New acquisitions spotlight: Malory’s History of King Arthur (1634)

Echoes from the Vault

Title page and woodcut frontispiece of St Andrews’ copy of the first book of the 1634 edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur

The Most Ancient and Famous History of the Renowned Prince Arthur King of Britaine was the last seventeenth-century edition of Thomas Malory’s great medieval prose romance, the Morte Darthur. After it, no new edition was printed until the early nineteenth century. This, therefore, was the Malory of Milton, of the romantic poets and of Walter Scott, who recorded owning a copy as a boy.

Detail of the woodcut of King Arthur literally in his roundtable, used in the 1634 edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.

Detail of the imprint of the 1634 edition of Morte d’Arthur

The volume was printed by William Stansby for the stationer Jacob Blome in 1634. It represents a break with previous early modern editions, all of which descended from William Caxton’s…

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