Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur: The Once and Future Text: January 2013

Friday, 25 January 2013

Quick Update

Peter reports, with typical precision, that 95.5% of the checking of the Apparatus and Commentary, which will form Volume 2 of the new Edition, is now complete: he is aiming to finish this by the end of the month. He will then need to work through the sections of the text (Volume 1) sent out to his "Seven Heroic Helpers" (Peter's words) and address any comments and corrections they have made. But all is still roughly on schedule, so more news shortly!

Quotations

"I've always felt Boydell and Brewer's handsome format made any book feel good, and I think I can claim to have cleared the Malorian ground a little by getting rid of that mass of references surrounding the text in the OET editions -- poor Malory cowering in the middle in a little space surrounded on all sides by scholarly siege equipment, which seemingly fires the multiplicity of brackets and other editorial litter at him and leaves it lying across the battlefield of the text. So I hope B&B and I between us have done a good deed by getting that out of the way, and left you able to encounter Malory, just you and him having a conversation. That was the idea, anyway, and whatever I may have said about textual critical principles and all that over the 23 years I've been doing that, my fundamental emotional drive has been to let Malory speak for himself as far as that could be done in a practical way." Field, Sept 2012