Andrew Lynch

Le Morte Darthur for Children: Malory’s Third Tradition

Malory’s Le Morte Darthur is a book for adult readers, but one that most of them will already have encountered in a version for children. This was not always the case. Before the mid-Victorian period, there was a juvenile Arthurian literature in the form of short histories, chapbook romances, ballads, Jack the Giant-Killer, and Tom Thumb, but it did not involve Malory, whom young people had to read straight or not at all. J. T. Knowles’s Story of King Arthur (1862) is usually seen as beginning adaptations of the Morte for young readers, a category which has since grown very large. Malory’s book remains today, as it was for Tennyson,1 a notable link between youth and age, still perhaps one of the few narratives that people might encounter in some form throughout their whole reading lives. But since the mid-nineteenth century there has been a troubled double apprehension of the Morte: that it is somehow particularly suitable for children yet can only be made so by strenuous adaptation. It has been a text both loved and feared, deeply entrusted and distrusted with cultural labor. Through our double compulsion to give the story to children yet to change it radically for that purpose, Malory sets a revealing test for each generation, each writer, who adapts and retells him.

Francis Webb's White Swan of Trespass - A Drum for Ben Boyd and Australian Modernism in the 1940's

In identifying romanticism as Australia’s continuing (if hidden) poetic preoccupation, Paul Kane broadly supports the view that Australian poetry missed its modernist opportunity in the 1940’s. The continuing importance of the mythical Ern Malley, he argues, has stemmed from the romantic attractiveness of his persona more than from his modernism. Yet Kane’s description of Malley, whom he calls ‘‘the romantic-symbolist-modernist poet par excellence . . . unsullied by actual existence’’, strongly evokes (for me, at least) the literary persona of an actual young Australian poet of the mid-1940’s—Francis Webb:

While I wrestled with the sum, the sun: Francis Webb's "Socrates"

Throughout his life, the ancient Greek world held a special importance for the Australian poet Francis Webb (1925-1973). Greece provided him with themes for five separate poems from &dquo;Vase Painter&dquo; (1947) to &dquo;The Sea&dquo; (1961) and there are significant undercurrents of Greek philosophy and myth in several later works.2 At the heart of Webb’s Collected Poems stands Socrates (1961), named after its opening poem, 118 lines long. Appearing in September 1957, &dquo;Socrates&dquo; was Webb’s first Australian publication since the privately printed Birthday (1953), and his first Bulletin piece since 1952.3 3

Feeling for the premodern

On the Charles Bridge in Prague stands a statue from 1683 of the late fourteenth-century martyr John of Nepomuk, later canonized as the patron saint of former Bohemia. Below it is a bas-relief bron...

'he nas but seven yeer olde': Emotions in Boy Martyr Legends of Later Medieval England

This chapter analyses the emotional significance of boy martyrdom in various medieval English sources, including Thomas of Monmouth’s Life of William of Norwich, the South English Legendary, Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, and the mystery plays. Boys were generally considered emotionally unstable and undisciplined in medieval culture, but these works give their emotions a status that empowers them as arbiters of right behaviour and as figures for adults to emulate. Medieval boy martyr stories explored parents’ hopes and fears for male children in a difficult environment, and encouraged readers to think about boyhood in relation to later life and death. They also reflected on human/divine relations through the inevitable links between any boy martyr narrative and the childhood of Christ.

Introduction — War as Emotion: Cultural Fields of Conflict and Feeling

The word ‘emotion’, first used in France in the fifteenth century to denote political or social upheaval, was also commonly linked to physical violence. Nicole Hochner observes that in the 1429 Chronique du Bon duc Loys de Bourbon, ‘l’esmotion du duc de Bretaigne’ (the ‘emotion’ of the Duke of Brittany), leads directly to a siege of the French town of Troyes. The OED puts the earliest reference to ‘emotiones’ in English over a century later, in 1562, where it was also used to describe manifestations of social unrest: ‘the great tumultes and emotiones that were in Fraunce between the king and the nobilite.’1 During the reign of Elizabeth I the term entered English vocabulary in this triangulation of the French, Italian, and English languages as a description of — and an explanation for — escalating conflict, most frequently in historical accounts. Throughout history emotions have not just started wars, but been firmly entrenched within them, and are a heightened condition of their narrative aftermath. The history of emotions must necessarily therefore take this long written history of war and violent conflict into account.

‘… another comfort’: Virginity and Emotion in Measure for Measure

In the last scene of Measure for Measure comes a moment of great stress for Isabella, when the Duke affects not to believe her evidence on the grounds that she is mad. She says: Oh Prince, I conjure thee as thou believ’st There is another comfort than this world That thou neglect me not with that opinion That I am touched with madness: make not impossible That which but seems unlike. (5.1.48–51)1 ‘Conjure’ may have a special appropriateness here, meaning not merely to ‘appeal earnestly to’ someone (5.1.48.n), but ‘… [t]o entreat (a person to some action) by putting him upon his oath, or by appealing to something sacred’.2 Isabella, not officially under oath herself, reminds the Duke that as a Christian prince he is sworn to respect a higher power, and one whose ways are ‘other’ than this world’s. Specifically, she says, God gives another kind of ‘comfort’ (‘strength’, ‘happiness’ or ‘consolation’)3 from that in worldly understanding; what looks mad and impossible to ‘opinion’ here is seen differently in heaven.4

Animated Conversations in Nottingham: Disney’s Robin Hood (1973)

The Walt Disney animated Robin Hood (1973)1 has often been regarded by critics as unimpressive. The influential site Rotten Tomatoes rates it at 55 percent, the lowest among the twenty-six Disney animations released before 1987.2 Various reasons have been alleged for this supposed inferiority. The film has been seen as a small-budget effort made without enthusiasm by Disney’s senior staff after his death in 1966, without the master’s magic input: “You had a pride in the film you were making because he was there… and of course he wasn’t there anymore. There was a vast difference.”3 It was released in the middle of a period when the company’s attention had supposedly turned from animation to its live action films and theme parks. Only seven Disney animated features were made between 1960 and 1980, although there were three part-animated films, including the smash hit Mary Poppins (1964).

Parergon Editors' Foreword

The articles in Houses, Households and Families in Medieval and Early Modern Europe have grown from papers originally presented at the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group Symposium, August 2005. We thank Philippa Maddern for her initial organisation of this collection and steady work in shepherding the authors towards completion and revision of their articles. Thanks are also due to the expert referees who reported independently to Parergon on submissions, and to Megan McKinlay for careful and prompt copy editing.

A Tale of 'Simple' Malory and the Critics

Malory criticism from Saintsbury to Vinaver and C.S. Lewis sought increasingly complex and thoughtful ways to reconcile a liking for the Morte with its perceived lack of an intelligent or respectable author.