English

K.S. Whetter just received a modest SSHRC Institutional Grant from Acadia for work on a classroom edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur [sic]. The SIG funding hires former Acadia English Major and new PhD student(!) Margaret Finlay to help gloss the edition. Malory’s fifteenth-century Morte was the last version of the King Arthur story to be written in the Middle Ages but is the mediaeval version that has most influenced post-mediaeval authors and filmmakers. Whetter’s complete edition, undertaken with Fiona Tolhurst, is forthcoming with Broadview Press; extracts will appear in the Broadview Anthology of Medieval Arthurian Literature in October 2023 (https://broadviewpress.com/product/the-broadview-anthology-of-medieval-arthurian-literature/#tab-description). Despite Malory’s influence on modern fiction and film, and despite the popularity of the Morte as an object of modern scholarly enquiry and as a teaching text in universities from America to Japan, there is no good classroom of the Morte suitable for today’s students. Tolhurst and Whetter – now aided by Margaret Finlay – are working on creating the best classroom edition of Malory available. The edition and its editorial theory are also the subject of Tolhurst and Whetter’s latest essay, “The Ethics of a New Edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur,” in Ethics in the Arthurian Legend, edited by Melissa Ridley Elmes and Evelyn Meyer (published by D. S. Brewer, July 2023 [https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781843846871/ethics-in-the-arthurian-legend/]).