ABSTRACT
Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur was written before March 1471 and first printed by William Caxton in 1485. This chapter historicizes the Morte Darthur in certain ways, while refusing other kinds of historicism altogether. Much of this issues from, and returns people to, all that is signified by the Winchester/Caxton gap: that is, the divide between the only surviving manuscript of Malory's Morte and Caxton's 1485 print. The Arthurian lineage of Malory's Morte is a long story, already well told. The saga of the Morte’s rediscovery and republishing as the Winchester Malory in 1930s and 1940s sustains this structuring tension between ancient and noble ideals and present-time calculation and commerce. ‘The Noble Tale of King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius’ breaks into the Morte just as the Arthurian world is bedding down into comfortable routinization. Arthur has overcome his own rather scanty claims to sovereign power, married into ownership of the Round Table, and defied various claimants to his throne.
