian morality. Though having his ideal represented in the marriage love of Gareth, Malory understands well the possibility of imperfection and thus includes Launcelot as one form of true lover, who is unable to marry but maintains chaste and unites in heart, and Tristram as another form of true lover, whose ¡§love is free in himself.¡¨ This thesis will conclude that in his treatment of love Malory depicts various possibilities of human nature of love and points out different measures to achieve the ideal.

This dissertation explores the utopian and dystopian tones of apocalypticism in medieval secular literature and how literary authors treated the end of time. Beginning with two different representational models of medieval apocalyptic, notably those of St Augustine of Hippo and of Joachim of Fiore, this study examines to what extent selected literary texts adhered to or deviated from those models. Those texts include Marie de France's Espurgatoire seint Patriz, William Langland's Piers Plowman, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Pardoner's Tale, and Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'arthur. This dissertation reveals that several texts subscribed to an expectation of cosmic and personal annihilation, in the Augustinian representation, or of global transformation in the Joachist version. Nearly all of the texts agree in their bleak outlook regarding the end of time, suggesting a climate of fear predominated in the Middle Ages. While the projected Christian eschatological timeline should have fostered hope for the saved, what it produced was often terrors of eternity and emptiness.

This dissertation examines the approximately 700 anonymous female characters who appear in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, expanding the possibilities for how gender roles might be interpreted based on a wider range of female roles. Primary named female characters such as Guinevere and Morgan Le Fay perform more stereotypical functions in the text as created and limited by the Arthurian literary tradition, but a significant portion of the nameless female characters challenge these assumptions. Malory uses many of these anonymous women to perform actions which are often attributed to male characters in medieval literature, such as acting as a guide or helper on a quest, challenging gender roles by assigning more active roles to these secondary characters. However, the very anonymity of the women help negate examples of potentially dangerous female agency by downplaying their presence in the text, removing a sense of individuality by creating nameless, faceless female characters who more easily fade into the background by refusing to identify them. This helps reassert patriarchal concerns both by focusing the reader's attention on the male characters' actions and by partially glossing over the female characters' contributions to the text. In order to address such a significant number of characters, this dissertation is divided into two parts. The first section is an analysis of Malory's text, examining the implications of using the anonymous female characters as a more significant factor in examinations of Le Morte. While current scholarship does address gender concerns to some extent, this generally focuses on those primary female characters who align more readily with stereotypical gender roles. I examine how gender assumptions can be undermined when the anonymous women are included as part of an analysis, as well as how they can affect such concerns as threatening or preserving the masculinity of the male characters based on the functions the female characters perform. I also explore medieval naming customs, or onomastics, and how cultural practices might have influenced Malory's text. This includes analyzing how Malory uses various forms of anonymity. How he refers to individual characters, such as through a vocational reference, gives the reader some insight into the character's function and portrayal. The second section of this dissertation consists of indexing the approximately 700 female characters according to Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. Because the number of episodes these women are in comprise 44% of the total text , Thompson's Motif-Index offers a systematic approach for dealing with such a significant number of characters. It provides a method for classifying specific actions in Le Morte according to common themes, as well as identifying how these motifs are used by Malory in non-traditional ways. Since many of his anonymous female characters perform stereotypically male roles, the motifs offer a way to quickly identify areas of future interest for scholarship. My own Index sorts the motifs based on forms of anonymity Malory uses to identify his characters. This allows the reader to compare how he portrays women within the same category, such as female relatives or helpers. While this project is necessarily limited, my Index offers a starting point for future study by allowing for an easy identification and comparison of the anonymous female characters in Malory's text.

The immense scope of Sir Thomas Malory¡¦s Le Morte Darthur has long kept daunting his readers. In terms of space, Malory includes both historical locations and imaginary and unnamed natural locales in his work. These places have different functions and therefore transmit different dimensions of spatial imagination. This dissertation examines three kinds of space¡Xwater as space, urban space and mystical space, and the aesthetic relations to these spaces in Le Morte Darthur. These named spaces and the selected locations in each category will be analyzed in the framework of microspace and macrospace, a structure proposed by Dick Harrison in conceptualizing medieval spatial experiences. Chapter one explores water as space. Some geographical sites, such as harbors, lakes, wells and rivers, and an imaginary space of Lancelot¡¦s tears as a qualitative concept are discussed in relation to the aquatic regenerative power. Particular interests are in how Malory accentuates differences which water exhibits in these sites and how water functions as a link to the past and to the future via language and spatial verticality. The second chapter moves to urban space, localized in specific places. This chapter aims to explicate how some medieval cities in Le Morte Darthur are consecrated or deconsecrated as a result of the city¡¦s association with distinct social and moral/immoral activities. The final chapter discusses mystical space. The places of sojourn of the Grail knights during their quest are marked by spatial verticality and horizontality, in proportion to each knight¡¦s moral worthiness. These locales form a preparatory path towards the space where the Grail vision and a divine message are ultimately revealed. An analogy between the interior space of the Grail and the extracosmic void space is drawn in order to convey the essence of the Grail in spatial terms. The progression from chapter one to three reflects a tendency from the physical to the mystical world of the human existence imagined in Malory¡¦s work. Moral dimension plays an important role in that it enables the transformation from microspace to macrospace in some instances. The term ¡§aesthetic spaces¡¨ will include both microspace and macrospace, in which Malory employs real and imaginary sites to fulfill his aesthetic ideal. ¡§Aesthetic spaces,¡¨ when taken in a broader sense, will also apply to ¡§poetic space¡¨ when language results in the transference of space which characters experience. Three categories of texts will be employed in the discussion: literary, historical and theoretical texts. The first group includes Le Morte Darthur, some major medieval English romances and chronicles and the Old French prose Vulgate and Post-Vulgate Cycles; the second, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century philosophical, religious and historical documents; and the last, theories of medieval spatial thinking from Harrison and Mircea Eliade. Through comparisons of a number of passages in Le Morte Darthur and these two French versions, this writer attempts to show that Malory, as the first writer to incorporate the Grail narrative into Arthurian romance in England prior to the late fifteenth century, succeeds in presenting microspatial and macrospatial thinking in Le Morte Darthur.

<p>  </p> <p>My dissertation proves that movement for both women and men is tantamount to power. The choice for a quest maiden (that is, a woman who takes part in a quest) to move between places and spaces is a choice for them to be able to change both their social and spatial positionalities. Focusing on high- and late medieval English chronicles and romance, I divide medieval Arthurian quest maidens into one of four categories based upon their movement: the static “in” and “out” groups that either remain inside a court or outside in the forest, and the mobile “inwards” and “outwards” groups that either enter into a court from outside it or who leave a court for the outside world. This diversity of categories is a novel contribution to spatial studies within Arthurian literature, as quest maidens are found everywhere across the Arthurian landscape. Such women dwell in the most intimate castle chambers as well as within the most remote forest copse. These placements are significant, as I argue that spaces are defined by the people who exist within them. As communal space is shaped and created by the multiple identities that inhabit that space, the ability to exist and shape that space becomes itself a demonstration of power. This power is expressed both by individuals, such as a knight in the woods or a queen in her castle, and by collectives, such as the Knights of the Round Table. A space gains its reputation by the deeds of its inhabitants, and those inhabitants either benefit or suffer by their space(s)’s reputation. This extends to the movement that occurs between such spaces. A maiden who enters Camelot to ask for help changes the identity of the court: it becomes a place that succors maidens. A maiden who conversely stops a knight in the Forest of Adventure helps shape that forest into a space for quests. As the Arthurian world is founded upon the questing process that these quest maidens both support and enable, their very existence shapes the form of the world. The space of the quest cannot be unlinked from the maidens who occupy and enable it.</p>

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