Introduction

Summary

This book began with two questions: how do we define “ethics?” And, how do we define “Arthurian ethics” more explicitly? We do not intend to answer these questions because, as Jane Gilbert noted in her 2009 essay “Arthurian Ethics,” they cannot be answered in any homogenous, one-size-fits-all way: “no single idea of the ‘good’ governs all Arthurian works.” In much the same way that we understand there is no single, overarching definition of “King Arthur” as a person, character, or figure, so must we, often to our frustration, acknowledge there is no single, overarching definition of “ethics” or of “Arthurian ethics.” This premise is the basis for the essays in this collection.

While we do not define ethics as a homogenous term or Arthurian ethics as a monolithic enterprise, it is helpful to remember that the earliest appearance of the term “ethics” in vernacular English texts is in the fourteenth century, entering into the English language from the French following the Norman conquest and by the thirteenth century and, far earlier, originating in Latin in the writings of Quintilian and transmitted to England through British Latin texts in the twelfth century. Coming from the French éthique, the definition is “of or related to moral principles” and from the Latin ēthicus, “belonging to morals, ethical, expressive of character, psychological” deriving from the still earlier Greek ἠθικός, “moral; showing moral character,” and, in the plural, “manners.” In all its earliest iterations in English, first attested in works such as John Trevisa's 1387 translation of Ralph Higden's Polychron and Geoffrey Chaucer's 1386 Legend of Good Women, the word is used to describe the branch of knowledge or study dealing with moral principles; it isn't until 1659 that the word is divested of its ties to the concept of study to simply mean “A system or set of moral principles; a set of social or personal values.” This matters because, when we are investigating the idea of ethics in medieval texts, we locate it specifically employed as a branch of study or of knowledge dealing with moral principles – that is, ethics in medieval texts are a didactic program embedded within the narrative, intended to help the reader think through moral concerns.