ABSTRACT
To many Victorians, the very name Guinevere meant adulteress and fornicatrix. Yet members of the Pre-Raphaelite Circle saw Malory's queen as hero or, at the least, as sympathetic sinner and depicted her and her sisters-in-sin, Iseult and Nimue, with admiration. In fact, the reasons for the Pre-Raphaelites' glorification of medieval fallen women were not directly personal Instead, their defenses of Guinevere's sisters stemmed from their study of Malory, their views of chivalric love, and their perceptions of Arthurian women as beings of another time and order who therefore functioned under different moral laws. For Morris, Burne-Jones, and Rossetti and, later, for Swinburne, the Malory-Caxton Morte Darthur, published in 1817 with a long introduction and copious notes by Robert Sou they, was the central text. In a watercolor of 1861, which originally bore Malory's text upon its frame, Merlin is depicted as a wizened, small, and somewhat sinister figure.
