Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory's Le Morte Darthur. by Kenneth Hodges. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. ix + 208. $65.

Most readers of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte see it as a monolithic treatment of chivalry: this is the way knighthood was or the way Malory thought it was. That view has governed many, perhaps all, readings of the Morte, as appears for example in Elizabeth Edwards's well-worded disquisition on the "code" of chivalry in her The Genesis of Narrative in Malory's Morte Darthur (2000; pp. 72­73). Kenneth Hodges challenges that widespread reading, as his title suggests. He argues in his introduction that there is not one code, not one "community" of chivalry, but several. He points out major communities of chivalry throughout the book, starting in Chapter 1 ("English Knights, French books, and Literary Communities") with the diverse "literary communities" found in French romances transmitted to the English Malory and to his various audiences (Scottish, Welsh, etc.). Even the religious community and its preferred chivalry appear in the Grail story, presenting not a replacement for the secular chivalric community found elsewhere in the Morte, as many have argued, but instead "the ongoing and seemingly irresolvable struggle between competing values" (p. 22).

D. Thomas Hanks Jr.
Baylor University