Dr Mary Bateman

speaker

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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

You're Dead to Me · Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth · 7 Mar 2025 podcast

Yeah, potentially. And some of these lays are Arthurian in nature. And some of them are quite typical. Some of them are a bit more unusual. There's one called Lanval about a knight who is overlooked by Arthur and Guinevere and just not treated very well. And he ends up being rescued by a fairy lover who he has... a very good time with in a meadow in a tent somewhere.

And she rides in to rescue him and he leaps on the back of her horse and rides off just as he's about to be given this terrible trial at Arthur's Court.

So she's great. I love Married France and they're a good length as well. You can just kind of dip in it.

Yes.

Yeah, a little bit. It's also really the first time that we start to see a lot of these disparate stories being brought together into a kind of very epic, coherent whole. But yeah, the Vulgate cycle, we're not sure exactly who wrote it, but we think it may have been written by someone, possibly a secular author who had spent time in Cistercian circles.

And they were all about kind of mystical things, which explains why... So they were monks? Yes, which explains why the Grail is such an important part of that.

Yeah, and so it really is answering to that image of the ideal knight as a Christianised kind of a knight. And it also raises the question as to whether there are forms of knighthood that shouldn't be idealised so much.

And I think by drawing that connection between the Grail quest and the death of Arthur, the mortatou, which is kind of the end point in the story, in the Vulgate collection, if you like, it's really reinforcing the potential for... The failure to achieve something as being potentially something that could lead to the downfall of somebody great. Yeah. Like Arthur.

I mean, it's really massive. We think Mallory was using sources written in French and sources written in English. But there is at least one book in the book. It's a book split into books, confusingly. And there is at least one book in there where we don't know what his source was, which is very intriguing.

It's an amazing fate of being able to synthesize a huge amount of stories and weave them together into a master narrative.

It does massively give the game away. The original title in English was different. It was the whole book of King Arthur and his noble knights of the round table, which I think is more... It leaves you to guess what the ending's going to be.

So it's written in 1469, 1470. So we're talking quite late at this point in the Middle Ages. Quite a bit later than the other romances we've been talking about.

Wars of the Roses. Yeah. And it's 1485. It's actually printed. And it's printed by this printer called William Caxton. And Caxton retitles it Le Morte d'Arthur. Presumably because it sounds kind of classy.

We had an episode on him.

Well, we had three candidates. We weren't sure which Thomas Mallory Knight who was imprisoned it was. As it turns out, there were three candidates. But the one who looks most likely, he was from Warwickshire. And yeah, he had a very colourful career, shall we say. He was a sheriff. He was a justice of the peace. Five times he was an MP. Wow.

But he was also accused of some pretty terrible crimes and spent time in prison for them. And these range from cattle rustling and things like that to robbing a local abbey. All the way up to attempted murder of the Duke of Buckingham, theft, rape and extortion. So all in all, not known as being a particularly nice guy.

And yet he's accused of all these terrible things. And actually, we think that he may have written Le Morte d'Arthur, which I don't know if you've ever seen a copy, but it is massive. It's huge. It's one of those books that people say that they've read sometimes when they haven't read all of it because it's so, so long.

And we think that he wrote it during a period of imprisonment, possibly Newgate prison or possibly... Tower of London. Maybe somewhere where he would have had access to manuscripts... that contained enough of his source material that he could use then.

It's the book of Sir Gareth.

So it takes you right from Arthur's conception through his rise to the throne. You've got the sword and the stone story in there about him pulling the sword from the stone and becoming king. He goes over to Europe and conquers the Roman Empire after a nasty challenge from a Roman emperor. We're introduced to all of his round table nights, as in some of the other romances.

Showing 101–120 of 168 · page 6 of 9