Preface

Summary

Arthurian scholarship, no less than the production of original Arthurian novels, films and other creations, has virtually exploded in recent decades. Two recent volumes of the Arthurian Bibliography, covering two decades (1978–98), list over 10,000 books, articles and dissertations on Arthurian subjects. It is little exaggeration to contend that owing to the profusion of scholarly studies it is next to impossible to keep abreast of recent and current developments in research on Arthuriana.

In addition, with each passing year, the major contributions of the past appear more remote, and we risk losing sight of previous trends and forgetting the substantial achievements that, however outdated by current standards, permitted or in many cases generated subsequent scholarly efforts.

In no instance is the essential contribution of past efforts more apparent than in text editing, and the ultimate value of critical studies is determined to no small extent by the reliability of the editions from which scholars work. However, the same principle holds for other forms of research: we build on the past accomplishments of others, even if we sometimes do so by rejecting the methods and conclusions of our predecessors. A myopic view of Arthurian scholarship from a twenty-first-century vantage point that looks back only to the late twentieth can easily obscure the crucial debt we owe to earlier generations.

In other words, we all too easily forget what we once learned from Bernard of Chartres – just how much we owe to the giants on whose shoulders we stand. It is essential that we both understand and value our scholarly past even as we ourselves help to shape the future of Arthurian research.

Accordingly, the present volume surveys the work of those who are the acknowledged giants – past and present – of our field and also of a great many other scholars, all of them important and some of them doubtless the future giants, whose work is recognized as instrumental in forming our discipline. To accomplish such a survey, we have invited the collaboration ofmajor scholars of Arthurian history, literature, art and film.