Prospectus
Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination:
The Matter of Britain in the Twelfth Century
Michael Faletra
Reed College
Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination:
The Matter of Britain in the Twelfth Century
Michael Faletra
Reed College
Overview
My current book project, Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination: The Matter of Britain in the Twelfth Century, locates the origins of English colonial discourse in twelfth-century Norman territorial expansion into Wales, accounting as well for the strange ideological persistence of the historical subordination of Wales to England. Literary historians generally use the term “Matter of Britain” to refer in aggregate to the cycles of tales about King Arthur and his knights that flourished in the High Middle Ages. I demonstrate here how these Arthurian stories are in fact part of a larger cultural interest in the pre-Saxon British past that arose in the mid-twelfth century. These “Matters of Britain” are generated largely by Anglo-Norman writers attempting to categorize, contain, or otherwise come to terms with the Welsh and their claims to sovereignty over the island of Britain (as descendants of the ancient Celtic Britons). In this wider sense, the narratives that constitute the various Matters of Britain proliferate throughout a range of texts in a variety of different genres, including not only Arthurian romances but also histories and pseudo-histories, courtly miscellanies, political treatises, satires, Breton lais, and travel narratives. Following avenues of inquiry opened up in part by postcolonial theory, I ground these Matters of Britain in their appropriate historical context – the colonization of Wales – and demonstrate their complicated relationships to Anglo-Norman territorial ambitions. To make a broad but telling comparison, I show how the sudden English interest in (and, indeed, creation of) the Matters of Britain is in fact analogous to the nineteenth-century colonialist phenomenon that Edward Said has identified as Orientalism. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain, 1138) is of central importance to the development of these discourses, condensing and transmitting tropes of Welsh barbarity, peripherality, etc., to later writers. Taking Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae as a starting point and as a frequent point of reference, some of the other texts I focus on include Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide, Marie de France’s Yonec, Lanval, and Milun, John of Salisbury's Policraticus, Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica, Itinerarium Kambriae, and Descriptio Kambriae, and Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium.
This manuscript is complete, with the exception of an epilogue that will briefly outline some of the major developments of the Matter of Britain viz a viz Wales in the later Middle Ages, which I will finish writing this summer (2013). I have benefited from the input of several colleagues who have read various portions of the work, and I have also delivered many parts of it at conferences over the years and have always been grateful to receive and implement feedback.
Argument and Organization
Introduction.
The Scrap-Heap of History
The introduction to this study establishes a context for subsequent readings by examining the relationship between the colonization of Wales and the inception of the Matter of Britain in early twelfth-century Anglo-Latin histories. After introducing the basic historical contexts involving English settlement in Wales, I review the major theories that account for the sudden explosion of interest in the Matter of Britain in the mid-twelfth century, showing how these models are, for the most part, either too strictly literary or too organicist and that they largely ignore Anglo-Norman cultural and political preoccupations. I especially discount the idea that the Matters of Britain were somehow “naturally” disseminated by Welsh bards and storytellers, as this account fails to consider the political exigencies underlying relations between England and Wales throughout the period. The introduction concludes with a more theoretical discussion of how to think about and apply ideas from postcolonial theory to texts that were composed centuries before the historical conditions of the modern colonial condition existed. I point the way forward by showing how certain ideas merely require modification in order to prove their utility to medieval contexts.
Chapter 1.
Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Matter of Wales
This chapter serves as the cornerstone of the entire book, as I show here how, in a stroke, Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae created the Matter of Britain by supplying a new and audacious vision of the insular British past – indeed, a political myth – that readers for centuries would find uniquely compelling. Most importantly, the Historia collates and crystallizes a series of discourses about the Welsh that would persist throughout the Middle Ages. I begin the chapter with a careful survey of all the ways in which Geoffrey depicts Wales and the Welsh throughout his work. I focus especially on the Historia’s ending, where the once glorious Britons, now utterly defeated, are transformed into the barbarous Welsh and confined to the mountains of Wales. Following Simon Meecham-Jones, I argue that Geoffrey’s text establishes four interrelated sets of tropes or discourses about Wales and the Welsh – peripherality, barbarism, moral/political authority, and “Britishness” – that all serve to promulgate the subordination of Wales to England. With these discourses in mind, I next consider how Geoffrey of Monmouth’s use of the figure of King Arthur, whom he knowingly detaches from any previous Welsh associations, plays into the larger schema of the Historia. Finally, I argue that Geoffrey's Prophecies of Merlin, justly famous in their day and long cited as early examples of Welsh or pan-Celtic patriotism, in fact fail to deliver on their incendiary promises, for the Historia contains all possibilities for British/Welsh insurgency within the distant past.
Some sections of this chapter represent substantially rewritten and reframed versions of arguments that I have published in two separate essays, “Narrating the Matter of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Norman Colonization of Wales,” Chaucer Review 35 (2000), 60-85; and “The Conquest of the Past in The History of the Kings of Britain,” Literature Compass 4.1 (2007), 121-133.
Chapter 2.
Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden: Courtly Britain and Its Others
This chapter explores the ways in which Geoffrey of Monmouth’s model of the British past was understood and disseminated in the generation or so following the publication of the Historia in 1138. I am concerned here to show the variety of responses and particularly to highlight how texts of the mid-twelfth century Plantagenet courts utilized, modified, and sometimes even pushed back against Geoffrey’s discourses about the Welsh and Wales. To this end, I focus on three major figures in this chapter – John of Salisbury, Walter Map, and Marie de France – three writers of disparate backgrounds and temperaments yet all associated with the Plantagenet courts and all ardently engaged with the Matters of Britain. The scholastic humanist John of Salisbury imbibed Geoffrey’s peripheralization and barbarization of the Welsh, making these ideas essential to his discussions of courtly identity. He exhibits the starkest portrayal of the Welsh in his masterpiece, the Policraticus, in his letters, and in other works. John’s writings are of central importance to this chapter because he articulates most clearly that Welshness stands in strict opposition to courtliness and, consequently, to being a civilized, virtuous subject; an animosity toward the Welsh, then, is the dark side of John of Salisbury’s oft-lauded humanism.
John’s opposition of (Welsh) barbarity to (Anglo-Norman) courtliness finds its way into the works of Walter Map and Marie de France, although both writers attempt to resist and subvert it, and it energizes the work of some of the writers I examine in later chapters as well, especially Chrétien de Troyes and Gerald of Wales. The half-Welsh master ironist Walter Map in his kaleidoscopic courtly satire De Nugis Curialium (The Courtiers’ Trifles) responds directly to John of Salisbury’s construction of Welshness by his emphasis on the figure of the fairy bride. While some of Map’s anecdotes may showcase some of the stereotypical negative qualities of the Welsh, his interest in stories about fairy brides, always encountered in his text on the Welsh border, ultimately show the instability of courtly identities: the fairy bride’s intrinsic power repeatedly proves inexorably resistant to assimilation or domination by English aristocrats. In a similar vein, I explore how three of Marie de France’s remarkable Breton lais – Lanval, Yonec, and Milun – further develop the idea of the fairy bride (or fairy husband). I show how Marie uses these figures both to complicate how certain received notions such as chivalry and courtliness relate to Welshness and to express, as a necessarily marginalized woman writer, a certain solidarity with the indigenes of Wales.
Portions of my arguments about Marie de France were published in an earlier form as “Chivalry at the Frontier: Marie de France’s Welsh Lais,” in Le Cygne: The Journal of the International Marie de France Society 4 (2007): 27-41.
Chapter 3.
Chrétien de Troyes, Wales, and the Matiere of Britain
In this chapter I offer an innovative new reading of the works of Chrétien de Troyes, highlighting the ways in which his Arthurian romances draw from and participate in the Plantagenet court’s ideologies concerning Wales and the Welsh. Following what seems now to be a growing consensus, I show that Chrétien knew England well and seems, on the evidence of at least his two earliest romances, Erec et Enide and Cligés, to have spent considerable time there and to have composed for patrons who were connected to the Plantagenet courts. Although his romances eschew the sweeping historical vision of Geoffrey’s Historia, I show how they nonetheless give voice to many of Geoffrey’s tropes regarding the Welsh and their country. In particular, Chrétien addresses some of the tensions between courtly and Welsh identities that I discussed in the previous chapter, and I show how his character Erec, the hero of the earliest Arthurian romance, mediates some of these tensions. On the one hand, Erec, whose homeland seems to be Wales, takes on a role similar to some of King Henry II’s Welsh allies, princes such as Rhys ap Gruffudd and Owain Cyfeiliog, whose identities seem both courtly and yet also uncannily foreign at the same time. I emphasize Erec’s seeming alienation at the beginning of the romance, and I argue that the text is primarily concerned with integrating him as thoroughly as possible into the royal court, ratifying his identity as a courtier and suppressing his Welshness. The challenges that Erec faces in his journeys through the wild, Welsh peripheral zone, especially the abolishing of evil customs (mauvaises coutumes), all serve to bring that territory under control and to consolidate the hero with the Arthurian courtly center.
The final sections of this chapter examines the ways in which Erec et Enide sets the template for the development of the Arthurian romance. Even romances composed outside of England (like Chrétien’s Charrette or Le Conte du Graal) or composed by poets with more tenuous ties to England or the Plantagenets (like Renaut de Beaujeu) nonetheless reiterate an essentially colonialist paradigm – the triumph of the chivalric center over the barbarous (and usually Welsh) periphery – thus transmitting echoes of the twelfth-century Matters of Britain into later periods.
Chapter 4.
Crooked Greeks: Hybridity, History, and Gerald of Wales
Building on the findings of the first three chapters, the fourth and final chapter examines the relationship between Norman historiography and colonial identity. Specifically, I look at how Gerald of Wales – half-Norman, half-Welsh – thinks through his hybrid identity, often (but not consistently) in the service of Anglo-Norman sovereignty in Wales. Focusing on Gerald's repeated failures to write the history of the Welsh, I examine how narrative and identity collide and collude in Gerald's works. I begin by examining the ways in which Gerald thinks about ancestry and heredity throughout his voluminous opera. While valorizing paternal heritage, he harbors grave misgivings about mothers and maternal lines as he discusses the genealogies of various Welsh Marcher barons as well as the Plantagenet kings (whose ancestress, he relates, was a demon); maternal lines for Gerald seem consistently to carry the taint of the alien, the foreign, the Welsh. The only maternal line he never scrutinizes is his own, all the more telling because he was Welsh on his mother’s side. Nevertheless, though Gerald as a genealogical thinker seems hopelessly opposed to the Welsh, his historical works suggest more complex models of colonial identity. In contrast to his account of the history of Ireland in his Topographia Hibernica, Gerald’s inability to write the history of Wales and the Welsh people – despite several declarations that he will do so – reflects, I argue, his growing sense that the available models of the British past, all derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth, were skewed in the favor of the English kings he hated. I demonstrate in the final sections of this chapter how his Itinerarium Kambriae (The Journey Through Wales, 1191) proposes new ways of thinking about the relationship between past and present.
Epilogue.
The Birds of Rhiannon
In this brief epilogue, I adumbrate some of the futures, literary and historical, that arise from the twelfth-century Matters of Britain; I emphasize, for example, how King Edward I, the conqueror of Wales in 1283, was also an avid fan of all things Arthurian, as was his grandson Edward III. I conclude by looking at a few of the ways in which Welsh writers, especially the author of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, responded to the political and textual colonization of Wales.
Parameters
The main book currently runs to approximately 83,000 words. The bibliography would add an additional 9,000. I would estimate that the epilogue, which I am still in the process of writing, will occupy about 3,000-5,000 words.
The book contains two genealogical charts. A map of twelfth-century Anglo-Norman colonization in Wales would be desirable.
Methodologies
I am a literary historian, and Matters of Britain, for all of its serious engagement with historical contexts, is a literary history. It outlines the trajectory of a series of works that often seem, through anxiety and influence, to be in dialogue with one another. While I am attentive the very resonant intertextualities that inform and connect the texts under consideration here, the bread and butter of my analyses involve traditional “close reading,” always with an eye toward how individual episodes, descriptions, or details contribute to a larger understanding of narrative structure. That said, it would also not be inaccurate to say that Matters of Britain is, broadly speaking, New Historicist, as I am interested throughout in the types of praxis these texts seem to allow. Indeed, the four master tropes that these narratives participate in (barbarity, peripherality, moral/political authority, and “Britishness”) all can and did (and still do) have very tangible consequences in the real world. The texts I examine here – especially Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae – are contiguous with English policy in Wales: Gerald’s Descriptio Kambriae even recommends the very military strategies that the English would use less than a century later to permanently subjugate the country. In many ways the tropes of Wales and Welshness that these texts explore are still very much active in modern Britain, a point I make in my introduction.
Given that the English colonization of Wales is the primary historical context that informs all of my readings, I necessarily acknowledge and borrow from postcolonial theory, both by engaging with theorists like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha but also by continuing some of the critical conversations already begun by postcolonial medievalists like Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Michelle Warren, and Patricia Clare Ingham. My analyses here are thus generally consistent with postcolonial studies, though I learned long ago that the introduction of unnecessary terminology, however clever or apt, does little to strengthen an argument. I attempt to write here as clearly as I can without sacrificing analytical complexity.
Finally, I should mention that, following the lead of the Annales School, Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur and others, I break down the disciplinary distinctions between historical, literary, and other types of narrative here. My analysis of Geoffrey of Monmouth, for example, is largely literary, while my discussions of Gerald of Wales, Walter Map, and even Chrétien de Troyes often touch on issues of historiography. Similarly, I break down the distinction between languages. Scholars of the Middle Ages usually gain expertise in a single national or linguistic tradition, and so studies that cross linguistic barriers to the extent that Matters of Britain does are relatively rare. Indeed, given that the British literati of the period were almost universally fluent in French and Latin (if not also in a third language, such as English or Welsh) it seems only appropriate that this study, which examines a broad cultural phenomenon, should attempt the same type of bilingualism. My occasional examination of Middle Welsh texts also serves to provide further contrast and context, and, in fact, it restores something like a voice to those whom the more hegemonic texts were hoping to silence.
Audience and Critical Context
Because of the variety of genres and national literatures that Matters of Britain examines, it not only examines issues relevant to medieval English literature, Arthurian studies, medieval historiography, and Celtic studies, but it also rethinks the relationship between historical and literary texts in twelfth-century Britain. In fact, two of the writers I discuss here – Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gerald of Wales – are discussed as much by historians as by literary scholars. Insofar as it engages Old French texts as well (in two out of four chapters), my book will also be of interest to scholars of medieval France.
By drawing attention to the ways in which the Norman conquerors of Britain projected ideas of cultural inferiority over the native Welsh, my book serves as an important corrective to the view that colonialism began with the discovery of the New World. In a direct way my book supplements the work done by the late historian Rees Davies, whose scholarship on medieval Wales emphasized always the consequences of Anglo-Norman colonization, and who viewed medieval English ideologies about Wales and the Welsh as pivotal precursors to modern colonial modes. In a broader sense, Matters of Britain participates in the lines of inquiry opened up by medievalists working with postcolonial theory over the last decade or so.
In two cases – my analysis of Geoffrey of Monmouth in Chapter 1, and my analysis of Chrétien de Troyes in Chapter 3 – Matters of Britain offers a major new critical intervention on figures who have been monumentally influential and who stand at vital crossroads in literary history, and especially in the history of Arthurian literature. My examination of Geoffrey of Monmouth, because it draws its conclusions from his depiction of Wales and the Welsh on a case-by-case basis throughout the Historia Regum Britanniae, will at last, I hope, put to rest questions about Geoffrey’s ethnic loyalties and the nature of his studied political ambiguity. Likewise, my chapter on Chrétien de Troyes, by taking seriously his embeddedness within the political and cultural concerns of the English/Plantagenet courts, offers a significantly revisionist view of the origins of the Arthurian romance.
I believe my studies of other major writers – Marie de France, John of Salisbury, Walter Map, Gerald of Wales – will prove similarly compelling to a wide range of scholarly readers, who may see the value in juxtaposing authors who are, despite their participation in a common courtly culture and a common geopolitical milieu, rarely considered side-by-side.
In the course of my discussion, I also touch upon or briefly analyze many other texts that may be of interest to a variety of readers, including all four of Chrétien’s other romances, John of Cornwall’s Prophetia Merlini, the anonymous Anglo-Norman Description of England and Fouke le Fitzwaryn, Renaut de Beaujeu’s Arthurian romance Le Bel Inconnu, Wace’s Roman de Brut, and William of Malmesbury’s Historia Regum Anglorum, as well as many Middle Welsh texts such as the Mabinogi, Owein, Ystorya Gereint uab Erbin, and Armes Prydein. In all cases, I believe that my inclusion of these texts is both justifiable and, indeed, necessary for achieving the wider and deeper vision of twelfth-century British literary culture that Matters of Britain hopes to communicate.
Author Qualifications
The seeds of this work were planted in the texts I explored in my doctoral dissertation, though all of the arguments I present in the current book have been thoroughly reconsidered and revised from their original versions. In the thirteen years since obtaining my degree, I have continued to think, read, and write about these texts, and I have taught most of them many times.
About Geoffrey of Monmouth I feel particularly competent, as I have not only published two articles on his works that anticipate some of the arguments I make here, but I have also edited and translated his History of the Kings of Britain as part of Broadview Press’s Literary Texts and Contexts series (2008). I also have considerable expertise on Gerald of Wales, having compiled an edition of the first (1191) version of his Itinerarium Kambriae as part of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 2010. Many of the insights I gleaned about Gerald’s work from this project have found their way into my analyses in Chapter 4. As part of my work on that text, I also traveled extensively through Wales, an experience that has afforded me a first-hand understanding of many of the geographical, cultural, and strategic aspects of the historical contexts that undergird my discussion.
I am a capable reader and translator of Latin, Old French, and Middle Welsh, all of which have a vital part to play in these arguments.
My current book project, Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination: The Matter of Britain in the Twelfth Century, locates the origins of English colonial discourse in twelfth-century Norman territorial expansion into Wales, accounting as well for the strange ideological persistence of the historical subordination of Wales to England. Literary historians generally use the term “Matter of Britain” to refer in aggregate to the cycles of tales about King Arthur and his knights that flourished in the High Middle Ages. I demonstrate here how these Arthurian stories are in fact part of a larger cultural interest in the pre-Saxon British past that arose in the mid-twelfth century. These “Matters of Britain” are generated largely by Anglo-Norman writers attempting to categorize, contain, or otherwise come to terms with the Welsh and their claims to sovereignty over the island of Britain (as descendants of the ancient Celtic Britons). In this wider sense, the narratives that constitute the various Matters of Britain proliferate throughout a range of texts in a variety of different genres, including not only Arthurian romances but also histories and pseudo-histories, courtly miscellanies, political treatises, satires, Breton lais, and travel narratives. Following avenues of inquiry opened up in part by postcolonial theory, I ground these Matters of Britain in their appropriate historical context – the colonization of Wales – and demonstrate their complicated relationships to Anglo-Norman territorial ambitions. To make a broad but telling comparison, I show how the sudden English interest in (and, indeed, creation of) the Matters of Britain is in fact analogous to the nineteenth-century colonialist phenomenon that Edward Said has identified as Orientalism. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain, 1138) is of central importance to the development of these discourses, condensing and transmitting tropes of Welsh barbarity, peripherality, etc., to later writers. Taking Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae as a starting point and as a frequent point of reference, some of the other texts I focus on include Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide, Marie de France’s Yonec, Lanval, and Milun, John of Salisbury's Policraticus, Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica, Itinerarium Kambriae, and Descriptio Kambriae, and Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium.
This manuscript is complete, with the exception of an epilogue that will briefly outline some of the major developments of the Matter of Britain viz a viz Wales in the later Middle Ages, which I will finish writing this summer (2013). I have benefited from the input of several colleagues who have read various portions of the work, and I have also delivered many parts of it at conferences over the years and have always been grateful to receive and implement feedback.
Argument and Organization
Introduction.
The Scrap-Heap of History
The introduction to this study establishes a context for subsequent readings by examining the relationship between the colonization of Wales and the inception of the Matter of Britain in early twelfth-century Anglo-Latin histories. After introducing the basic historical contexts involving English settlement in Wales, I review the major theories that account for the sudden explosion of interest in the Matter of Britain in the mid-twelfth century, showing how these models are, for the most part, either too strictly literary or too organicist and that they largely ignore Anglo-Norman cultural and political preoccupations. I especially discount the idea that the Matters of Britain were somehow “naturally” disseminated by Welsh bards and storytellers, as this account fails to consider the political exigencies underlying relations between England and Wales throughout the period. The introduction concludes with a more theoretical discussion of how to think about and apply ideas from postcolonial theory to texts that were composed centuries before the historical conditions of the modern colonial condition existed. I point the way forward by showing how certain ideas merely require modification in order to prove their utility to medieval contexts.
Chapter 1.
Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Matter of Wales
This chapter serves as the cornerstone of the entire book, as I show here how, in a stroke, Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae created the Matter of Britain by supplying a new and audacious vision of the insular British past – indeed, a political myth – that readers for centuries would find uniquely compelling. Most importantly, the Historia collates and crystallizes a series of discourses about the Welsh that would persist throughout the Middle Ages. I begin the chapter with a careful survey of all the ways in which Geoffrey depicts Wales and the Welsh throughout his work. I focus especially on the Historia’s ending, where the once glorious Britons, now utterly defeated, are transformed into the barbarous Welsh and confined to the mountains of Wales. Following Simon Meecham-Jones, I argue that Geoffrey’s text establishes four interrelated sets of tropes or discourses about Wales and the Welsh – peripherality, barbarism, moral/political authority, and “Britishness” – that all serve to promulgate the subordination of Wales to England. With these discourses in mind, I next consider how Geoffrey of Monmouth’s use of the figure of King Arthur, whom he knowingly detaches from any previous Welsh associations, plays into the larger schema of the Historia. Finally, I argue that Geoffrey's Prophecies of Merlin, justly famous in their day and long cited as early examples of Welsh or pan-Celtic patriotism, in fact fail to deliver on their incendiary promises, for the Historia contains all possibilities for British/Welsh insurgency within the distant past.
Some sections of this chapter represent substantially rewritten and reframed versions of arguments that I have published in two separate essays, “Narrating the Matter of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Norman Colonization of Wales,” Chaucer Review 35 (2000), 60-85; and “The Conquest of the Past in The History of the Kings of Britain,” Literature Compass 4.1 (2007), 121-133.
Chapter 2.
Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden: Courtly Britain and Its Others
This chapter explores the ways in which Geoffrey of Monmouth’s model of the British past was understood and disseminated in the generation or so following the publication of the Historia in 1138. I am concerned here to show the variety of responses and particularly to highlight how texts of the mid-twelfth century Plantagenet courts utilized, modified, and sometimes even pushed back against Geoffrey’s discourses about the Welsh and Wales. To this end, I focus on three major figures in this chapter – John of Salisbury, Walter Map, and Marie de France – three writers of disparate backgrounds and temperaments yet all associated with the Plantagenet courts and all ardently engaged with the Matters of Britain. The scholastic humanist John of Salisbury imbibed Geoffrey’s peripheralization and barbarization of the Welsh, making these ideas essential to his discussions of courtly identity. He exhibits the starkest portrayal of the Welsh in his masterpiece, the Policraticus, in his letters, and in other works. John’s writings are of central importance to this chapter because he articulates most clearly that Welshness stands in strict opposition to courtliness and, consequently, to being a civilized, virtuous subject; an animosity toward the Welsh, then, is the dark side of John of Salisbury’s oft-lauded humanism.
John’s opposition of (Welsh) barbarity to (Anglo-Norman) courtliness finds its way into the works of Walter Map and Marie de France, although both writers attempt to resist and subvert it, and it energizes the work of some of the writers I examine in later chapters as well, especially Chrétien de Troyes and Gerald of Wales. The half-Welsh master ironist Walter Map in his kaleidoscopic courtly satire De Nugis Curialium (The Courtiers’ Trifles) responds directly to John of Salisbury’s construction of Welshness by his emphasis on the figure of the fairy bride. While some of Map’s anecdotes may showcase some of the stereotypical negative qualities of the Welsh, his interest in stories about fairy brides, always encountered in his text on the Welsh border, ultimately show the instability of courtly identities: the fairy bride’s intrinsic power repeatedly proves inexorably resistant to assimilation or domination by English aristocrats. In a similar vein, I explore how three of Marie de France’s remarkable Breton lais – Lanval, Yonec, and Milun – further develop the idea of the fairy bride (or fairy husband). I show how Marie uses these figures both to complicate how certain received notions such as chivalry and courtliness relate to Welshness and to express, as a necessarily marginalized woman writer, a certain solidarity with the indigenes of Wales.
Portions of my arguments about Marie de France were published in an earlier form as “Chivalry at the Frontier: Marie de France’s Welsh Lais,” in Le Cygne: The Journal of the International Marie de France Society 4 (2007): 27-41.
Chapter 3.
Chrétien de Troyes, Wales, and the Matiere of Britain
In this chapter I offer an innovative new reading of the works of Chrétien de Troyes, highlighting the ways in which his Arthurian romances draw from and participate in the Plantagenet court’s ideologies concerning Wales and the Welsh. Following what seems now to be a growing consensus, I show that Chrétien knew England well and seems, on the evidence of at least his two earliest romances, Erec et Enide and Cligés, to have spent considerable time there and to have composed for patrons who were connected to the Plantagenet courts. Although his romances eschew the sweeping historical vision of Geoffrey’s Historia, I show how they nonetheless give voice to many of Geoffrey’s tropes regarding the Welsh and their country. In particular, Chrétien addresses some of the tensions between courtly and Welsh identities that I discussed in the previous chapter, and I show how his character Erec, the hero of the earliest Arthurian romance, mediates some of these tensions. On the one hand, Erec, whose homeland seems to be Wales, takes on a role similar to some of King Henry II’s Welsh allies, princes such as Rhys ap Gruffudd and Owain Cyfeiliog, whose identities seem both courtly and yet also uncannily foreign at the same time. I emphasize Erec’s seeming alienation at the beginning of the romance, and I argue that the text is primarily concerned with integrating him as thoroughly as possible into the royal court, ratifying his identity as a courtier and suppressing his Welshness. The challenges that Erec faces in his journeys through the wild, Welsh peripheral zone, especially the abolishing of evil customs (mauvaises coutumes), all serve to bring that territory under control and to consolidate the hero with the Arthurian courtly center.
The final sections of this chapter examines the ways in which Erec et Enide sets the template for the development of the Arthurian romance. Even romances composed outside of England (like Chrétien’s Charrette or Le Conte du Graal) or composed by poets with more tenuous ties to England or the Plantagenets (like Renaut de Beaujeu) nonetheless reiterate an essentially colonialist paradigm – the triumph of the chivalric center over the barbarous (and usually Welsh) periphery – thus transmitting echoes of the twelfth-century Matters of Britain into later periods.
Chapter 4.
Crooked Greeks: Hybridity, History, and Gerald of Wales
Building on the findings of the first three chapters, the fourth and final chapter examines the relationship between Norman historiography and colonial identity. Specifically, I look at how Gerald of Wales – half-Norman, half-Welsh – thinks through his hybrid identity, often (but not consistently) in the service of Anglo-Norman sovereignty in Wales. Focusing on Gerald's repeated failures to write the history of the Welsh, I examine how narrative and identity collide and collude in Gerald's works. I begin by examining the ways in which Gerald thinks about ancestry and heredity throughout his voluminous opera. While valorizing paternal heritage, he harbors grave misgivings about mothers and maternal lines as he discusses the genealogies of various Welsh Marcher barons as well as the Plantagenet kings (whose ancestress, he relates, was a demon); maternal lines for Gerald seem consistently to carry the taint of the alien, the foreign, the Welsh. The only maternal line he never scrutinizes is his own, all the more telling because he was Welsh on his mother’s side. Nevertheless, though Gerald as a genealogical thinker seems hopelessly opposed to the Welsh, his historical works suggest more complex models of colonial identity. In contrast to his account of the history of Ireland in his Topographia Hibernica, Gerald’s inability to write the history of Wales and the Welsh people – despite several declarations that he will do so – reflects, I argue, his growing sense that the available models of the British past, all derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth, were skewed in the favor of the English kings he hated. I demonstrate in the final sections of this chapter how his Itinerarium Kambriae (The Journey Through Wales, 1191) proposes new ways of thinking about the relationship between past and present.
Epilogue.
The Birds of Rhiannon
In this brief epilogue, I adumbrate some of the futures, literary and historical, that arise from the twelfth-century Matters of Britain; I emphasize, for example, how King Edward I, the conqueror of Wales in 1283, was also an avid fan of all things Arthurian, as was his grandson Edward III. I conclude by looking at a few of the ways in which Welsh writers, especially the author of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, responded to the political and textual colonization of Wales.
Parameters
The main book currently runs to approximately 83,000 words. The bibliography would add an additional 9,000. I would estimate that the epilogue, which I am still in the process of writing, will occupy about 3,000-5,000 words.
The book contains two genealogical charts. A map of twelfth-century Anglo-Norman colonization in Wales would be desirable.
Methodologies
I am a literary historian, and Matters of Britain, for all of its serious engagement with historical contexts, is a literary history. It outlines the trajectory of a series of works that often seem, through anxiety and influence, to be in dialogue with one another. While I am attentive the very resonant intertextualities that inform and connect the texts under consideration here, the bread and butter of my analyses involve traditional “close reading,” always with an eye toward how individual episodes, descriptions, or details contribute to a larger understanding of narrative structure. That said, it would also not be inaccurate to say that Matters of Britain is, broadly speaking, New Historicist, as I am interested throughout in the types of praxis these texts seem to allow. Indeed, the four master tropes that these narratives participate in (barbarity, peripherality, moral/political authority, and “Britishness”) all can and did (and still do) have very tangible consequences in the real world. The texts I examine here – especially Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae – are contiguous with English policy in Wales: Gerald’s Descriptio Kambriae even recommends the very military strategies that the English would use less than a century later to permanently subjugate the country. In many ways the tropes of Wales and Welshness that these texts explore are still very much active in modern Britain, a point I make in my introduction.
Given that the English colonization of Wales is the primary historical context that informs all of my readings, I necessarily acknowledge and borrow from postcolonial theory, both by engaging with theorists like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha but also by continuing some of the critical conversations already begun by postcolonial medievalists like Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Michelle Warren, and Patricia Clare Ingham. My analyses here are thus generally consistent with postcolonial studies, though I learned long ago that the introduction of unnecessary terminology, however clever or apt, does little to strengthen an argument. I attempt to write here as clearly as I can without sacrificing analytical complexity.
Finally, I should mention that, following the lead of the Annales School, Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur and others, I break down the disciplinary distinctions between historical, literary, and other types of narrative here. My analysis of Geoffrey of Monmouth, for example, is largely literary, while my discussions of Gerald of Wales, Walter Map, and even Chrétien de Troyes often touch on issues of historiography. Similarly, I break down the distinction between languages. Scholars of the Middle Ages usually gain expertise in a single national or linguistic tradition, and so studies that cross linguistic barriers to the extent that Matters of Britain does are relatively rare. Indeed, given that the British literati of the period were almost universally fluent in French and Latin (if not also in a third language, such as English or Welsh) it seems only appropriate that this study, which examines a broad cultural phenomenon, should attempt the same type of bilingualism. My occasional examination of Middle Welsh texts also serves to provide further contrast and context, and, in fact, it restores something like a voice to those whom the more hegemonic texts were hoping to silence.
Audience and Critical Context
Because of the variety of genres and national literatures that Matters of Britain examines, it not only examines issues relevant to medieval English literature, Arthurian studies, medieval historiography, and Celtic studies, but it also rethinks the relationship between historical and literary texts in twelfth-century Britain. In fact, two of the writers I discuss here – Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gerald of Wales – are discussed as much by historians as by literary scholars. Insofar as it engages Old French texts as well (in two out of four chapters), my book will also be of interest to scholars of medieval France.
By drawing attention to the ways in which the Norman conquerors of Britain projected ideas of cultural inferiority over the native Welsh, my book serves as an important corrective to the view that colonialism began with the discovery of the New World. In a direct way my book supplements the work done by the late historian Rees Davies, whose scholarship on medieval Wales emphasized always the consequences of Anglo-Norman colonization, and who viewed medieval English ideologies about Wales and the Welsh as pivotal precursors to modern colonial modes. In a broader sense, Matters of Britain participates in the lines of inquiry opened up by medievalists working with postcolonial theory over the last decade or so.
In two cases – my analysis of Geoffrey of Monmouth in Chapter 1, and my analysis of Chrétien de Troyes in Chapter 3 – Matters of Britain offers a major new critical intervention on figures who have been monumentally influential and who stand at vital crossroads in literary history, and especially in the history of Arthurian literature. My examination of Geoffrey of Monmouth, because it draws its conclusions from his depiction of Wales and the Welsh on a case-by-case basis throughout the Historia Regum Britanniae, will at last, I hope, put to rest questions about Geoffrey’s ethnic loyalties and the nature of his studied political ambiguity. Likewise, my chapter on Chrétien de Troyes, by taking seriously his embeddedness within the political and cultural concerns of the English/Plantagenet courts, offers a significantly revisionist view of the origins of the Arthurian romance.
I believe my studies of other major writers – Marie de France, John of Salisbury, Walter Map, Gerald of Wales – will prove similarly compelling to a wide range of scholarly readers, who may see the value in juxtaposing authors who are, despite their participation in a common courtly culture and a common geopolitical milieu, rarely considered side-by-side.
In the course of my discussion, I also touch upon or briefly analyze many other texts that may be of interest to a variety of readers, including all four of Chrétien’s other romances, John of Cornwall’s Prophetia Merlini, the anonymous Anglo-Norman Description of England and Fouke le Fitzwaryn, Renaut de Beaujeu’s Arthurian romance Le Bel Inconnu, Wace’s Roman de Brut, and William of Malmesbury’s Historia Regum Anglorum, as well as many Middle Welsh texts such as the Mabinogi, Owein, Ystorya Gereint uab Erbin, and Armes Prydein. In all cases, I believe that my inclusion of these texts is both justifiable and, indeed, necessary for achieving the wider and deeper vision of twelfth-century British literary culture that Matters of Britain hopes to communicate.
Author Qualifications
The seeds of this work were planted in the texts I explored in my doctoral dissertation, though all of the arguments I present in the current book have been thoroughly reconsidered and revised from their original versions. In the thirteen years since obtaining my degree, I have continued to think, read, and write about these texts, and I have taught most of them many times.
About Geoffrey of Monmouth I feel particularly competent, as I have not only published two articles on his works that anticipate some of the arguments I make here, but I have also edited and translated his History of the Kings of Britain as part of Broadview Press’s Literary Texts and Contexts series (2008). I also have considerable expertise on Gerald of Wales, having compiled an edition of the first (1191) version of his Itinerarium Kambriae as part of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 2010. Many of the insights I gleaned about Gerald’s work from this project have found their way into my analyses in Chapter 4. As part of my work on that text, I also traveled extensively through Wales, an experience that has afforded me a first-hand understanding of many of the geographical, cultural, and strategic aspects of the historical contexts that undergird my discussion.
I am a capable reader and translator of Latin, Old French, and Middle Welsh, all of which have a vital part to play in these arguments.
