How Spenser Reformed Malory

A major contribution to Spenser studies, Arthurian scholarship, and early modern medievalism, revealing Spenser's The Faerie Queene as a sustained Protestant response to Malory.


King Arthur remained a potent figure in early modern Britain due to the continued popularity of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur (1485). Writers in England and Scotland competed to adapt Arthur for new purposes. Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590; 1596) offers a reformed and purified legend. Kenneth Hodges shows that, while it has long seemed remarkably independent of Malory, The Faerie Queene is structured as a sustained and detailed response to Le Morte Darthur.

For Protestant writers, Malory's enduring vision of the Arthurian past posed urgent problems, shaped as it was by Catholic devotion and marked by adultery and sexual violence. Through detailed comparative readings, the study shows how Spenser systematically rewrote these elements in the 1590 poem, before returning more selectively and sympathetically to Malory in 1596. In doing so, it reveals how Arthurian tradition became a site of religious, political, and national contestation in Reformation Britain.

Bridging medieval and early modern literary cultures, this book offers a major new account of how literary tradition is reshaped under ideological pressure.