Maidens, Magic, and Manipulation: The Female Presence in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur

Abstract

The legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are preeminent in medieval lore, as literary history celebrates these valiant knights on their illustrious quests; these crusades, however, were very often affected, or even entirely motived, by love, lust, or a damsel in distress. What of those women whom these knights loved and lost, or feared and fought? A distinctly male presence remains the primary focus of medieval literature; my work aims to explore how the dynamic of these medieval texts is influenced and motivated by the consequences of female endeavours, in terms of an autonomous feminine presence in the narrative world, and the authority with which this is presented. My focus lies primarily with an exploration of this female form in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, a fifteenth-century text which presents the Arthurian world governed by the king and his renowned company of knights, based on ...