One of the great problems for medieval society, as Maurice Powicke long ago observed, was the reconciling of Christian teaching and the views of the Church with the everyday ‘life of the ordinary man’ and woman. For patristic writers such as St Augustine the solution was to look exclusively to the heavenly afterlife. This view is adopted by some secular writers as well: Geoffrey Chaucer closes Troilus and Criseyde (mid-1380s) by having Troilus laugh at and reject the earthly loves and tribulations which had so troubled him earlier in the poem. The author of the Queste del Saint Graal (c. 1215–20), the penultimate stage of the Vulgate or Lancelot–Grail Cycle, is slightly more accepting of earthly existence than is Troilus, but he nevertheless espouses a movement away from secular to celestial chivalry. Not all romance authors (or knights), however, necessarily agree with such Christian sentiments. There is, for instance, considerable scholarly debate regarding whether or not Sir Thomas Malory's adaptation-translation of the Queste del Saint Graal in his fifteenth-century Le Morte Darthur adopts the same religious view as does his source. Charles Moorman and C. S. Lewis are the most authoritative critics to argue in favour of a deeply Christian Morte Darthur, with Moorman in particular advocating that Malory adopts both the matière and sens of the Vulgate Queste, and that he does so both in his own Grail Quest and throughout the Morte as a whole. This religious reading of the Morte has in recent decades been revived and expanded by Karen Cherewatuk, D. Thomas Hanks Jr, and others, each of whom promotes various religious aspects of Malory's text. At the same time, a good many critics join Eugène Vinaver in suggesting the exact opposite, that Malory and his text are more concerned with secular than celestial matters. A third camp of critics attempt a middle ground, arguing that Malory incorporates religion into earthly chivalry. I support the Vinaverian position, but the topic is also, obviously, closely related to the equally vexed question of the wider relationship between chivalry (and individual knights) and Christianity, a topic addressed by Raluca Radulescu in this volume.