Gender and Arthurian Romance

This chapter takes up the complex and fluid topic of gender in relation to Arthurian romance. It explores the intersections of gender with chivalry, emotion and agency in the twelfth-century romances of Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France and their fourteenth-century English reworkings; the gendered treatment of desire, constraint and identity in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale ; and finally the formative role of gender across Arthur’s reign in Malory’s Morte Darthur . Engagement with gender roles, emotional experience and the place and predicament of women is built into Arthurian romance from its inception, reflecting courtly interests in the nuances of behaviour and feeling. Medieval Arthurian romances repeatedly treat women as wielding profound power, including through unorthodox means of magic, but they also address the constraints of gender roles for women. Malory’s Morte Darthur illuminates the crucial part played by gender in the narrative of the rise and fall of Arthur’s kingdom, and the conflict between heterosexual and homosocial relations.