Scholars
Who argues what, and where they disagree. Positions are summarised, not endorsed.
The Matter of Britain (Arthur) — 24
Albert Pauphilet
1884-1948
Etudes sur la Queste del Saint Graal (1921) argued for monastic and specifically Cistercian inspiration and possibly authorship. The starting point for all later debate on the Queste's theology.
Barbara Tepa Lupack
Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children; with Alan Lupack, the leading scholar of Arthurian juvenilia and American Arthuriana. Directly relevant to teaching-oriented adaptation.
Donald Maddox
The Arthurian Romances of Chretien de Troyes (1991); reads the romances as structured around 'specular encounters' that force the hero to see his own situation.
Eugene Vinaver
1899-1979
Edited the Winchester Manuscript as The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (1947), arguing Malory wrote eight separate romances rather than one book. The title itself is the argument.
Felicity Riddy
Sir Thomas Malory (1987); reads the Morte in relation to late-medieval gentry culture and reading practices.
G. Ronald Murphy
Gemstone of Paradise: The Holy Grail in Wolfram's Parzival (2006) reads Wolfram's Grail-stone against reliquary design and the Holy Sepulchre.
Gaston Paris
1839-1903
Coined amour courtois ('courtly love') in an 1883 article on the Charrette. The term is now often treated as a nineteenth-century construct imposed on medieval texts.
Jean Frappier
1900-1974
Foundational twentieth-century critic of Chretien and of the Vulgate Cycle; formulated much of the standard account of the Grail's literary development.
Juliette Wood
The Holy Grail: History and Legend (2012) is a sceptical folklorist's account of the Grail and, in particular, of the modern conspiracy literature attached to it.
Karen Jankulak
Author of the standard short critical study of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the Writers of Wales series.
Kevin J. Harty
The Holy Grail on Film and other collections; the standard bibliographer and critic of Arthurian cinema.
Lee Patterson
1940-2012
Negotiating the Past (1987) and Chaucer and the Subject of History (1991). Historicist critic of late-medieval English literature; the five Patterson essays on disk (on the fifteenth century, imagination, the monstrous races, the Parson's Tale, and 'rapt') are the strongest local…
Michael A. Faletra
Translator of the Historia and author on Geoffrey's Welsh-colonial politics; reads Geoffrey as a text produced within, and about, Anglo-Norman domination of Wales.
Michael D. Reeve and Neil Wright
Their 2007 edition and facing translation of the Historia Regum Britanniae (De gestis Britonum) is the current standard Latin text, based on the earliest manuscripts and conservative about later interpolation.
Norris J. Lacy
General editor of the Lancelot-Grail translation and of the New Arthurian Encyclopedia; the central organising figure of Anglophone Arthurian studies in the late twentieth century.
O. J. Padel
Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature (2000, 2nd edn 2013) argues the Welsh Arthur is a folkloric figure of marvels and onomastic legend, and that the 'historical' Arthur is a later rationalisation of him.
P. J. C. Field
Revised Vinaver's edition (1990) and wrote the standard biography, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (1993), defending the Newbold Revel identification.
Rachel Bromwich
1915-2010
Editor of Trioedd Ynys Prydein, the indispensable edition and commentary on the Welsh Triads and the standard reference for pre-Galfridian Welsh Arthurian tradition.
Richard Barber
The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief (2004); traces the Grail as a literary invention and its long afterlife in devotion and pseudo-history.
Roberta L. Krueger
Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (1993); asks what these texts did to and for the women who were their audience.
Ronald Hutton
Witches, Druids and King Arthur (2003) applies a historian's scepticism to claims of pagan survival in Arthurian and druidic material, and to the modern traditions built on those claims. The corrective text for anyone building a 'Celtic Arthur'.
Sian Echard
Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition (1998); works on the reception, materiality and book-history of Arthurian texts.
Thomas Green
Concepts of Arthur (2007) contests the historical Arthur, arguing the entire case rests on the Historia Brittonum and Annales Cambriae and that both are too late and too legendary to bear the weight. Maintains an open-access bibliography at arthuriana.co.uk.
Walter F. Oakeshott
1903-1987
Found the Winchester Manuscript in 1934 while cataloguing Winchester College's library; described the discovery in 'The Finding of the Manuscript' (1963).
The Matter of the Greenwood (Robin Hood) — 15
A. J. Pollard
Imagining Robin Hood: The Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context (2004). Reads the early stories as an imaginative construction of late-medieval English society rather than a record of it. Held locally.
David Crook
Argued in the 1980s that the Robert Hod of the 1225 Yorkshire assize rolls is the same man as Robert of Wetherby, which would explain why a Barnsdale outlaw is pursued by the Sheriff of Nottingham.
David Wiles
The Early Plays of Robin Hood (1981), the foundational study of the play and game tradition.
Isaac Taylor
1829-1901
'Who was Robin Hood?', Notes and Queries s7-IV.88 (1887). Early sceptic, comparing Robin to William Tell and noting that the legend postdates the supposed man by centuries. Held locally - useful as evidence that the sceptical case is over a century old.
J. C. Holt
1922-2014
'The Origins and Audience of the Ballads of Robin Hood', Past and Present 18 (1960), and Robin Hood (1982). Argued against Hilton that the ballads' 'yeoman' audience means the retainers and dependants of crown, aristocracy and gentry, not discontented peasants - and…
Jeffrey L. Singman
Robin Hood: The Shaping of the Legend (1998); detailed work on the games and the gentrification.
John Bellamy
Robin Hood: An Historical Enquiry (1985), attempting to identify historical originals. Reviewed sceptically by Holt in Albion 18.1 - the review is held locally, which makes this a good paired case study in historical method.
John Marshall and Philip Butterworth
Early English Performance: Medieval Plays and Robin Hood Games - Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies. The key resource for the performance tradition and the parish games. Held locally.
Maurice Keen
1933-2012
The Outlaws of Medieval Legend (1961) and 'Robin Hood - Peasant or Gentleman?', Past and Present 19 (1961). Initially supported Hilton, later retracted in the face of Holt's evidence - an unusually clean example of a historian publicly changing position.
R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor
Rymes of Robyn Hood (1976), the standard sourcebook, and two Northern History review-essays held locally: 'Merry Men at Work' (1997) on the heritage transformation, and a 1999 piece on the Robin Hood ballads and the Forresters discovery.
R. H. Hilton
1916-2002
'The Origins of Robin Hood', Past and Present 14 (1958). Marxist historian; read the ballads as expressing the grievances of discontented manorial peasantry. Reprinted with the whole debate in Peasants, Knights and Heretics (1976).
Scott Allen Nollen
Robin Hood: A Cinematic History (1999); with Knight, a standard reference on screen adaptations.
Stephen Basdeo
Writes extensively on nineteenth-century Robin Hood, Ritson, Egan and the radical tradition; maintains an accessible public-facing account of the academic study of the legend.
Stephen Knight
The central modern authority: Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (1994), Robin Hood: An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism (1999), editor of the Forresters Manuscript (1998), co-editor with Ohlgren of the TEAMS Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales (1997). His thesis is that…
Thomas H. Ohlgren
Co-editor of the TEAMS Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales; author of Robin Hood: The Early Poems 1465-1560 (2007), which reads the early texts through the commercial and mercantile milieu of their actual producers and readers rather than through peasant discontent.