One of the most important recent publications in the field of late mediaeval literature is Eugène Vinaver's edition of The Works of Sir Thomas Malory,1 which has made available a more accurate text for the study of Malory's writings than any scholar has previously had at his disposal. As Vinaver points out in the Preface to this work (i, vi), his edition, which is based on the recently discovered Winchester MS.,2 is much closer to what Malory actually wrote than is Caxton's emended version, and consequently invalidates many conjectures made by those who have known Malory only as he is presented by Caxton. A careful examination of this MS. and a painstaking comparison of it with the sources on which Malory drew have caused Vinaver to reverse several opinions that he previously supported by cogent argument3 and have led him to two general conclusions: (1) that Malory's writings should not be regarded as a unified account of the rise and fall of King Arthur and the Round Table, but rather as eight separate romances whose subjects were drawn independently from the Arthurian cycle (I, XXIX-XXXV) and (2) that the order of composition of the tales was not in the sequence presented by both Caxton and the Winchester MS., since evidence shows (I, XXV-XL) that the story of the war with Rome, which Vinaver calls the Tale of the Noble King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius (Caxton Book v), was written before the Tale of King Arthur (Caxton Books I, II, III, and IV).4
D'Eden à Armageddon, ou la pomme et le serpent : Sir Thomas Malory, laudator temporis acti
