A fourteenth-century Arthurian epic read through Virgil, Augustine, and the classical tradition.


The anonymous Middle English poem of the late fourteenth century known as the alliterative Morte Arthure, detailing King Arthur's fall from power and grace and regarded as an epic of sorts, has provoked much scholarly debate, with little consensus reached on such matters as its literary context, sources, and genre. This book argues that the Morte Arthure was fashioned after what was regarded in the medieval classroom as the epic par excellence, Virgil's Aeneid (29-19 BC), but took Christian thematic cues from Augustine's City of God (c. 426) in critiquing the pursuit of earthly empire at the expense of one's eternal soul. Such a reading productively resolves many disagreements within the body of scholarship on the poem's form, meaning, and merit, and demonstrates that late medieval authors had a practical understanding of the conventions of classical epic literature. The ultimate purpose of this book is to read the poem on its own terms and to establish it as an underappreciated classic of the Western literary tradition.