Le Morte Darthur : Authoritative Text, Sources and Backgrounds, Criticism

The text is unabridged, with original spelling and extensive, easy-to-use marginal glosses and footnotes.

No other edition accurately represents the actual (and likely authorial) divisions of the text as attested to by its two surviving witnesses―Caxton’s 1485 print and, especially, the famous Winchester Manuscript. The Winchester Manuscript is now generally agreed to be the more authentic of the two earlier texts. The Norton Critical Edition is the first edition of Malory to recover important elements of this manuscript: paragraphing marginal annotations hierarchies of narrative division as signaled by size and decorative intricacy of initial capitals and font changes The Norton Critical Edition also represents, in black-letter font, the striking rubrication of proper names in the Winchester Manuscript, reconstructing for readers something of an authentic medieval reading experience, one which gives visual support to Malory’s extraordinary representation, in character and setting, of a chivalric ideal. No other student edition of Malory contains such extensive contextual and critical support.

Stephen H. A. Shepherd is a professor of English at Loyola Marymount University. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Queen’s University at Kingston and his doctorate from the University of Oxford. His honors include fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Huntington Library. He is the editor of the Early English Text Society edition of Turpines Story and of the Norton Critical Edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, and he is a coeditor of the Norton Critical Edition of William Langland’s Piers Plowman. The primary focus of his research and publication is the critical, codicological, and historical contexts of medieval English literature.