Morte d’Arthur

The misnamed printed version of Sir Thomas Malory’s The Whole Book of King Arthur and of His Noble Knights of the Round Table, completed between 1469-70. Caxton issued his printed version in 1485, part of his effort to re-establish romantic literature as a method to improve the quality of the knights in England, who he dispaired had become degenerate and ill-equipped for war. The Morte d’Arthur is a massive work, originally divided into 21 books of 507 chapters, it covers the entire history of Arthur and each of his knights, stories compiled from the rich corpus of Arthurian literature in French and English.