6 Death in the Margins: Dying and Scribal Performance in the Winchester Manuscript THOMAS H. CROFTS Previous contributors to this collection have explored the death and dying themes in a variety of ways: death as wielded by kings and as recorded in the lexical text of Historia regum Britannie, death as a thematic concern of characters, authors or audiences, and the death and dying of sundry Arthurian charac- ters. Often, of course, these approaches and topics overlap. I wish to continue this interconnection and variety of death by combining these approaches with two new subjects: the problem of knights who die but do not stay dead in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur; and the manner in which the bibliographic or manuscript text of the Morte announces those deaths. 1 Certain innovations in the Morte Darthur can be traced to Sir Thomas Malo- ry’s inclination away from the romance-world of his sources. What he inclines toward is less easy to name; ‘tragedy’ – if generic taxonomy is required – comes closest. 2 Malory’s book is much more preoccupied with death and ‘unhappe’ than its sources. Several of the Morte’s innovations, both in its adaption gener- ally and in the Winchester manuscript particularly, combine to alter radically the way of chivalric death. I will concentrate here on three such features. One is the consistent naming of knights who are anonymous in the source texts, a technique that increases the oficial population of the book. While this practice invests the book with new personages, it also invests it with new deaths; and there is a profound difference – as will be discussed below – between the death of an unnamed knight and that of a named one. 3 A second innovation is the Winchester scribes’ rubrication of all proper names in the text, and the inclusion, in many cases, of obituary side-notes marking the demise of a given character. 1 On the distinctions between the lexical and bibliographic text, see especially Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago, 1983). 2 For a generic taxonomy that foregrounds the ways in which Malory manipulates his romance materials away from romance towards its generic opposite and the creation of a ‘tragic-romance’, see K. S. Whetter, Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 7–8, 99–149, 155–9. 3 On Malory’s naming and characterization, see especially Robert Henry Wilson, Characteriza- tion in Malory: A Comparison with His Sources (Chicago, 1934); Robert H. Wilson, ‘Malory’s Naming of Minor Characters’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 42 (1943), 364–85; and Robert H. Wilson, ‘Addenda on Malory’s Minor Characters’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 55 (1956), 563–87.