When Derek Brewer began to publish under his own imprint in 1976, one of the first books was on the sources and analogues of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and three years later we began Arthurian Studies with Aspects of Malory, edited by Toshiyuki Takamiya and Derek Brewer, an auspicious start for a series which 42 years later numbers 87 volumes on all aspects of the Arthurian legend and its literature. The third volume in 1981 was the result of an early foray into humanities computing by Cedric Pickford and Rex Last of Hull University: The Arthurian Bibliography ran to eight hundred pages, with a cut off date of 1978. It was keyed in with the help of three members of a training programme for the long term unemployed, paid for by the Manpower Services Commission. The foreword is an interesting piece of computer history, which describes the struggles with the mainframe computer at Hull, and its inability to print in lower-case, which meant that the entire book is in block capitals.
The titles range from editions of Chrétien de Troyes, a fine translation of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, to notable works on Arthurian art by Muriel Whitaker and Barbara Tepa Lupack. Its main thrust, however, is the Arthurian monograph: the most notable is Peter Field’s The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory, a masterly survey of the historical evidence about the author of the Morte Darthur. In 2013, his monumental edition of the Morte Darthur appeared; unusually for an academic edition, as the first volume presents an elegant and highly readable text, with the footnotes and textual variants in the second volume, so that they can be consulted in parallel. Two other impressive titles are the work of Nigel Bryant, his lively translations of Perceforest, and of Chrétien de Troyes’ Story of the Grail complete with its four continuations by other hands. And fittingly, as the bibliography of books and articles on Arthurian matters grows exponentially – one of the recent volumes is A History of Arthurian Scholarship, whose editor, Norris Lacy of Penn State University, has just retired as series editor, having overseen thirty volumes in all. The most recent title, Christopher Berard’s Arthurianism in Early Plantagenet England, is a particular pleasure for me, combining history and literature, with some fascinating new discoveries. You will find a contribution from him in ‘A cabinet of curiosities‘.
For a complete list of volumes available click below:
https://boydellandbrewer.com/search-results/?series=arthurian-studies