Reflections of royalty: Late Middle English Arthurian texts and the mirrors for princes tradition
Abstract
This study highlights late Middle English Arthurian texts in light of the mirrors for princes genre, which includes texts that hold up a mirror to a ruler to show how that ruler should or should not act. The genre holds a diversity of texts, with some focusing more on the theoretical approaches to politics and others being more similar to anthologies of exempla used for both entertainment and instruction. Because these mirrors cross over a wide range of texts, a more precise knowledge of the uses and content of this genre becomes important to scholars studying political matters during the Middle Ages. These texts, however, provide more than just descriptions of proper kingly behavior to be used for the education of a prince or other nobility; writers could and did use these texts as covers for criticism of kings. In this study, I argue that some of the Arthurian romances, when read alongside mirrors for princes, were also used in this way: to cover political commentary by writing about a “safe” king rather than directly criticizing the current ruler sitting on the throne. The three texts I examine were each written during a time of crisis, times when these tensions would have been present in the minds of the authors. The Scottish Lancelot of the Laik was composed toward the end of the reign of James III (about 1488), a king whose reign in many ways resembles the English king Richard II. The Alliterative Morte Arthure was created around the troubled reign of Richard II with his political battles with the Appellants and eventual deposition in the foreground. Sir Thomas Malory was located directly in the midst of the Wars of the Roses, and scholars have often commented on how that conflict is reflected within his text. By placing these key Arthurian texts into their historical contexts, we gain a more complete understanding of how they reflect and comment upon the relevant issues of kingship, a topic of great concern to the people living in the Middle Ages but one that has often been overlooked by modern scholars.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Astell, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Medieval literature|British and Irish literature
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