On October 26-8, 2000, there was a great gathering of Arthurian scholars from England, Canada, and the United States at the University of Rochester for Camelot 2000: A Millennial Conference on the Arthurian Legends. One of the purposes of the conference was to demonstrate the variety of approaches used by scholars studying Arthurian material and indeed the variety of material available for study; another was to demonstrate or suggest new areas for examination. This volume, which grew out of the papers at the conference, contains essays developed from the keynote addresses and from those papers that were overviews of a particular area of Arthurian Studies or that projected future trends in the field. (Papers that focused on a specific work or a specific problem have been published in a special issue of Arthuriana.)

Arthurian Studies is a fascinating field in part because it is multi-disciplinary and it crosses linguistic, geographic, and temporal barriers. The very fact that the conference was widely sponsored - by Boydell & Brewer, the Rossell Hope Robbins Library, Rush Rhees Library, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of English, the Department of Art and Art History, the Department of Studies, the Department of History, the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, the Department of Religion and Classics, the Cluster on Premodern Studies, and the Visual and Cultural Studies Program - suggests the range of interests that come together under the rubric of Arthurian Studies.

The essays in this volume represent some of that variety. They also offer new slants on traditional problems, take new approaches to Arthurian Studies, or look to the future of the field. Norris Lacy presents a masterful survey of Arthurian Studies, and his suggestions for what is and is not needed might well serve as a prophecy that the field will continue to thrive only if it remains vital and flexible without abandoning its traditional strengths and if scholars remember the importance of comparative studies. Derek Brewer turns tos the concept of honor in the Morte Darthur, a topic he has been writing about for years; and yet anyone reading his essay and realizing that he is defining paradox as essential not only to Malory’s concept of honor but to the romance itself can immediately imagine dozens of articles and dissertations growing from this idea.