Marriage, Adultery, and Inheritance in Malory's Morte darthur. By Karen Cherewatuk. Arthurian Studies LXVII. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006. Pp. xxvi + 149. $80.

This book is to be both enjoyed and respected for the information, methods, and emotion with which Karen Cherewatuk argues that "problems related to marriage" are central to Malory's story of the genesis and demise of the Round Table society (p. 127). As the argument develops over the course of five chapters, we are confronted with marital and dynastic issues: a barren and adulterous queen, daughters who "barter their virginity" (p. 57), orphaned sons, bastard sons, and three generations of Pendragon men predisposed to engage in sex that is illicit— and incestuous in the case of both Arthur and that product of his own adulterous incest, the bastard usurper and parricide Mordred. Except for the boys whose fathers have died, sexual passion would seem to be the connective thread through these problems, and in fact, with the aid of Augustine and Aquinas Cherewatuk does pinpoint an "original sin" in illicit sex (p. 122). Nevertheless, it is on the relationship of promiscuity, illegitimacy, infertility, fatherlessness, adultery, and incest to the "ideology of marriage" as a "companionate relationship and as a public institution" (p. xxiv) that Cherewatuk demands we concentrate while she assesses Malory's representation of marriage as a source for public honor as well as social and political order (p. xxvii); the necessity of "lineage, blood, and wealth" for a "good marriage" (p. 23); the "emotional and social pain" of a "failed romance" (p. 22); and violence resulting from "sexual relations that …break the bonds of marriage" (p. 126).

Sue Ellen Holbrook
Southern Connecticut State University