The Works

Sir Thomas Malory’s Arthurian romances are a remarkable example of literary revival: the product and consumation of a movement initiated by early French writers, transforming the legacy of one nation into a seminal text for another. In the process, they effect the transition from the medieval to the modern conception of the novel - from early romance to a type of fiction able to carry its message to the modern world. Eugene Vinaver’s edition, which first appeared in 1974, was the first to be based on the 15th century manuscript discovered in the Fellow’s Library in Winchester College in 1934, which was closer to Malory’s own text than Caxton’s printing, the text on which all previous editions had been based.