a cultural bias. Acton Griscom, the editor of what was for many years the standard vulgate text of the Historia, implied nearly seventy years ago that the preeminence of Latinists within the medieval scholarly community produced at least a premature rejection of the possibility of Geoffrey’s Welsh source.19 Geoffrey’s claims to the contrary were interpreted, moreover, in the most ungenerous terms, with scholars suggesting that his Welsh source was duplicitously invented “to cover the romantic creations of [his] own imaginative genius” (Griscom 102).
Admittedly Geoffrey may have had no written source. But his assertion of the vetustissimus liber amounts to his use of a standard rhetorical figure, the “old book” topos. Monmouth’s deployment of the “old book” topos locates him firmly within the established tradition of medieval historiography; it does not imply that he perpetrated “one of the best hoaxes of the Middle Ages” (Crick 226). As Julia Crick points out, Geoffrey’s use of the imagination in recounting his history is not at all unusual; like his competitors, Geoffrey amplified and elaborated a story within an already existing narrative tradition. Ruth Morse argues that invention and rhetorical embellishment were especial features of medieval and classical histories written about a very distant past. If an account could be demonstrated as authorized, as Morse puts it, “‘Truth’ might be secondary.… [The] inescapable but highly exploited interpretative circularity depends upon the variety of authority which authorities had” (102). Given these facts, what is striking about the Historia, is neither Geoffrey’s fondness for invention nor his use of the “old book” topos, but the fact that, despite a tradition of historical invention endorsed by medieval rhetorical theory, his is the only account of early Britain dismissed for its apparently extravagant inventions.20 When Bede peppers his famous ecclesiastical history with descriptions of miracle cures and visions of heaven and hell, his excursions into the fantastic fail to compromise his appeal for “scholars [who] respect his historical thoroughness and competence” (Gransden 17). Christian tradition and historiography remain legitimate and authoritative sources for fantasy and magic; other fantasy traditions do not. Thus Antonia Gransden declares Bede’s “grasp of historical method … unique in the middle ages,” displaying as evidence of this methodological competence the fact that “he was the first historian to date consistently by the era of the Incarnation—the system of dating AD. and BC. in use today” (25). Here Bede’s commitment to marking time in Christian terms testifies to his historical expertise. Monmouth’s narrative seems, on the other hand, the only early history held accountable to objectivist standards; his history is, in fact, the very place where the definition of “history” gets made.21
Scholarly concern with Geoffrey’s extravagant fictions may, in fact, displace anxieties about his extravagant popularity. Scholars have consistently, if implicitly, linked the problem of Geoffrey’s authority to his text’s popularity. Gransden’s (once very influential) account of medieval historiography critiques the apparent problem of Geoffrey’s popularity in terms that denigrate the pleasures of his text. Describing Geoffrey as “a romance writer masquerading as a historian” (I, 202), Gransden classifies the Historia as romance because it was so delightfully amusing and so remarkably popular (Gransden I, 207; II, 459).22 More recently Julia Crick has revised this opinion, reminding modern readers of the importance of pleasure and delight for historians writing during the Middle Ages, a time when “history was not a free-standing discipline, but an auxiliary one” (225). Crick continues, “Lacking a niche in the academic world, historians … had to catch their audiences in a way that writers of technical literature generally did not…. In such a market content, style, and general appeal to the reader were essential to success” (225–26). By such standards, as Crick concludes, Geoffrey of Monmouth “was an exceptional artist fully governing and not governed by his material. His choice of subject was a brilliant success” (226). Crick reminds us that Geoffrey was not writing from a position of textual authority and disciplinary influence. Her remarks imply that critical condescension toward Geoffrey’s artistry and brilliance remains linked to his success. Indeed, the Historia was far more influential than the authorized “technical literature” of the time.
For his part, Geoffrey of Monmouth evinces his own anxiety about the pleasures of his text. He endeavors to ensure that those pleasures not be identified with himself as a writer. Geoffrey’s prefatory remarks (cited as epigraph to this chapter), explicitly link Arthurian pleasures with Welsh culture. The “old British book” drawn from Welsh oral tradition was, Geoffrey insists, invested with enjoyment: stories of Arthur were handed down joyfully (“a multis populis quasi inscripta iocunde & memoriter predicarentur,” emphasis mine), his source “book” of British traditions was an aesthetic delight (“ex ordine perpulcris orationibus pro-ponebat” [Griscom 219, emphasis mine]). In contrast to the joys of the Welsh tradition, Monmouth insists upon his own modest and unpretentious style. The following quotation (from Lewis Thorpe’s translation) addresses those issues:
I have taken the trouble at [Archdeacon Walter’s] request to translate that [old British] book into Latin, although I have been content with my own expression and my own homely [rustic] style and I have gathered no gaudy flowers of speech in other’s gardens. If I had adorned my page with high flown language I should have bored my readers, for they would have been forced to spend more time discovering the meaning of my words than following the story.23
Perhaps such a statement amounts to the standard trope of authorial humility; perhaps, too, it offers rhetorical concessions to competing traditions of historiography (like that of the Venerable Bede or William of Malmesbury) narrating the history of the English people or of their church.24 Monmouth’s investment in rhetorical modesty, here again, situates him firmly within the status quo. But what would Monmouth gain by identifying the aesthetic pleasure of his text with the Welsh stories he chose to “translate,” rather than with his own imagination? Might his humility signal something more than another standard topos?
To answer these questions we turn to a central section of Geoffrey’s text that will serve as an important source for late-medieval political propaganda. In the center of the Historia—wedged in between two episodes in the history of Constantine—Geoffrey “translates” “The Prophecies of Merlin.” Up to this point, the account of British history has moved forward in chronological progression: beginning with the story of Brutus, continuing through the time before and during Roman colonization of Britain. Geoffrey next tells the story of the dynasty of Constantine, interrupting that narrative immediately after the famous episode of Vortigern’s tower, a monumental edifice crumbling (so Merlin advises) because of two dragons, one red and one white, locked in battle beneath it. At this point, in most redactions, Geoffrey’s authorial voice intrudes in dedication.25 In most (but not all) manuscripts his patron is now identified as Alexander Bishop of Lincoln, “a man of the greatest religion and wisdom … waited on by so many noblemen” (170).26 At this point Geoffrey recapitulates his humility, linking himself and Bishop Alexander with Merlin, the prophet:
I [Geoffrey] … pressed my rustic reed-pipe to my lips and, modulating on it in all humility, I translated into Latin this work written in a language which is unknown to you. All the same, I am greatly surprised that you should have deigned to commit the task to so poor a pen as mine, when your all-powerful wand could command the service of so many men more learned and more splendid than I … Leaving on one side all the wise men of this entire island of Britain, I feel no shame at all in maintaining that it is you and you alone who should … declaim it with bold accompaniment, if only the highest honour had not called you away to other preoccupations…. [S]ince it has pleased you that Geoffrey of Monmouth should sound his own pipe in this piece of soothsaying, do not hesitate to show favour to his music-makings. If he produces any sound which is wrong or unpleasant, force him back into correct harmony with your own Muses’ baton. (Thorpe 170–71; VII, 1)
Alexander’s power becomes a magician’s wand; Geoffrey maintains proudly that Alexander “alone should declaim [the prophecies] with bold accomplishment,” despite the fact that their original language is “unknown” to him. In place of Alexander’s “all
