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

150 of them.

Quite a lot. Lancelot is more important than in other English romances in Mallory because of his French sources. And this is where you get the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, that great love triangle. Mallory's kind of squeamish about the sex stuff. So they don't have sex.

Yeah. Well, and possibly a slightly more prudish audience. I don't know. Until quite late in the text. And then after everything goes wrong for Arthur and he's betrayed by Mordred and the knights fall into kind of infighting and factions, partly because of what happens with Lancelot and Guinevere. It all goes very wrong. Arthur is mortally wounded and is taken off to Avalon.

This is one of those texts where we are told some people think he doesn't live anymore. And this is where we first hear Arthur called the once and future king. And then there's a funny postscript with Lancelot and Guinevere where they become a monk and a nun, respectively, which is greatly elaborated upon by Mallory.

The grail quest is very much in there.

Does a grail, gets made a king, dies. Yes.

I think we think of Arthurian tourism as a kind of post-Victorian thing, but absolutely not. You know, like people were going to pilgrimage sites and churches and things like that that claimed to have objects connected with Arthur and all of the people who populated his world. Some of these were kind of clearly propaganda objects as well, right?

So when Edward I defeats Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, he seizes a crown from him that is supposed to have been Arthur's crown that then gets stored quite safely in Westminster for a while. Oh. There's Arthur's sword.

Yes, he does. He gives it to, I think, King Tancred, I think. He gives it to the King of Sicily.

So they say.

No.

Yes, and we know this based on people who visited and tell us that they were shown Arthur and Guinevere's chamber, Garwain's skull and his bones because he dies in Dover, according to Geoffrey.

Yes. Edward III built it? I think Edward I, we think possibly to do with a grand tournament. And it's still hanging there. You can go and see it. Clearly not authentic in any way. Henry VIII had it repainted as well. Beautiful. So it's been continually an object of royal propaganda. Sure.

Yeah, this is kind of a period that we call the Arthurian revival when interest in Arthur just explodes again. And there's various reasons for this. Arthur is, you know, a powerful Christian imperial symbol. You can see how he might be appealing to certain Victorians.

Yeah. Helpful. Yeah, all of that. He's a morally upright figure at a time when people are being more thoughtful about morals and particularly morals among the upper classes as well.

Some of the more dodgy bits of the medieval Arthur, like things like the incest story where Arthur kills a load of babies because he doesn't want Mordred to come and overthrow him, his incest child. The Victorians don't like that very much.

Yeah, it's very King Herod.

Mallory is actually republished. It's censored, like some of the nastier bits are tweaked for Victorian tastes. And then Tennyson. So Tennyson actually kind of rediscovers a lot of the Arthurian stories, partly through Mallory, but also partly through the Welsh tales that by that point had been translated by Lady Charlotte Guest. and by other people that he knew.

And he's really well known for his rewrites of the Arthurian story. You've got his poem, The Lady of Shalott, which is very, very famous. And also his grand Arthuriad, which is called The Idols of the King.

Yeah, and actually I would suggest that we can partly thank women for the Arthurian revival. Only partly though. You know, they were interested in the Arthurian stories even when people were passing them off as kind of frivolous and not valuable. I mentioned already Lady Charlotte Guest.

Showing 121–140 of 168 · page 7 of 9