Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Medieval English and Dutch Literature in its European Context and the Work of David F. Johnson
- 1 Reconstructing a Lost Manuscript of the Old English Gospels
- 2 The Reception of the Old English Version of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues between the Conquest and the Close of the Nineteenth Century
- 3 An Unrecorded Copy of Heinrich Krebs’s An Anglo-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Dialogues, Printer’s Proofs
- 4 The Body as Media in Early Medieval England
- 5 Who Snatched Grendel in Beowulf 852b?
- 6 ‘Mobile as Wishes’: Anchoritism, Intersubjectivity, and Disability in the Liber confortatorius
- 7 The Presence of the Hands: Sculpture and Script in the Eighth to Twelfth Centuries
- 8 Perceval’s Name and the Gifts of the Mother
- 9 A Relaxed Knight and an Impatient Heroine: Ironizing the Love Quest in the Second Part of the Middle Dutch Ferguut
- 10 Multilingualism in Van den vos Reynaerde and its Reception in Reynardus Vulpes
- 11 Three Characters as Narrator in the Roman van Walewein
- 12 As the Chess-Set Flies: Arthurian Marvels in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and the Roman van Walewein
- 13 For a Performer’s Personal Use: The Corrector’s Lines in the Lower Margin of the Middle Dutch Lanceloet Manuscript
- 14 ‘Oft leudlez alone’: The Isolation of the Hero and its Consequences in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 15 Shifting Skin: Passing as Human, Passing as Fay in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 16 The Lover Caught Between his Mother and his Maiden in Lanseloet van Denemerken
- 17 Afterlives: The Abbey at Amesbury and the ‘Rehabilitation’ of Guinevere in Malory and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur
- 18 The Importance of Being an Arthurian Mother
- Select Bibliography
- Bibliography of David F. Johnson’s Works
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
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
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Medieval English and Dutch Literature in its European Context and the Work of David F. Johnson
- 1 Reconstructing a Lost Manuscript of the Old English Gospels
- 2 The Reception of the Old English Version of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues between the Conquest and the Close of the Nineteenth Century
- 3 An Unrecorded Copy of Heinrich Krebs’s An Anglo-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Dialogues, Printer’s Proofs
- 4 The Body as Media in Early Medieval England
- 5 Who Snatched Grendel in Beowulf 852b?
- 6 ‘Mobile as Wishes’: Anchoritism, Intersubjectivity, and Disability in the Liber confortatorius
- 7 The Presence of the Hands: Sculpture and Script in the Eighth to Twelfth Centuries
- 8 Perceval’s Name and the Gifts of the Mother
- 9 A Relaxed Knight and an Impatient Heroine: Ironizing the Love Quest in the Second Part of the Middle Dutch Ferguut
- 10 Multilingualism in Van den vos Reynaerde and its Reception in Reynardus Vulpes
- 11 Three Characters as Narrator in the Roman van Walewein
- 12 As the Chess-Set Flies: Arthurian Marvels in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and the Roman van Walewein
- 13 For a Performer’s Personal Use: The Corrector’s Lines in the Lower Margin of the Middle Dutch Lanceloet Manuscript
- 14 ‘Oft leudlez alone’: The Isolation of the Hero and its Consequences in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 15 Shifting Skin: Passing as Human, Passing as Fay in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 16 The Lover Caught Between his Mother and his Maiden in Lanseloet van Denemerken
- 17 Afterlives: The Abbey at Amesbury and the ‘Rehabilitation’ of Guinevere in Malory and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur
- 18 The Importance of Being an Arthurian Mother
- Select Bibliography
- Bibliography of David F. Johnson’s Works
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
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 ContextEssays in Honour of David F. Johnson, pp. 311 - 328Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022