Book contents
- Frontmatter
- contents
- List of Contributors
- Elizabeth Archibald
- Introduction: Learning, Romance and Arthurianism
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 Silence in Debate: The Intellectual Nature of the Roman de Silence
- 2 From Sorceresses to Scholars: Universities and the Disenchantment of Romance
- 3 The Island of Sicily and the Matter of Britain
- 4 Romance Repetitions and the Sea: Brendan, Constance, Apollonius
- 5 Emaré: The Story and its Telling
- 6 Dark Nights of Romance: Thinking and Feeling in the Moment
- 7 ‘This was a sodeyn love’: Ladies Fall in Love in Medieval Romance
- 8 Noise, Sound and Silence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 9 Armorial Colours, Quasi-Heraldry, and the Disguised Identity Motif in Sir Gowther, Ipomadon A and Malory’s ‘Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney’
- 10 The Body Language of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur
- 11 ‘Spirituall Thynges’: Human–Divine Encounters in Malory
- 12 Malory’s Morte Darthur and the Bible
- 13 Arthurian Literature in the Percy Folio Manuscript
- 14 Dutch, French and English in Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye
- Bibliography of Elizabeth Archibald’s Writings
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
10 - The Body Language of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 December 2023
- Frontmatter
- contents
- List of Contributors
- Elizabeth Archibald
- Introduction: Learning, Romance and Arthurianism
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 Silence in Debate: The Intellectual Nature of the Roman de Silence
- 2 From Sorceresses to Scholars: Universities and the Disenchantment of Romance
- 3 The Island of Sicily and the Matter of Britain
- 4 Romance Repetitions and the Sea: Brendan, Constance, Apollonius
- 5 Emaré: The Story and its Telling
- 6 Dark Nights of Romance: Thinking and Feeling in the Moment
- 7 ‘This was a sodeyn love’: Ladies Fall in Love in Medieval Romance
- 8 Noise, Sound and Silence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 9 Armorial Colours, Quasi-Heraldry, and the Disguised Identity Motif in Sir Gowther, Ipomadon A and Malory’s ‘Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney’
- 10 The Body Language of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur
- 11 ‘Spirituall Thynges’: Human–Divine Encounters in Malory
- 12 Malory’s Morte Darthur and the Bible
- 13 Arthurian Literature in the Percy Folio Manuscript
- 14 Dutch, French and English in Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye
- Bibliography of Elizabeth Archibald’s Writings
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
Summary
What is lacking is any consideration of the ultimate value of Malory’s work. He stands high above his contemporaries; but to say this is not to say much. He is immensely readable … But often enough he sounds like an awful old buffer, constantly deploring ‘modern life’ … His ethics are those of the rugger club: when Arthur learns of Guinevere’s adultery with Lancelot, his first thought is not of her but of the loss to the team … Within this simple value-system feeling is deep and genuine; but whether it is complex enough to sustain a whole imaginative world is doubtful. Malory is perhaps the least intelligent writer who has become an English classic.
Elizabeth Archibald, through her insightful interventions, has promoted and contributed to an evolving re-evaluation over recent times of the complex imaginative world, the intelligence and the ultimate value of Le Morte Darthur. One aspect of the deep value-system of that world lies in what Malory encourages readers to see in their mind’s eye of the non-verbal communication between his characters. Such body language is the focus of this essay.
To confront the question of defining what body language includes is immediately illuminating about Malory’s distinctive estimation of bodily signs. Is non-verbal communication confined to such consciously performed bodily signals as gestures of greeting and parting, kneeling, various motions and gestures of the hands and head, smiles, embraces and kisses, the making of various sounds, or the bestowal of looks? Or should body language also be understood to comprise any involuntary symptoms that the sentient body may display, such as laughing or weeping (where not ‘put on’), blushing or pallor, trembling and swooning? In practice, such distinctions tend to be blurred by Malory’s method in the Morte, where much body language contributes to a ceremonialized order of conduct as observance. Here, therefore, body language is taken at its broadest, and Malory’s distinctive patterns of both willed and involuntary bodily signals in the Morte will be traced.
Body language is not necessarily significant in the Morte because Malory imports more gestural detail than in other accounts of the same Arthurian episodes, although at significant junctures Malory may indeed add powerful body language.
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- Information
- Medieval Romance, Arthurian LiteratureEssays in Honour of Elizabeth Archibald, pp. 143 - 157Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021