General Editors’ Foreword

Summary

This volume of Arthurian Literature ranges from Chrétien’s Camelot to the French televison series Kaamelott. Irit Kleiman describes Chrétien’s Conte du Graal as ‘an elaborate architecture of imperfect doublings’. Using both psychological and mythological approaches, she discusses the impact of Lévi-Strauss’s description of Perceval as an ‘inverted Oedipus’, and the links between Chrétien’s poem and its Anglo-Norman context (especially the legal context). A key term for her arguments is mahaign, a wound or mutilation. Wounds are central to two essays on Malory which originated as papers for a session at Kalamazoo in 2013 sponsored by Arthurian Literature, ‘Wounds and Emotions in Arthurian Literature’. Karen Cherewatuk notes that Malory is not much interested in the metaphorical wound of love so popular with medieval authors; she focuses on physical wounds, not those which bring honour but those which mark dishonour, such as the arrow in Lancelot’s buttock. Depending on the context, she argues, readers may interpret such wounds as indications of moral transgression. Kevin Whetter resists the mainstream of Malory criticism to argue that wounds are to be accepted as inevitable concomitants of knightly activity and the winning of worshyp; it is ‘communal damage’, rather than individual wounding, that gives cause for concern. Whetter also discusses weeping, of which there is much in Malory. Megan Leitch, who spoke in the same session, focuses on sleeping and swooning, and concludes that while swooning can convey appropriately positive moral stances (even if remorseful), sleeping is more problematic: ‘For those who wish to “doo after the good and leve the evyl”, it does not do to be a “slepynge knyght”’. Wounds also feature in Erin Kissick’s discussion of ‘transformative female corpses’ in the form of Sir Pedivere’s wife and Percival’s sister; she sees these corpses as critical comments on the chivalric community ‘that depends on defining itself against the female body’.

This volume includes a welcome group of essays on art and material culture, an important source of information about the reception of the Arthurian legend. Joan Tasker Grimbert considers the surprisingly early twelfth-century images on a marble column from the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela which have been identified as Tristan and Iseult, and an account of the burial of the lovers in the same cathedral in the Icelandic version of their story from 1400.