Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-04T21:23:04.206Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

17 - Afterlives: The Abbey at Amesbury and the ‘Rehabilitation’ of Guinevere in Malory and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2022

Larissa Tracy
Affiliation:
Longwood University, Virginia
Geert H. M. Claassens
Affiliation:
KU Leuven, Belgium
Get access

Summary

AT THE END of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur (completed 1469–70; published 1485) [hereafter Morte], after the wrack and ruin of Lancelot and Mordred's respective civil wars and the internecine strife in the wake of the Grail Quest, Guinevere, hearing that Arthur has died, seeks refuge in an abbatial convent at ‘Amysbyry’, or Amesbury. She takes vows there to become a Benedictine nun, wearing ‘whyght clothys and blak’ (2.929), and is eventually elected abbess and ruler, ‘as reson wolde’ (2.930). After an uncertain amount of time, she encounters her former lover Lancelot and turns him away, enjoining him to adopt a religious vocation in light of his sin, and while their parting is sorrowful, provoking ‘lamentacyon as they had be stungyn wyth sperys’ (2.934), the queen dies repentant. Malory's rendering of Guinevere's final years is poignant, leaving little doubt as to the authenticity of the queen's devotion, and his version of events is the one that has become perhaps most canonical in the centuries since its composition. The Morte, however, is an exceedingly late medieval account, and its treatment of Guinevere, at odds with a huge majority of the preceding pan-European Arthurian tradition, is derived in large part from Malory's principal English source for the latter part of his text, the anonymous fourteenth-century stanzaic Morte Arthur [hereafter sMA]. Guinevere's moral rehabilitation at Amesbury, in fact, is a detail seemingly original to the sMA, and although scholars have offered fruitful examinations of the textual convent in reference to the Benedictine monastery and later dependent Fontevrault priory located in the historical town of Amesbury, the site's particular associations and resonance within the Arthurian literary tradition have gone unacknowledged in any substantial detail. Amesbury is an important site of transformation in the Brut tradition that descended from the earliest dedicated chronicle account, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) [hereafter Historia] (c. 1136–38), and the fact that the poet of the sMA, and later Malory, utilizes Amesbury as the location of Guinevere's redemption strongly suggests an intertextual link from within the established Brut tradition that introduces a thematic valence of mourning turned to celebration for the queen in these later texts.

Type
Chapter
Information
Medieval English and Dutch Literatures: the European Context
Essays in Honour of David F. Johnson
, pp. 311 - 328
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×