The Noble And Joyous Book Entytled Le Morte Darthur

Stories of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, their loves, quests and chivalric feats, were popular throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. In England they culminated with Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, printed by William Caxton in 1485 and reprinted twice by Wynkyn de Worde before the English Reformation. Central to Malory was the quest for the Holy Grail, the cup or dish used by Christ used at the Last Supper and brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea, which fed the worthy and healed wounds. But the Grail could be seen as an image of the Catholic Eucharist. Significantly, the first post-Reformation printing of Malory (1557) was during the reign of Mary Tudor. Although it was printed twice in Protestant London, in 1582 and 1634, the Morte Darthur largely disappeared until revived by late-eighteenth-century antiquarian interest and nineteenth-century enthusiasm for all things mediaeval. Meanwhile, Roger Ascham in The Schoolmaster (1571) condemned the Morte Darthur as a Catholic work presenting a danger to Protestant youth, and Edmund Spenser countered it in The Faerie Queene (1590) with a specifically Protestant holy knight, emphasis on grace rather than works, and rejection of the image of transubstantiation.