At the end of the section of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur that P. J. C. Field titles ‘Uther Pendragon and Merlin’, Arthur famously has a group of infants slain, all to avert a prophecy that one of them – born on May Day (46.8–10) – will eventually destroy his kingdom (36.15–17). One of these children is Mordred, who survives the deliberate shipwreck and who, the reader is told, will be seen coming to Arthur's court ‘as hit rehersith aftirward and towarde the ende of the Morte Arthure’ (46.18–19). This apparent promise to tell the story of how Mordred arrives at Arthur's court is never kept. Mordred in fact appears throughout the Tales of Lancelot and Tristram, the very middle of the Morte, but he is already an established knight by that time. It might be that what Malory signals here is that the end of the Morte will involve Mordred, as is traditional and central to the Arthurian legend, but his wording seems very specific, and this would also not be the only narrative promise Malory makes early in his book and then fails to keep. In 2019, Elizabeth Archibald published an article dealing with Malory's apparently broken promise. Entitled ‘Mordred's Lost Childhood’, the article was part of a special issue of the journal Arthuriana dedicated to ‘Malorian and Scholarly Retraction’. In a fundamental sense, the retraction article is a long-awaited answer to a question she herself posed in 2002: ‘So what about Mordred's recognition scene?’

This interest in Mordred and his destiny, indeed his childhood, also occurs in conversation. I recall discussing, to take one example, the cover of Haydn Middleton's The King's Evil (1995), the first book in Middleton's Mordred Cycle trilogy. The cover depicts a naked young man, curled in a fetal position against what appears to be a pitch-black background. Held to the light, the cover reveals that the background is not an empty black but rather filled with the glossy outlines of dead babies, the victims of Arthur's plan. Mordred is a haunted figure, vulnerable rather than villainous, traumatized by his father's murderous actions.

At the end of the penultimate book in T. H. White's Once and Future King series (initially published in separate volumes from 1938 to 1940 and 1958), The Candle in the Wind, a weary King Arthur summons a page on the night before the final battle with Mordred. He explains the core idea of his reign, ‘that force ought to be used, if it were used at all, on behalf of justice,’ and tells the boy he is to be sent away from battle, as he wants ‘someone to be left, who would remember their famous idea.’ That boy is named ‘Tom of Newbold Revell near Warwick.’ In other words, Thomas Malory, future author of Le Morte Darthur, still the most famous and widely read of the major medieval Arthurian texts. The collapse in White's narrative of the chronological gap between the ‘historical’ Arthur and his most famous chronicler, not to mention the even wider gap between romance and history, points creatively to the crucial importance of Malory to the Arthurian tradition as a whole. While Malory's real biography might make us pause at the thought, White's account makes his centrality literal, the keeper of an idealistic flame.

Malory is perhaps unique as a single author who acts as a narrow, controlled channel through which a tradition survives the pre-modern and is subsequently reborn. Beginning in the late nineteenth century with Tennyson and Swinburne, the modern Arthurian tradition has largely been a response to Malory's Morte. Whether a Malorian framework is evoked quite closely (Steinbeck's Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights; posthumously published in 1977) or is otherwise augmented with other materials to fill perceived gaps (Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex [1978]), Malory remains the index. Even when a text wants to jettison medieval “accretion” and return to something authentically Celtic, the stamp of Malory continues: Lancelot may disappear, but the adultery remains – an “original” character, someone like Bedwyr, is simply swapped in; texts like Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon rework the role of gender and violence in the Morte.

By current critical understanding of the aesthetic difference between high and popular romance, authors like Thomas Chestre (fourteenth century) and the anonymous authors of The Greene Knight (c. 1500), Torrent of Portyngale (c. 1400) and Sir Gowther (mid to late fifteenth century) can only fail to impress. Chestre's work has seemed unfocused and amateurish, while the Greene Knight appears to academic audiences as a bad misunderstanding of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But if we use a different critical lens – that of fan fiction – we might reorient our approach to what motivates people to write and tell stories in the late Middle Ages. Modern fan fiction theory is a useful way of illuminating how medieval popular romance works because it helps to move us past modern notions of both textual authority and writing for profit, although it is also necessary not to collapse all distinctions between medieval literature and modern fan texts. Using Henry Jenkins’ theory of ‘textual poaching’, authors like Chestre look rather more like ‘readers who appropriate popular texts and reread them in a fashion that serves different interests’. Chestre's work, Torrent, and the Greene Knight engage with new social interests or produce fan-friendlier versions of difficult or ambiguous narratives; Sir Gowther links romance to apocalyptic eschatology through the figure of Merlin. All four participate in a popular view of history as something organised around and by chivalry and chivalric identity. I will argue that to some extent this will not be a new apparatus, but a shifting of focus, partly concerning authorial intention and partly concerning perceived aesthetic effect. Fan fiction, then, offers a new way to interpret the radical translation into the vernacular – of earlier aristocratic ethos, of eschatological prediction – represented by late Middle English romance, where the focus becomes the entertaining of both one's self and one's audience. Textual poaching imagines a diegetic field – a body of story – as a game preserve, bordered and guarded. The fan fiction writer defies authority in order to translate material across those borders. Jenkins’ other term for fan fiction practitioners is, after all, ‘nomads’.

Fan fiction is different from adaptation, although they share significant features. The idea of textual poaching has been expanded and questioned. Juli J. Parrish argues that fan fiction writers ‘reimagine the preserve itself’, the landscape in which the poaching takes place transformed by their activity.

When Arthur comes to the throne in Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, his rule is challenged (as in some of Malory's sources) by forces both external and internal. In Malory, the internal resistance comes in two waves, related but in a slightly unclear way: an initial rebellion at his coronation by kings angry at the accession of ‘a berdles boye that was come of lowe blood’ (12.9–10), and a second following an act of political infanticide combined with an invasion from North Wales. This Welsh invasion is led by Ryons of North Wales and his brother Nero now in alliance with Lot of Lothian and the Orkneys (Lot being a driving force in the initial rebellion). After the final defeat of this combined force, Arthur orders the erection of a grandiose monument both to his victory and to the memories of the dead:

The reconciliation between Lot and Arthur, found in previous versions (as discussed below), is here replaced by unity through elimination, caught in an image of conquest and domination. The description of the tombs stands out in a Camelot otherwise only faintly sketched: we know more about this aspect of St Stephen's Cathedral, where this tomb is located (61.30–31), than any other physical location in the Morte.

In this essay, I will argue that this monument is far more important to Malory's over-arching purpose than has been previously acknowledged: its spatial location, at the heart of Arthur's most famous castle, anchors Arthurian claims to control over the various kingdoms and regions which make up his empire.

IN KIT PEARSON'S 2007 novel A Perfect, Gentle Knight, a family reacts to the death of their mother, and the benevolent neglect of their father, by playacting as the Knights of the Round Table. Led by the eldest brother Sebastian, who adopts the identity of Sir Lancelot, the siblings find their game taking over their lives. Sebastian, also suffering from bullying at school, increasingly loses himself in his chivalric identity. In Pearson's Young Adult novel, set in late 1950s Vancouver, Sebastian's allegorical approach to the world threatens to separate him from it completely. While the novel spends time on the motifs and characters of the Round Table tradition, the title hints at another connection: Chaucer's pilgrim Knight and his son, the Squire. Despite its Canadian setting and the nationality of its author, this book suggests that Canadian medievalism is as yet undefined, outside of being something with its origins rooted in the medievalism of its British parent but inflected by that of its American cousin. Like Sebastian’s, Canada's medievalism – like so much of its identity – is a kind of (sometimes uncomfortable) hybrid.

A Perfect, Gentle Knight follows the Bell family, six children and their widower father William, recovering from the death of their mother and spouse. Sebastian, the oldest, runs the household with the help of his next two siblings, sisters Rosalind (Roz) and Cordelia (Corrie); they are followed by Harry and twins, Juliet and Orlando (Orly). Bullied at school, Sebastian sees his home life as a refuge; the reader is told that he keeps his hair in a way that makes him resemble Prince Valiant (40), which attracts trouble in a 1957 school. While they have an inadequate housekeeper, latest in a series, Sebastian refuses to allow his siblings to complain to their father, called Fa, lest he replace her with someone who will pay attention to what they do. The leading candidate is their paternal aunt, Madge, currently acting as a caregiver for a cousin in Winnipeg. Sebastian has a degree of independence that he does not want threatened, and part of that independence is built around what we would now call a roleplaying game: they pretend to be members of King Arthur's court at Camelot.

Scholarly assessments of Chaucer's fabliaux seldom acknowledge that these tales are erotic as well as funny; even less frequently do such investigations delve into why fabliaux are a source of pleasure. As Tom Hanks and W. W. Allman note in their article ‘Rough Love: Notes toward an Erotics of The Canterbury Tales’, scholars seem ‘to have averted their gaze when Chaucer's characters leap into bed’. Allman and Hanks, as their title implies, study an erotics of violence, mostly of men doing violence to women, and they focus in particular on the Merchant's Tale and its ‘erotics of stabbing’. A more positive erotic reading of the Merchant's Tale appears in Andrew Taylor's 1996 essay ‘Reading the Dirty Bits’. Taylor notes the lingering gaze of another scholar, E. Talbot Donaldson, upon a description of young May's body:

Donaldson writes, ‘the Spring of pretty young girls is a permanent thing, and that May in their personas will always warm the masculine heart’. Taylor suggests that pleasure taken in this description and in Donaldson's gloss of it is mimetic: ‘For the young college man to share Donaldson's and Chaucer's pleasure in May is to become, like them, a connoisseur of both good writing and pretty girls, a master of ironic detachment and well-modulated heterosexual desire’.

There was a time when all good and alert critics, according to E. Talbot Donaldson, were supposed to be in love with the heroine of Troilus and Criseyde. Gretchen Mieszkowski, writing on Donaldson's important and compelling criticism, addresses this oddity:

Leaving aside Donaldson's apparent dismissal of same-sex attraction, further leaving aside the privilege on display, try replacing ‘falling in love’ with lust, ‘their first loves’ with the first girl who lets them get to fourth base. At that point, we might be nearer to an understanding of Pandarus than most criticism has previously allowed: for the possessiveness of Donaldson is a milder, partly because it is extra-diegetic, form of the possessiveness of Pandarus. Donaldson argues that the reader must ‘skate over’ the scene in which Pandarus visits Criseyde in bed, the morning after she first sleeps with Troilus, otherwise said reader will ‘end up in some very cold, very dark water’.

As Roger Ascham famously observed, Malory's Morte Darthur is primarily concerned with ‘open manslaughter, and bold bawdry’. I would not disagree; in fact, I would say that these themes are not only dominant but are inextricably interwoven. Male sexuality, in Malory, is consistently portrayed as potentially violent and disruptive, dangerous not only to individuals but to the whole structure of society, and therefore in need of controlling measures. The medieval world did not, of course, often portray any form of sexuality positively. Sexual desire leads both men and women to sin: both directly in committing fornication, incest and adultery, and indirectly in committing treason or disregarding their duties. It could easily be assumed that this is a divide between the clergy on the one side, themselves compelled to live in celibacy and thus suspicious of sexual desire, and the more relaxed nobility and commons on the other, cheerfully ignoring the rules when it suited them. However, this is too simple a dichotomy. Malory himself, despite the bold bawdry, shares in the suspicion of unregulated desire, in his nostalgia for a chaster time,

In her seminal 1980 essay Pouvoirs de l'horreur, Julia Kristeva identifies ‘the abject’ as the human reaction to a breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of distinction between the subject and the object, the interior and the exterior, or the self and the Other. Her classic example of a site of abjection is that of the human corpse, which although a continuation of the dead person's corporeal presence also becomes simultaneously a marker of his or her spiritual absence, and thus must be rejected or repressed, causing the subjective experience of ‘horror’. Kristeva argues that human rationality necessarily involves a series of such repressions, and that the association of the human with the unrepressed thus becomes a site of potential tension. ‘The abject confronts us’, she suggests, ‘with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal’. This borderland between the acceptable and the unacceptable thus becomes the site of the carnivalesque, the comedic and the socially transgressive, as attested by post-medieval writers from Rabelais to Bakhtin and beyond.

In the first decade of the sixteenth century, the abject was also a major concern for the poet William Dunbar, writing at the court of King James IV. Dunbar's poems are critically regarded as some of the most brilliant – and, frequently, the most offensive – writings produced in late medieval/ early modern Scotland. Many of his satirical pieces depict the court of James (who would later go on to lose his life at the disastrous Battle of Flodden) at play, simultaneously parodying and affirming the excesses of late medieval/Renaissance aristocratic culture.

George Ripley, in his apostrophic preface to God in the Compound of Alchemy, claims to have ‘renounced … fleshly lust’ and asks God to provide him (and, presumably, other worthy alchemists) with His ‘secret treasure’: ‘Shew us thy secrets and to us be bounteous’ (21.4). Throughout the Compound, Ripley guides readers away from worldly pleasures, urging them instead to focus their desires on God-granted alchemical secrets and ‘our stone of great delight’ (37.2). Likewise, Thomas Norton, in his prologue to the Ordinal of Alchemy, warns of avaricious would-be alchemists who ‘in fyre / Of brennyng couetise haue therto desire’ (27–8). Norton emphatically shuns ‘wordly werkis’ in favour of alchemical ‘connyng’, advising his reader to ‘sett fully his trust’ in God and ‘in connyng be fixid al his lust’ (509, 517, 535–6): ‘For above all erthlye thynge / I mooste desire & love connynge’ (2595–6). Desire or lust, in both the Compound and the Ordinal, is thus redirected from the physical body and material world toward the divinely inspired knowledge of the alchemical corpus. Moreover, as I will illustrate, Norton and Ripley both direct their reader to focus on the text's rhetorical structures in order to achieve desired alchemical objectives.

The hit HBO cable series Game of Thrones (2011–14) – the fantasy-medieval saga based on George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire novels – has provided more than its fair share of salacious sex scenes. Rape, marital rape, attempted rape, prostitution, group sex, sodomy (of both heterosexual and homosexual forms), incest, sex leading to castration, sex leading to leech-application, and even – occasionally – vanilla consensual sex, have appeared on the screen in the first four seasons of the show. The show, while generally well reviewed, has come under sustained criticism from certain sectors of the media for its depiction of a brutal medieval sexuality, a misogynous sexual culture replete with the threat of violent coercion. This popular (mis)representation of sex in what passes for the Middle Ages in the popular mind is, of course, far from a new phenomenon, and can be traced back through a long genealogy of such representations. One much dissected recent moment in this genealogy is found in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), where the African-American gangster Marsellus (Ving Rhames), having been saved from looming sodomitic rape by Bruce Willis's character Butch, vows his own distinct form of violent sexual revenge: ‘What now? Let me tell you what now. I'ma call a coupla hard, pipe-hittin’ niggers, who'll go to work on the homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch. You hear me talkin’, hillbilly boy?

In her 2007 essay ‘“Wordy vnthur wede”: Clothing, Nakedness and the Erotic in some Romances of Medieval Britain’, Amanda Hopkins examines the interplay of clothing and nudity in creating erotic moments, noting the connection of eroticism with female aggression on the one hand, and the erotic link between female nudity and passivity on the other. Lancelot's encounter with Elaine at Corbyn in Malory's Morte Darthur is marked by erotic moments featuring female nudity that appear emblematic of the latter. The eroticism of the moment when Lancelot rescues the ‘dolerous lady’ (2.791) from the boiling water by taking her by the hand, ‘naked as a nedyll’ (2.792), depends both on her total nudity and her status as victim – that is to say that the moment is erotic not just because she is naked, but because that nudity is not of her own making. Later, when Elaine ‘skypped oute of her bedde all naked’ (2.795) and kneels at Lancelot's feet to beg for her life, both her nudity and her vulnerability work to produce an erotic effect. Certainly Lancelot quickly changes his mind and turns from threatening her to embracing her. Yet to view Elaine as completely passive is a mistake – at the least her passivity is manipulated and Lancelot's presence in her bed is the result of machinations in which Elaine plays a willing part.

Sir Thopas's resolution to forsake human women in order to seek out an elf-queen as his lover satirizes one of the most well-known romance motifs: the fairy mistress who offers herself to the human protagonist of the narrative. It is characteristic of this motif that, with relatively few exceptions, the fairy offers sexual intercourse to the hero without any demand for the commitment of marriage and without stipulating any directly connected negative consequences. The motif's origins are a good deal earlier than those of romance – it features in several early medieval Irish narratives – but it is with romance that the motif is most particularly associated. It is noticeable that this extramarital sex is generally not explicitly condemned in the romances. Of course, romance authors are not prone to sermonizing digressions, so this might be passed over as merely a reflex of the genre; however, condemnation need not be overtly stated to still be clear and, in this respect, romance differs markedly from fabliaux, the other genre which frequently portrays extra-marital sex.

In the late fifteenth-century Squire of Low Degree, the incompetent protagonist woos a Hungarian princess in a way that seems to subject the romance genre to derivative, almost parodic, excess. This excess, however, offers particular insight into the representation of wooing in Middle English romance more broadly. While many romance heroines assume their suitors will display knightly prowess to win their love, this princess seems so aware of the Squire's shortcomings that she explains to him precisely what he must do, focusing on the rather boy-scout-like logistics of riding ‘Over hylles and dales, and hye mountaines, / In wethers wete, both hayle and raynes’, and lodging ‘under a tre, / Among the beastes wyld and tame’. Reminiscent here of how a Sir Thopas might understand chivalry, the text continues its overzealous attempt to ape romance when the princess exhaustively details the accoutrements that she expects from a suitor (203–30), and it is equally unable to find the right register when she offers to bankroll his required adventures (251–5). The envious steward's attempts to ruin the Squire by exposing his amorous inclinations are predictable enough; the results, however, have been seen as uncharacteristic of romance, since the king does not object to the Squire courting his daughter, but rather instructs the steward: