Why Malory's Launcelot Is Not French: Region, Nation, and Political Identity

Abstract

Discussions of early nationalism need to focus not just on how incipient nations differentiated themselves from international communities, such as the Roman church, but also on how smaller territories fitted into more expansive composite monarchies, in which one king ruled several lands that had separate traditions and laws. Thomas Malory dramatizes the latter situation by having King Arthur's major knights come from lands subject to the English crown but located outside England: Wales, Ireland, Orkney. In their tense efforts to build a fellowship, the knights personify the troubles of building a nation that grows by hybridizing various regional identities. Malory makes Launcelot come from Gascony and dramatizes the shifts in national imagination necessary in England (and France) as Launcelot's lands shift from being autonomous to being held by the English to being part of a newly constituted France.

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