“Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse”

“Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse” (“The book and its author were the go-betweens”) is a line from Dante’s story of Paolo and Francesca, invoked in an introductory discussion of the moral effects of Malory’s Morte Darthur. It turns a literary book into an accomplice in illicit love, and thus sharpens the essay’s response to Roger Ascham: Malory’s work carries moral dangers, but its violence and love stories cannot be judged apart from the virtues, justice, and tragic consequences also built into its narrative.

The line and its context

Ascham condemns the Morte Darthur for taking pleasure in “open manslaughter and bold bawdray,” and claims that its most celebrated knights kill without just cause and commit adultery through cunning. The essay recalls Dante’s phrase immediately after presenting this charge. Its placement gives the line a pointed relevance: it evokes the possibility that a story may help kindle the desire it depicts, and that reading can become part of a chain leading toward moral wrongdoing.

The essay does not treat the quotation as a complete verdict on Malory. It calls Ascham’s account a real but only partial truth, arguing that he greatly exaggerates the book’s evil and leaves its good unrecognized. The allusion therefore contributes to a balanced critical argument rather than simply endorsing the claim that Arthurian romance corrupts its readers.

A qualified judgment of Malory

The essay answers Ascham by emphasizing what his accusation leaves out. Much of the killing in Malory’s narrative occurs in the defeat of cruel oppressors and the restoration of kingdoms from anarchy to law and good government. Such conflicts call forth gentleness, forbearance, self-sacrifice, courage, and hardiness. The ethical meaning of violence consequently depends on its occasion and purpose, not on its presence alone.

At the same time, the essay does not dismiss the charge concerning illicit love. It points to the narrative’s tragic ending as a silent, implied judgment upon lawless love. In that reading, the story does not merely display desire as a source of pleasure: its consequences form part of the moral evidence against it. Dante’s line resonates with Ascham’s warning, but the essay places that warning within a larger account of the book’s competing ethical meanings.

Love, chastity, and the book’s limits

The essay contrasts the tragic love associated with Launcelot and Elaine with the spiritual purity of Sir Galahad and Sir Percivale. It regards these maiden knights as significant ideals, yet argues that Malory’s book does not clearly or powerfully present marriage as the highest and purest realization of human relations. In the essay’s view, chastity and illicit love do not exhaust the moral possibilities: marriage should provide the positive ideal against which both can be understood.

That ideal, the essay contends, is more fully brought out in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, where marriage is set in relation and contrast to other forms of love and chastity and ultimately given tragic grandeur. The Dante quotation thus belongs to a critical discussion of literature’s moral power, but it does not settle the question by itself. Its force lies in the tension between the danger Ascham identifies and the wider ethical structure the essay finds in Malory: wrongdoing has consequences, violence may serve justice, and yet the work falls short of making marriage’s moral ideal sufficiently clear.