Malory's Le Morte Darthur has become one of the most popular medieval romances, and it has remained continually in print since Caxton's 1485 edition. The "noble chyvalrye, curtosye, humanyté, frendlynesse, hardynesse, love, frendshyp, cowardyse, murder, hate, vertue, and synne" which William Caxton found within the book have captivated both scholars and average readers for centuries. Curiously absent from the critical record, however, have been examinations of gender and the family, themes which are of the utmost importance to the characters within the Morte Darthur. This thesis investigates the theme of family interactions within Malory's "Tale of Sir Gareth," examining the tale itself as well as looking at several analogous stories to determine if the theme is Malory's own or if it could have come from a probable source. "The Tale of Sir Gareth" follows the thematic patterns set forth early in the Morte Darthur. The tale's main interests are knightly gaining of worship and how knightly families interact. The two themes are connected by the proof-of-knighthood quest which calls for a combat between family members. Gareth operates within a realm dominated by familial groups. Outside of Arthur's court, knights rely on family links for protection and honor. Even within Arthur's Round Table fellowship, knights cleave to kin groups. Gareth enters Arthur's kitchens with the intention of discovering who his true friends are. He breaks the normal pattern of familial association: after gaining worship, he separates himself from his brothers. Malory's "Tale of Sir Gareth" has been troubling to scholars, as "Malory had before him in the writing of this 'Tale' no 'source,' at least not in the sense that we use in considering the other segments of Le Morte Darthur." While no clear source is available, many analogous Fair Unknown Romances exist. Five romances which have been suggested by Robert H. Wilson and Larry D. Benson are Le Bel Inconnu, Lybeaus Desconus, Wigalois, Erec and Enide, and Ipomadon. In these romances, the theme of familial conflict is not an important one. This suggests that Malory inserted the theme of familial violence into his tale. The majority of the action within the Morte Darthur comes in the form of knights on quests to gain honor and worship. Being a member of a knightly family is a necessary pre-condition for being a great knight as knights rely on their family for honor and renown and also must fight against close family members as proof of their prowess. This creates a destabilizing force within Arthur's Round Table Fellowship, and the majority of the conflicts within Malory's Morte Darthur can be traced to interfamilial conflict.

Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis argues that the sixth book of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, the Tale of the Sangreal, introduces a new idea of chivalry to the knights of the Round Table and challenges them to reform how violence is justified in Arthurian society at the fundamental level. The central issue revolves around the knight’s intentions as they are confronted with situations of violence. In the Grail quest, each knight must demonstrate that he uses his knightly skills for the benefit of the community, not for his own purposes. By contrasting how knights justify violence in terms of Arthurian ideals, which privileges the use of violence for individual gain, with how knights justify violence in terms of Christian ideals, which privileges the use of violence to protect the community, this thesis demonstrates why Arthurian civilization collapsed as civil war engulfed the kingdom. Furthermore, the thesis shows how the Sangreal interacts with the rest of the Morte Darthur. It asks the knights to give up their worldly pretensions to honour and courtly privilege, and to reform their lives radically to comply with Christian ideals. This is achieved as the Grail journeys of the three Grail knights, Perceval, Bors, and Galahad, and the journey of Lancelot are examined closely, producing the spiritual biography of the knights. To demonstrate how far Arthurian civilization had moved from Christian ideals, the final chapter scrutinizes Arthur’s estrangement from God in the early years of his reign. These investigations make it evident that the Sangreal acts as a mirror for the Morte Darthur, proposing a better way of being within the chivalric world by closely analyzing the justification of violence within that world. This demonstrates that the collapse of Arthurian civilization is unavoidable.

Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis argues that the sixth book of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, the Tale of the Sangreal, introduces a new idea of chivalry to the knights of the Round Table and challenges them to reform how violence is justified in Arthurian society at the fundamental level. The central issue revolves around the knight’s intentions as they are confronted with situations of violence. In the Grail quest, each knight must demonstrate that he uses his knightly skills for the benefit of the community, not for his own purposes. By contrasting how knights justify violence in terms of Arthurian ideals, which privileges the use of violence for individual gain, with how knights justify violence in terms of Christian ideals, which privileges the use of violence to protect the community, this thesis demonstrates why Arthurian civilization collapsed as civil war engulfed the kingdom. Furthermore, the thesis shows how the Sangreal interacts with the rest of the Morte Darthur. It asks the knights to give up their worldly pretensions to honour and courtly privilege, and to reform their lives radically to comply with Christian ideals. This is achieved as the Grail journeys of the three Grail knights, Perceval, Bors, and Galahad, and the journey of Lancelot are examined closely, producing the spiritual biography of the knights. To demonstrate how far Arthurian civilization had moved from Christian ideals, the final chapter scrutinizes Arthur’s estrangement from God in the early years of his reign. These investigations make it evident that the Sangreal acts as a mirror for the Morte Darthur, proposing a better way of being within the chivalric world by closely analyzing the justification of violence within that world. This demonstrates that the collapse of Arthurian civilization is unavoidable.

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This thesis examines the Lady of the Lake as an active chivalric player in the thirteenth century Lancelot-Grail Cycle (also known as the Prose Lancelot) and in Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century Le Morte Darthur. To study the many codes of chivalry, particularly in regard to women, I use two popular chivalric handbooks from the Middle Ages: Ramon Lull's Book of Knighthood and Chivalry, Geoffroi de Charny'sKnight's Own Book of Chivalry. Traditionally, the roles of women in medieval chivalry are passive, and female characters are depicted as objects to win or to inspire knights to greatness. The Lady of the Lake, I argue, uses her supernatural origins and nature to break with female chivalric conventions and become an instructress of chivalry to King Arthur's knights. As a purely human character, her power would be limited. As a guardian fairy and/or enchantress, the Lady is allowed to exercise more autonomy

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>