Dr Mary Bateman

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168 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard Mar 2025

Dr Mary Bateman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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You're Dead to Me · Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth · 7 Mar 2025 podcast
I think fan fiction is an excellent way of describing it. I've heard it called that in my lectures, particularly as it really snowballs. So what Greg's referring to here is the romance tradition that starts in Europe, which is very hard to summarise because it just explodes so quickly. Geoffrey's text is translated, so it's originally in Latin.
a handy lingua franca for the period, and it's translated very, very quickly into French by a Channel Islander called Wass, into English, translations of it all across Europe and into Welsh as well, actually. So, yeah, from the 12th century, we start to see Arthurian literature being composed.
The lion's share of Arthurian romance, really, most innovative Arthurian romance that we see at the earliest date is in French, which, of course, is a prestige language in much of Europe.
Essentially. Yeah. So in French, these texts are called romans, which is still the word for novel today in modern French. And then in England, when you start seeing these texts called romance, it's clear that they are, it's actually used for any text that's written in French originally, it doesn't even have to have like knights and everything else.
Yeah, so we think it's to do with romance, like literature originally being written kind of in Latinate. Some of these authors in particular, I'm thinking here of Marie de France, who I'll talk about in a second, also Chrétien of Troyes, Chrétien de Troyes.
They really are interested in these big questions about how a knight balances his chivalric, his martial obligations with, you know, being courtly and refined and being a lover.
And Arthur in these texts becomes, we call him a raffinéant, a do-nothing king. He's a lot less important than his knights and all of their affairs and adventures and things like that. And Lancelot is actually, he isn't even in the Arthurian tradition prior to Roman.
The round table is first mentioned in... Do you remember earlier I mentioned Wass, the Channel Islander, who translates Geoffrey and adapts it, makes it more interesting.
Yes, and one of the additional details that he includes is that a circular table is produced that can seat knights all the way around it with no hierarchy. So it's to get rid of squabbling about seniority. In the Grail texts, this is developed a bit, so there's always a seat that's left vacant called the siege perilous or the dangerous chair, the dangerous seat.
Yeah. And the idea being that it's deadly to sit in. The only person who can sit in it has to be the most pure knight going. And that's the only one who can achieve the quest for the Grail.
Crotien says that it is a flat serving dish for presenting the Eucharist wafer. And there's moments where they see this vision of it being brought out in a sort of parade. And it's actually gained a lot more importance since the romance. It's kind of become this huge object that people are looking for.
But actually, the original Grail romance, it's part of a collection of mystical objects, really, if you like.
Yeah, so it ranges from 12 nights up to a lot more than that, sometimes 150. In the Welsh tradition, 24. Sometimes 225, sometimes 300. If you want to know how crazy it gets, Lachamon, who is the English translator of Geoffrey, Geoffrey's text, in Lachamon's Brute, he says that a carpenter builds this fold-out portable table that can be carried around that can seat as many as 1,600 knights.
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
That's a lot. That's pretty good. Yeah.
There's hundreds of them. There's so many.
Other mainstays include Gehaerys, Agravain.
Yeah.
Yeah, so she's a really important figure because, first of all, there aren't many female Arthurian authors, to be honest, at this early date that we know of. And Marie de France translates this group of stories that she says are Breton lays, which were kind of sung to a harp in Brittany, which is very intriguing because that might suggest a route into the French tradition.
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