"Malory completed his Morte Darthur in 1469-70. The two earliest surviving witnesses, the Winchester manuscript and Caxton's printed edition, were both produced within the next sixteen years. The manuscript was soon lost, but its rediscovery in 1934 revealed that these two texts had striking differences. Eighty years of scholarship in a variety of disciplines has discovered a good deal about who changed what and why: the Caxton, for instance, tends to be very unreliable in the last few lines of particular kinds of pages. These discoveries should make it possible to produce an edition of Malory's book that comes closer than ever before to what Malory intended to write. The present edition aims to do that, basing itself on the Winchester manuscript, but treating it merely as the most important piece of evidence for what Malory intended, and the default text where no other reading can be shown to be more probable."  

This is the blurb on the Boydell and Brewer website for the forthcoming Edition, edited by P J C Field, of Malory's Le Morte Darthur. The current due date is listed as November 2013, and anticipation for its arrival has been growing among Arthurian scholars:  Peter Field's work on Malory is internationally recognised, and his Edition will be a strong contender to replace Eugene Vinaver's 3 volume OUP edition (1947, and then revised by him in 1967 and then by Field in 1990) as the standard scholarly version of the fifteenth-century literary classic. 

Peter Field

As a researcher working on publishing practices as well as medieval and particularly Arthurian texts, I wanted to look at the ways the scholarly and publishing imperatives act on such a canonical edition: shaping its overall physical and bibliographical presence, as well as its scope, readership and use.  This research project focusses on the new Malory, hoping to capture the publishing history of this Edition, including those paratextual elements that are often so easily lost, but so valued by researchers.  I've been granted access to the conversations between Peter Field and Richard Barber, who is the Editor at Boydell responsible for bringing the book through the publication process.  Richard is, of course, himself an internationally recognised expert on medieval and Arthurian topics, so the editorial communications on the text are particularly well informed from both sides.  I will be investigating the publishing histories of other editions of Malory, visiting archives and reporting on findings, and interviewing and recording reactions and responses from readers and scholars who are involved with the new Edition, looking at the influences such texts can have, and trying to map some of the consumption paths generated by marketing materials, scholarly networks, and less formal communication circuits, as the production and publication progress develops.