The first in-depth study of Arthurian places in late medieval and early modern England and Wales. Places have the power to suspend disbelief, even concerning unbelievable subjects. The many locations associated with King Arthur show this to be true, from Tintagel in Cornwall to Caerleon in Wales. But how and why did Arthurian sites come to proliferate across the English and Welsh landscape? What role did the medieval custodians of Arthurian abbeys, churches, cathedrals, and castles play in "placing" Arthur? How did visitors experience Arthur in situ, and how did their experiences permeate into wider Arthurian tradition? And why, in history and even today, have particular places proven so powerful in defending the impression of Arthur's reality? This book, the first in-depth study of Arthurian places in late medieval and early modern England and Wales, provides an answer to these questions. Beginning with an examination of on-site experiences of Arthur, at locations including Glastonbury, York, Dover, and Cirencester, it traces the impact that they had on visitors, among them John Hardyng, John Leland, William Camden, who subsequently used them as justification for the existence of Arthur in their writings. It shows how the local Arthur was manifested through textual and material culture: in chronicles, notebooks, and antiquarian works; in stained glass windows, earthworks, and display tablets. Via a careful piecing together of the evidence, the volume argues that a new history of Arthur begins to emerge: a local history.

The continued influence and significance of the legend of Arthur are demonstrated by the articles collected in this volume. The rich vitality of both the Arthurian material itself and the scholarship devoted to it is manifested in this volume. It begins with an interdisciplinary study of swords belonging to Arthurian and other heroes and of the smithswho made them, assessed both in their literary contexts and in "historical" references to their existence as heroic relics. Two essays then consider the use of Arthurian material for political purposes: a discussion of Caradog's Vita Gildae throws light on the complex attitudes to Arthur of contemporaries of Geoffrey of Monmouth in a time of political turmoil in England, and an investigation into borrowings from Geoffrey's Historia in a chronicle of Anglo-Scottish relations in the time of Edward I, a well-known admirer of the Arthurian legend, argues that they would have appealed to the clerical elite. Romance motifs link the subsequent pieces: women and their friendships in Ywain and Gawain, the only known close English adaptation of a romance by Chretien, and the mixture of sacred and secular in The Turke and Gawain, with fascinating alchemical parallels for a puzzling beheading episode. This is followed by a discussion of the views on native and foreign sources of three sixteenth-century defenders of Arthur, John Leland, John Prise and Humphrey Llwyd, and their responses to the criticisms of Polydore Vergil. In twentieth-century reception history, John Steinbeck was an ardent Arthurian enthusiast: an essay looks at the significance of his annotations to his copy of Malory as he worked on his adaptation, The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights. The volume moves to even more recent territory with an exploration of the adaptations of Malory and other Arthurian writers that occur in the comic books by Geoff Johns about Arthur Curry, aka Aquaman, King of Atlantis. The book is completed by a reprint of a classic essay by Norris Lacy on the absence and presence of the Grail in Arthurian texts from the twelfth century on.