In the image above, Arthur goes to war against the Roman Emperor, Lucius, for levying taxes against Britain. Here, Vinaver’s pencil underlinings and marginal notes indicate the literary sources and analogues from which Malory borrowed to compose his English version of the tale. “Geoffrey” refers to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (“History of the Kings of Britain”), a pseudo-historical Latin chronicle written in 1136 that contains the earliest known complete account of Arthur’s life. “V Merlin” probably refers to the 13^th century French Vulgate Merlin, which tells of Merlin’s life and the early history of Arthur. The Vulgate or Prose Merlin was one part of the vast Vulgate Cycle, a French Arthurian text so popular that it spawned a Post-Vulgate Cycle, which expanded on and continued the adventures of Arthurian characters. One of these Post-Vulgate texts is the Suite du Merlin, also called the Huth-Merlin because it is found in the Huth manuscript. The Huth-Merlin, which expands upon the history of Merlin presented in the Vulgate Merlin, is probably what Vinaver means when he writes “H Merlin.”

 
Stansby’s edition of the Morte is the sixth edition of the Caxton Malory and, because of its age, a rare book. (See above.) The Winchester manuscript probably remained in obscurity for so long because it was mistakenly catalogued as this Stansby edition. According to Walter Oakeshott, “[t]he catalogue made of the Fellows’ Library in the early nineteenth century has a detailed and precise account of the book [Winchester MS]. It does not, however, mention Malory’s name but describes the manuscript by reference to the pages in the 1634 edition of the Most Ancient and Famous History of Prince Arthur, of which there was also a copy in the library. If Malory’s name had been recorded in the catalogue, the manuscript could hardly have escaped notice so long” (6). Stansby’s preface notes that “in many places this Volume is corrected…for here and there, King Arthur or some of his Knights were declared in their communications to sweare prophane, and use superstitious speeches, all (or the most part) of which is either amended or quite left out, by the paines and industry of the Compositor and Corrector at the Presse.”


 
Two of the earliest newspaper articles detailed the discovery of the Winchester manuscript. One of these articles may have informed Vinaver of the discovery. They are dated:
 

• Monday, June 25, 1934. “Malory Find at Winchester” published in the Daily Telegraph
• Tuesday, June 26, 1934. “A ‘Morte Darthur’ Manuscript” published in The Times

 
Ironically, The Times article does not even mention Walter Oakeshott, the librarian who fortuitously discovered the manuscript. The Telegraph article was written by H. D. Ziman, Secretary of the Friends of the National Libraries (FNL), after viewing the manuscript in an exhibit that Oakeshott organized exclusively for the FNL. Oakeshott asserts that “[Ziman] wrote it—and a day or two later Professor Vinaver…appeared from Manchester on my doorstep, asking to see the book” (Oakeshott 4). Vinaver’s former student and colleague F[rederick] Whitehead offers a different story, claiming that an unnamed “friend who had read the announcement of the discovery in The Times…informed Vinaver by telephone” (Whitehead vi). Either way, one of these articles was responsible for bringing Vinaver to Winchester.

   
In an article published in The Times on August 25 (two months after the manuscript’s discovery was publicized), Oakeshott offers a “preliminary analysis” of the key differences between the text of the Winchester manuscript (W) and the 1485 Caxton edition (C). Highlights of Oakeshott’s analysis include:
 

• The establishment of an earlier date of composition for W, based on analysis of a vellum fragment and watermarks. While C was printed in 1485, W’s date of composition is estimated to range from 1470-80.
• More direct evidence of Sir Thomas Malory’s authorship. W contains colophons (inscriptions at the end of a section that identifies the author by name) omitted in C. In one revelatory colophon, the author refers to himself as a “knight prisoner Sir Thomas Malleore,” providing biographical information that helps identify which one of four documented Sir Thomas Malory’s might be our author.
• C’s drastic abridgement of the Roman War section, which is half of the length of the corresponding section in W.
• C’s liberal rewritings of Malory’s text, particularly Caxton’s translations of Malory’s French phrases into English. Vinaver, in a lecture at Leeds University, would later call “the freedom [with which Caxton made changes] criminal in a modern publisher.”

 
Included with this analysis was an illustrated reproduction of one page from W, folio 357v (see right).

It is written in a 15^th century secretary script barely legible to modern eyes. Observe:
 

• The proper names, like Galahad, Melias, and Sankgreall (Old French for “holy grail”). Like all the proper nouns in W, they are written in a slightly larger hand and, strikingly, in red ink (but not visible in the newspaper’s black-and-white copy).
• The last line of the page, which reads “Now turnyth the tale unto Syr Melyas de Lyle.” Clearly set apart from the rest of the text and rubricated (written in red ink), this explicit-like transition signals the text’s shift from one tale to another.
• The image of a cross in the bottom left margin, which reflects a moment in the story. In this part of the Grail Quest, Sir Galahad has befriended a Danish prince, Sir Melias. They encounter a cross planted at the fork in the road. An inscription on the cross challenges them to take one of the two paths: the right-hand road will test whether one is a “good man” while the left-hand road offers the chance to win “prouesse” or knightly glory through battle. Young Melias chooses the left-hand path (which in Christian symbolism is always the wrong or sinful direction), leaving Galahad on the right path. The drawing of the cross not only visually recreates the scene but also marks a suspenseful crux in the characters’ drama. What will happen to Melias? The drawing is visually linked to the transitional phrase that promises to reveal the outcome of Melias’ choice, so the combination of text and image work together to propel readers forward, urging us to turn the page.

   
Vinaver took eleven years to complete his edition of the Winchester Malory. During this time, only he and discoverer Oakeshott were allowed to see the manuscript. The Winchester Fellows, who owned the manuscript at the time, made it clear that Vinaver could only access it in the confines of the John Rylands Library in Manchester. (The Winchester manuscript is now owned by the British Library in London.) Below is a transcription of the letter from Sir Frederick J. Kenyon, a Winchester Fellow, to Vinaver granting him permission to examine the manuscript.
 
Aug. 28, 1936

Dear Sir,
 
I am writing on behalf of the Warden and Fellows of Winchester to ask when you would wish to have the MS of Malory placed at your disposal to work at.  As you will no doubt have seen, Mr. Oakeshott has published his account of his discovery in the Times, and I think he will soon have finished the work he wishes to do from it before parting with it for your use. I have arranged with Dr. [Henry] Guppy to reprint the MS in the John Rylands Library, where you will be able to have access to it under the conditions in force for the use of MSS in that library. I do not know whether you are now at Manchester, but if you will let me know when you will be able to begin work on it, I will arrange for the MS to be sent.

Yours sincerely,
F. J. Kenyon

Vinaver’s method of editing has recently come under increasing fire from the scholarly community. As public access to the Winchester manuscript has increased, scholars have begun to see the liberties Vinaver took in preparing his edition. Some even claim his decisions misrepresent the contents of the Winchester. See the images below. The first is a facsimile of the Winchester manuscript opened to the so-called “May” passage; beside it is the identical passage in Vinaver’s Works. Here are a few of the drastic changes made. W’s prose is an unbroken wall of text, with neither paragraphing nor much punctuation. Malory’s writing style, as D. Thomas Hanks describes it, is “simple and colloquial, objective and fact-crammed, non-pictorial: fast-moving” (Hanks 24). This final adjective is key. In viewing the manuscript, readers experience a fast-paced and lively narrative. In contrast, Vinaver—by drastically changing the layout (adding modern punctuation, paragraphing, and chapter breaks) —seems to fragment and slow down the same narrative. Clearly, Vinaver’s editorial intentions were good; he aimed to render the imposing wall of W’s text into a form more suitable for modern readers’ sensibilities. He admitted that “I had no hesitation in giving it, as far as possible, the appearance of a modern novel and avoiding at all costs that of a learned treatise” (Works 1^st ed. Introduction, cxxiv-cxxv). But do his editorial choices render his Works too different from the Winchester, his source? Helen Cooper thinks so. In discussing Vinaver’s section breaks, she writes:
 

Vinaver’s ignoring of [the Winchester’s] large capitals…is so frequent as to be almost normal practice in his edition. In the whole of the ‘Tristram,’ for instance, only half of the large capitals in the manuscript are used by Vinaver for his own text divisions; the other half of the divisions he gives have no manuscript justification, and, equally, the remaining half of the large capitals are ignored, sometimes to the point where they are not signaled even by a paragraph break. This means that Vinaver is imposing his own editorial layout at odds with that given by the scribes; and this matters very considerably, given that there is strong evidence that the scribes themselves inherited their layout from their exemplar, and that there is therefore weighty evidence that it may be Malory’s own. (Cooper 263; emphasis mine)

 
This particular part of the story, the “May” passage, is one instance where Vinaver makes radical editorial changes. This episode compares the coming of spring (“that lusty moneth of May”) to lovers’ renewal of “corrayge” and “stabylité” to each other. Malory compares “stable” (faithful) love to spring and “unstable” (unfaithful) love to winter. He ends by explicitly labeling Gwenyver a “trew lover,” a problematic statement considering her adultery with Launcelot. One way to make sense of this statement is to interpret Gwenyver as a faithful lover of Launcelot (not Arthur) in that she inspires the knight to perform amazing feats of knighthood. In W, for example, the May passage directly follows a tournament in which a disguised Launcelot fights and wins the competition while wearing Gwenyver’s golden sleeve. Thus, Malory arguably sets up Gwenyver as a “trew lover” according to the tenets of courtly love, precisely because she inspires Launcelot’s chivalric prowess. Her love for him is ennobling and results in his military glory. In essence, one could argue, Launcelot’s victory in the tournament justifies his affair with Gwenyver; the subsequent May passage makes explicit Malory’s condoning of their adultery. But Vinaver, instead of allowing the text to flow uninterrupted from the tournament to the May passage, inserts a section break between the two. The May passage, instead of ending the tournament section now begins a new section titled “The Knight of the Cart.” In making this change, Vinaver renders the May passage a prelude to Gwenyver’s abduction scene, the only episode in the entire Morte where Launcelot, after rescuing the queen, explicitly sleeps with her. When she is accused of adultery and treason by her abductor Mellyagaunce, Launcelot is forced to defend her honor on the battlefield. While Launcelot does win the final fight against Mellyagaunce, his moral justifications are questionable at best. Does he win because he fights for a just cause (the queen’s innocence)? Or because Mellyagaunce has committed even more egregious sins than Launcelot? Or simply because he is a better warrior than Mellyagaunce? Malory does not provide a clear answer, but “The Knight of the Cart” forces both characters and readers to confront the lovers’ guilt and deception. Vinaver’s repositioning of the May passage therefore sends readers mixed messages about the lovers, and the relationship between chivalry and courtly love. Thus, Vinaver’s intrusive editorial choices might further corrupt the intended meaning of an already problematic passage.

The "Eight Tale" Theory and Critical Reaction

Vinaver entitled his edition of the Winchester Malory The Works of Sir Thomas Malory instead of the more common Le Morte d’Arthur. He justified his pluralizing (Works) by asserting that Malory had conceived of his Arthurian narrative not as a single unified text, but as a series of eight separate tales. Accordingly, Vinaver divided up the Winchester’s text into eight sections—called either “tales” or “books—some of which were further subdivided into chapters. To fully evaluate Vinaver’s theory, one must keep in mind his bias towards French literature. Vinaver compares Malory’s narrative intention to that of contemporary French romances, which employ an entrelacement style:
 

The French Arthurian prose cycle with its various ramifications was not an ‘assemblage of stories’, but a singularly perfect example of thirteenth-century narrative art, subordinate to a well-defined principle of composition and maintaining in all its branches a remarkable sense of cohesion. It was an elaborate fabric woven out of a number of themes which alternated with one another like the threads of a tapestry: a fabric whose growth and development had been achieved not by a process of indiscriminate expansion, but by means of a consistent lengthening of each thread. Malory’s adaptation, on the other hand, was far from possessing or even attempting the unity which is claimed for it by the critics. He never tried to reduce his French romances to ‘one story’; the method he used was both more subtle and more drastic. With great consistency…he endeavoured to break up the complex structure of his sources and replace their slowly unfolding canvas of recurrent themes by a series of self-contained stories. It was a delicate and difficult process of unravelling, of collecting the various stretches of any given thread and letting it unwind itself with as few interruptions as possible. (Works 1^st ed. Introduction, viii)

 
But Vinaver insists his argument does not devalue Malory’s work:  “Instead of a ‘single work’ subordinate to an imaginary principle of all-embracing dramatic ‘unity’, what we have before us is a series of works forming a vast and varied panorama of incident and character. What their ‘assemblage’ may lose in harmony it gains in diversity and richness of tone, expressive of the author’s real design.” (Works 2^nd ed. Introduction, xli)
 
In response to medievalists’ nearly universal backlash to his theory, Vinaver adhered to his original thesis, forcefully defending it in “The Problem of Unity,” which debuted in his second edition of Works. That “Malory wrote eight separate romances does not imply that there are any serious discrepancies in their portrayal of characters or that there are no links and similarities to be found between them. All it means is that the eight romances are not structurally unified…and that in so far as there was a principle of ‘singleness’ in the composition of these romances it operated within the limits of each individual romance, not for Le Morte Darthur as a whole.” (Works 2^nd ed. Introduction, xlii-iii)
 
In the same essay, Vinaver makes an astute observation about why his theory proved so controversial:
 

We take it for granted that unity is not only a supreme artistic merit, but a feature without which no work of literature, regardless of its date and character, has any claim to recognition. To show that Le Morte Darthur was ‘one book’ and not several was therefore not simply to add to its value: it was to establish its existence as a work of art. No wonder, then, that when I ventured to suggest that Le Morte Darthur, as the Winchester MS. seemed to me to show, was not one book, but several, people in various parts of the English-speaking world felt that something precious was being taken away from them – not just a particular aspect of the book, but the book itself…. (Works 2^nd ed. Introduction, xliv)

 
Today, Vinaver’s eight tale theory has been widely rejected. His defense failed to persuade most scholars, who remain convinced that Malory’s text—whatever its structural flaws—coheres enough to be considered a unified whole. But even if we disagree with his thesis, we need not disregard his contribution to the field of medieval romance. His edition remains a popular source for medievalists worldwide, and his theory initiated valuable discussion about our assumptions for works of high literature.


D. S. Brewer, a renowned medievalist, famously refuted Vinaver on the grounds that the literary merit of Malory’s Morte should not be judged by its source material but as an independent text. In regard to Vinaver’s eight tale division, Brewer concedes that “his divisions are more logical than many of Caxton’s. What we deny is not their validity, but their absoluteness; for we shall find, not, certainly, a unified plot throughout the book, but a continuous stream of development…with well-marked pauses. But the pauses are all stations on the same journey; not termini of different lines” (15-16). In labeling Vinaver’s breaks “well-marked pauses,” Brewer asserts the continuity of the entire Morte. More importantly, Brewer implicitly rejects Vinaver’s French-English comparison. Instead, he asserts that the only thing that matters is that the text establishes and “obeys its own laws.” Malory, Brewer implies, experiments with a new form of writing that does not necessarily fit into Vinaver’s preconceived notions of genre—either as a “cyclic romance” or what modern audiences think of as a “novel.” As Brewer says:
 

Malory’s difficulty was that there was simply no form ready made for him. He had abandoned the interwoven complexities of the old cyclic romances he translated. Neither the prose short story nor the prose novel had evolved sufficiently for him to employ it. He was dealing with extremely complicated material, and [he] had a hard job to master it. What wonder if in parts he lost his command for a while? In the end, such is the power of a great imagination at full stretch, he produced a fairly adequate form; but it is almost sui generis. It is certainly not a collection of unrelated short romances. It is certainly not a novel. It has something of the qualities of both, and something also of the quality of the old cyclic romances. Thanks to Professor Vinaver’s editing we can now see the component parts more clearly, and how they were arrived at. (16-17)

   
C. S. Lewis, best known for his children’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia, voiced his disagreement with Vinaver. Though he claims to “be on Mr. Brewer’s side in this question [of unity],” he actually establishes a new way of thinking about literary unity. He argues that it is not a simple question of one vs. many but that the two categories can shade into one another: “I do not for a moment believe that Malory had any intention either of writing a single ‘work’ or of writing many ‘works’ as we should understand the expressions. He was telling us about Arthur and the knights. Of course his matter was one—the same king, the same court. Of course his matter was many—they had had many adventures” (22). Furthermore, Lewis contends that unity is ultimately judged by a text’s readers, not solely imposed by its author. “The choice we try to force upon Malory is really a choice for us. It is our imagination, not his, that makes the work one or eight or fifty. We can read it either way. We can read it now one way, now another. We partly make what we read” (22). His conception of a text seems to owe something to what modern audiences would call reader-response theory, in which a text is a somewhat organic product, as much grown by collaborative dialogue between reader and writer as it is built by a sole author. Lewis illustrates his point best in a metaphor in which he compares the Morte to a cathedral:
 

Beyond question, Professor Vinaver has shown the cathedral from a new angle; placed the modern pilgrim where he will enjoy it best…The cathedral of words is so large that everyone can find in it the work of his favourite period; and here, as you could not do in a real cathedral, you can always strip that favourite work of later accretions without pulling the whole thing down. What you must not do is to call those bits 'the' or 'the real' cathedral. They might have been. The whole might have been designed by one man and finished in one style. But that is not what happened. Though every part of it was made by a man, the whole has rather grown than been made. Such things have a kind of existence that is almost midway between the works of art and those of nature. (28)

   
R. M. Lumiansky, a scholar of medieval English, is best known for his 1964 publication of Malory’s Originality. The book, a compilation of essays by Lumiansky and his former students, concludes that Malory intended his Morte to be a single unified narrative. In an ironic echo of Vinaver’s table of contents, Lumiansky devotes each consecutive chapter of his book to one of Vinaver’s eight tales, analyzing each to prove the antithesis of Vinaver’s theory. Each essay focuses on the organic unity of each tale with its antecedents and successors, highlighting cross-references, prefigurings, anticipations, and reflections. According to Lumiansky, Vinaver reduces Malory to “simply a ‘translator’ and ‘redactor’” who “borrowed a great deal from his sources,” but this limited view ignores Malory’s unique “handling of these borrowings [which] resulted in a highly original literary work” (7). In his introduction, Lumiansky lays out his thesis in forceful terms: “[T]he authors of the present study are convinced that Malory wrote a single unified book rather than eight separate ‘Tales’; for that book we have used Caxton’s title, Le Morte Darthur. Whether or not Malory started his writing with the idea of producing a series of separate narratives and later shifted to the idea of a unified book—a situation that we do not believe existed—is not pertinent for this study, which is concerned with Malory’s final intention for his work, insofar as it can now be determined…[A] primary purpose in each of the chapters…is to show the function of the given ‘Tale’ as a part of Le Morte Darthur as a whole….This examination of Le Morte Darthur, we feel, makes indisputably apparent its general unity in theme, structure, and characterization” (4). While certain observations made in these essays are valuable, most reviewers agree that Lumiansky and his colleagues commit the “intentional fallacy” (Greene 121), “uphold[ing their] thesis by reading into Malory’s text things that are not there and by brushing aside or ignoring things that do not fit” (Matthews 159). Still, the book comprises the most expansive and intensely argued repudiation of Vinaver’s theory to date.

   
P. J. C. Field, an eminent Arthurian scholar, offers a scathing review of Vinaver’s second edition of Works. While it begins with an acknowledgment that the Works “is…the best edition of Le Morte Darthur,” Field claims it is “still not as good as it should be” (180). Field’s confrontational language seems to attack Vinaver more directly than his predecessors did, but his objections do not seem substantially different: “[A new section] is an attack (pp. xli-li) on R. M. Lumiansky’s argument for the unity of Malory’s work. But despite a number of shrewd strokes, Vinaver does not squarely face the point…that Malory deliberately and successfully altered the characterisation of his very diverse sources towards a single central idea” (181). Dismissive as this opening seems, Field unleashes his most devastating ammunition on Vinaver’s errors in transcription. One particularly biting section points out Vinaver’s hypocrisy in criticizing Sommer’s mistakes (see above) when he himself commits numerous errors:
 

The text of this edition is the best we have yet had of Malory, though very conservative in its adherence to the Winchester MS (W) against Caxton (C). It combines intelligent if careless editing with maximum readability: the combination of old spelling with modern punctuation and layout gives clarity; the emendatory symbols are informative but not distracting; and the apparatus criticus at the foot of the page is terse and logical….This said, two criticisms remain to be made…[T]he editor still adheres too closely to Bédier’s principles, and so shirks the responsibilities of his own intelligence. He gives us a Winchester Morte Darthur at times when Malory’s Morte Darthur is recoverable….The more serious criticism is of Vinaver’s careless transcription. His strictures on Sommer’s 1889 Morte Darthur (p. cxxxi) are in bad taste when we compare the two editors’ work. Vinaver objects to Sommer having made over a thousand mistakes, but his own ‘Corrigenda’ (pp. 1743-56), compiled with the assistance of three other Malory scholars, contains 622 errors, or one for every two pages of text….If Professor Vinaver’s excellent mind would not bow itself to the drudgery of ensuring correctness, he should have shared the burden and the credit with a more pedestrian associate. (182-83)

The Second Edition of Works

The scholarly world’s response to the 1947 publication of the three-volume Works was so enthusiastic that Vinaver was immediately commissioned to do a second edition. Demand for the text prompted Clarendon Press to also publish a more streamlined one-volume edition. Both versions of the second edition were later reprinted with additional corrections. Despite his colleagues’ vehement protests to his “eight tale” theory, Vinaver did not modify his argument in his second edition; rather, he concentrated on fixing scribal and typographical errors, expanding his commentary, and supplementing his notes and bibliography. Vinaver’s labor on these multiple second-edition texts would occupy him for the next thirty years (1947-77), nearly to the end of his life. Here are a few letters marking important points in Vinaver’s progress.

   
While working on the second edition of his Works in the late sixties, Vinaver met Barry Gaines at the University of Wisconsin, where Vinaver was a visiting professor. Although Gaines identifies his area of specialty as English Renaissance drama, “I enrolled in Vinaver’s Malory seminar despite my lack of training in things medieval. Professor Vinaver later chose me as his research assistant” (Gaines x). As his assistant, Gaines was instrumental in helping Vinaver proofread and correct his text for the 1967 second edition and, moreover, compiled an annotated bibliography of Caxton editions until 1900, which Vinaver published in his Addenda (pp. 1756-59) to the corrected 1973 impression of the three-volume Works. The remainder of this exhibit largely stems from the correspondence between Vinaver and Gaines as they worked on corrections and additions to both the three- and one-volume second editions.
 
In this letter, Vinaver informs Gaines that they will soon have to turn their attention to the one-volume Malory “in old [Middle English] spelling,” which would be published four years later in 1971. Later, Vinaver declares with excitement that “my new [second edition] 3-volume Malory is definitely going to be out next month” and, indeed, Clarendon Press promptly published it in October 1967. Vinaver goes on to laugh about the “howlers” or egregious mistakes that the press originally printed and then lapses into nostalgia.




In this letter, Vinaver rejoices that Clarendon Press is running out of his second-edition Works because it will give him an opportunity to “get rid of that horrid list of corrigenda [Latin for “corrections”] at the end of vol. III!” His sardonic remark that “[r]eviewers are on the whole much better at spotting misprints than at understanding what the book is about” might refer to P. J. C. Field’s caustic 1969 review, in which Field blasted Vinaver for his numerous typographical errors. Later, Vinaver discusses additions to be made and details about incorporating such addenda into the layout of the current edition. Vinaver’s and Gaines’ collaborative process of corrections and additions would take two years to complete; the corrected impression was published in 1973.




To the right is one of Vinaver’s many handwritten pages of corrigenda. It is unclear what the Roman numerals indicate, but the entries listed under “III” all seem to be proper nouns (either names or places). The listed “1, 2, 3” in the left margins indicate in which one of the three volumes the mistake is located. In each entry from left to right is listed: the mistaken word or phrase, followed by a parenthesis, the corrected word or phrase, and the page and line number, separated by a period.


 
In the eight months since the last displayed letter, Vinaver and Gaines managed to make all their corrections to the 1700+ pages of the second edition, so that by this date “the entire work is now in the hands of the Press.” Only the Addenda remained to be written.  This is a rather impressive turnaround, considering that Vinaver underwent a medical procedure and taught “two rather difficult new courses requiring a lot of preparation” during his appointment at the University of Victoria. In a telling statement, Vinaver admits that “[w]hen I was allowed to resume work on a limited scale I said to myself that something had to go, and decided that the first priority was my commitment to the students.” Gaines, meanwhile, visited both the John Rylands Library in Manchester and the British Museum in London to examine editions of Caxton. In this letter, Vinaver asks Gaines how he would like to format his bibliography and how he would like to be credited. He also offers to pay Gaines for his work: “after all the three-volume Malory is a marketable commodity, and there is no reason why a contribution to it such as an up-to-date bibliography should not carry a remuneration of some sort.”

   
In this letter, Vinaver laments the burgeoning costs of his corrected edition to Clarendon Press and, urged on by the press, discusses speeding up his preparation of the Addenda. To do so, he suggests a change in Gaines’ contribution, to which Gaines readily consented:
 

I wonder whether the best solution of the problem would not be for you to contribute…a bibliography of the post-Caxton editions of Malory….Would you care to do that?…No such bibliography exists, and you seem to me to be in an excellent position to compile one. Perhaps it would be wise to set the year 1947 as the chronological limit and have the first edition of my 3 vol. text as the last item. Or you might like to stop at 1900—all that is up to you. But I do feel that in a definitive version of the work there is room for this kind of bibliography, since my own bibliography, as you know, does not go beyond Caxton.

 
Later in the letter, Vinaver congratulates Gaines on his purchase of a rare Caxton edition, a 1634 volume edited by William Stansby, to enrich his personal collection of Malory texts. In a previous letter dated just four days before this one, Gaines proudly recounted his acquiring of a “beautiful copy of the edition of 1634, the last of the black letter reprints of Caxton. I found the volume offered for sale for $300 and decided that never again would I have the opportunity and the money – so I bought it.” By “the last of the black letter reprints,” Gaines means that Stansby’s Malory was the last of the Caxton editions printed in the heavy, ornate type known as “black letter”; by the seventeenth century, presses had largely switched over to a lighter, simpler “Roman” typeface. The 1634 Stansby edition was the last edition of Malory printed for over a century (until 1816), when scholarly interest in medieval topics, including Arthuriana, was revived. Even as distinguished a Malory scholar as Vinaver admitted that “I have never yet seen [the Stansby edition] advertised in any catalogue: it is “a wonderful find.” In 2012, Gaines sold this Stansby edition to the Robbins Library at the University of Rochester. See above for images.
 
   
Having received Gaines’ bibliography, Vinaver offers it a title and justifies why he chooses to cut a part of it. One of his considerations is purely practical; he would like to limit the cost to the press (which has already spent £800 in corrections!) and, ultimately, the retail price of his new edition. Included with this letter was a check for $200 made out to Gaines as “a purely symbolic expression of [Vinaver’s] gratitude.” (A pencil notation in the corner of the letter reads “$200 enclosed.”) In a later letter, Gaines reveals that Vinaver’s payment will “send…me on a vacation in Mexico which I had planned but not quite financed. Only today I charged my air line tickets thinking that I would let September's work pay for August's fun.”
 
Also included here is Vinaver’s “Note to the Corrected Impression,” published in 1973. Here, he formally thanks Barry Gaines for his contribution.


 
Six years after the one-volume edition was first published (in 1971), Clarendon Press published the corrected reprint. (See above for an image.) This text reproduces the text of the 1973 three-volume second edition, “but without the Introduction, the critical apparatus, the Index, and the Bibliography” (ix). Vinaver proudly calls this text “a definitive edition,” a sentiment Gaines echoes in a later letter.
 
   
Here, Gaines discusses his receipt of the one-volume paperback edition in the most complimentary terms. His declaration that “it will be the most widely used of all the editions” has proven prophetic. Professors at universities worldwide order this volume for their Malory courses, and students (including those studying here at the University of Rochester) carry around their plump but portable red-bound paperbacks to classes and conferences. Vinaver’s work continued to influence scholarship after his death in 1979. In 1990, distinguished Arthurian scholar P. J. C. Field published the third edition of the three-volume Works, making additional corrections to render the text as “factually accurate” as possible in light of new discoveries and scholarship done since Vinaver’s death (Field 1747). Its retail price, $375, testifies to the Works’ persistent popularity (Kennedy 1002). As Gaines says, Vinaver’s lifetime dedication to Malory—encapsulated in his aptly named Complete Works—is “an enduring monument.”

Vinaver Miscellany

A few miscellaneous items, including personal effects, include:

1. A photo of Professor Vinaver taken at the University of Victoria. (See right.) Date unknown, but possibly from 1972-1973 when Vinaver spent a year as a visiting professor at the university.
2. A 1955 catalogue and order form for several of Vinaver’s publications. This provides a snapshot of Vinaver’s lifetime devotion to Arthurian studies, starting from his 1929 book that drew on his dissertation through his editions of Malory that would occupy him until his death in 1979. A review from the Sunday Times lauds Vinaver’s Works as the “most exciting and important event in English literary scholarship in this century.” Though this declaration may have been premature, the edition’s rising prices attest to its continuing popular demand. As listed in this catalogue the three-volume edition retailed for £7.70 (about $20) in 1955. By the time the corrected second edition was published in 1973, the price had skyrocketed to £84 (about $210), outpacing the rate of inflation. Now, its price has stabilized at £90 retail (about $140).
3. A Christmas card from the Vinavers to Barry Gaines and his family. It reads:I am in the process of writing you a long letter, but meanwhile I don’t want to delay our season’s greetings to you both, with the best of good wishes for 1971. E. V. Dated December 26, 1970, this card was sent just months before Vinaver’s one-volume second edition Malory went to press. The contents of the aforementioned “long letter” may refer to their work on this text.
4. An undated, handmade Christmas card from Vinaver to Gaines. The drawing on the cover is a comedic take on a famous Arthurian scene, where the newly-crowned king Arthur is presented with the magical sword Excalibur. He witnesses a samite-clothed hand (belonging to the Lady of the Lake) clasping the sword as it rises from the watery depths. Vinaver’s card features an ink drawing of a stunned young man cringing in a bathtub as a similar hand rises from the water, brandishing a sword. (See below.)
5. The program for Vinaver’s funeral, held August 2, 1979. Vinaver passed away on July 21, 1979, just a month after his 80^th birthday from malignant lymphoma. He was survived by his wife Elizabeth and son Adam.

Acknowledgments

This exhibit would not have been possible without the Vinaver material that came to the Robbins Library from Barry Gaines. Special thanks to Alan Lupack, Rosemary Paprocki, Kristi Castleberry, Kara McShane, and Marc Bollmann for their invaluable advice and contributions to the exhibit.

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