of “postcolonial” becomes, as K. Anthony Appiah puts it, “the post of the space-clearing gesture” (348). Such insights remain specifically resonant for scholars working in early periods. We can, I would argue, deploy “postcolonial” to signal a concern with agency and oppositional texts, even as we appreciate the historical specificity (the similarities and differences) of twentieth-century or medieval scenes of conquest.
The oppositional discourses of Welsh vaticinative poetry could, in this way, be viewed as a “postcolonial” collection. Yet the complicated textual status and linguistic nature of these traditions might also offer a crucial qualification to standard definitions of “opposition.” On the one hand, early vaticination, as E. M. Griffiths established, characteristically links the restoration of insular rule to the Britons through figures like Arthur. Yet the texts that survive (as the Historia Brittonum to which Jarman refers) are themselves notoriously complicated, combining elements of Latin clerical and Welsh “native” cultures.32 This difficult situation means that these “oppositional” texts are not romantically “pure.” Such complications have sometimes produced scholarly diffidence on questions of Welsh oppositional agency, particularly with regard to Arthur. Yet evidence of oppositional traditions in texts “contaminated” by substantial interlinguistic, cultural, and historical complexity registers, I would argue, not the absolute absence of resistance so much as the absence of resistance as a “pure” process or event. These texts testify to the complexity of “native” culture and resistance in Wales, a locale that combines conquest and difference with a long history of intimate exchange. Viewed as complicated, mixed sets of texts, these “oppositional discourses” themselves emerge as an extraordinary kind of creative agency, to recall Patterson’s formulation, an imaginative makyng in the face of constraint. Furthermore, I would argue that so long as we understand the “post” of “postcolonial” to refer solely to the time after the withdrawal of colonial rule, we will likely miss that such poignant complications suggest not a complicity with conquest that must be deplored, but the difficulty of oppositional strategies. And this, again I would argue, is exactly the case with the scholarly reception of Geoffrey’s Historia.
The importance and power—the historical agency—of the oppositional traditions Geoffrey deploys have been traditionally under appreciated in favor of an overemphasis upon the genealogical interests of Geoffrey’s Anglo-Norman patrons and audience. As a result many readers have emphasized what they see as Monmouth’s collusion with Anglo-Norman colonial desires for things Welsh, arguing that Geoffrey appropriates, even “colonizes,” Welsh material for his own uses.33 Yet arguments that emphasize Anglo-Norman patronage and rule tend to render insignificant, and often ignore altogether, the agency of other audiences and other uses of Geoffrey’s text. In these accounts, the Historia remains almost exclusively an instrument of hegemonic power, a text that sponsors only the desires of parvenu Anglo-Norman conquerors, despite the fact that the Historia’s popularity, as the diversity of extant manuscripts suggests, obtained far beyond their concerns.34 In contrast to this approach, I will argue shortly for a reading of the subtle relation between Monmouth’s Anglo-Norman patrons and Welsh resisters of Anglo-Norman rule. For if Monmouth’s text aided the Norman conquerors, it also gained important benefits for a linguistic minority and contributed to the further development of Welsh discourses of resistance. Those gains occurred in part because of the evocative (and puzzling) ambiguity of the texts themselves, and of Monmouth’s clever use of them. The ambiguity of the Prophecies, and Geoffrey’s own political acuity, meant that those resisting the designs of the Anglo-Normans had access to authoritative and popular texts that enabled resistance. The Merlin Prophecies, articulated in the Historia Brittonum as texts of Welsh resistance to Saxon conquest, could resonate as well with the later scene of Anglo-Norman Conquest. I argue below, moreover, that these important ambiguities make Geoffrey’s text crucial for competing accounts of Britain’s future, and that this explains in part the long-lived popularity of Geoffrey’s text.
Scholars have already noted that the flexible ambiguity of Geoffrey’s Historia proved useful in the context of twelfth-century Anglo-Norman aristocratic enmity. Shichtman and Finke remind us of the awkwardness of Geoffrey’s multiple dedicatees, a group of enemies, key figures from both sides of the bitter dynastic struggles following Henry I’s death.35 As a result, they describe Geoffrey’s Historia, following the work of Pierre Bourdieu, as symbolic capital, “the creation of a past which could ease the [genealogical] anxieties of a powerful ruling class concerned with discovering family origin” (35). Geoffrey’s work was so popular because of its ability to accommodate such a diverse and fractured audience. I am suggesting that there is an even broader and more diverse audience to which we must attend. For Geoffrey’s popularity ventured far beyond a court circle interested in the particularities of dynastic politics. And it pertained as well to a set of contestations between the Welsh and Anglo-Normans rooted in divergent interpretations of the Merlin Prophecies.
We thus still need to address the crucial question of these traditions, asking why the history Geoffrey chose to tell was, unlike Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum or Bede’s Historiam ecclesiasticam gentis Anglorum, not the story of an English past, but of a British one.36 How did this story of British kings help create an insular future, and what might this mean for our understanding of the category of “Britain?” The legacy of Geoffrey’s matter of Britain in the later Middle Ages—its appearance in texts of futuristic prophesy and political propaganda, its uses as genealogical data for aristocratic pedigree, its elaboration in regionalist romances of Arthur, or in the plans of English (or Scottish) sovereigns who name their first-born sons after the mythical king—means that Monmouth’s fantasy offered an enduring imaginary ground for creating (and contesting) the identity of an historic British community. I turn now to examine how and why Geoffrey’s “Britons,” and the ambiguity of Merlin’s futuristic prophecies of their return, prompt these uses. The Britain Geoffrey describes evokes a doubled history: one specifically linked to a remnant Welsh population, and another linked to an insular return, and to a British totam insulam.
Doubled Time and Spaces: The Riches of British History
Francis Ingledew has shown that the genealogical impulse in the Historia links with territorial claims to land, arguing that as Geoffrey’s text eased Anglo-Norman genealogical disputes, it also came to sponsor territorial claims for an entire class of aristocrats. This is because, Ingledew argues, Geoffrey advanced the very definition of what constitutes a “national” history, where “the possession of territory and power came to correlate distinctively with ownership of time; time came to constitute space—family and national land—as home, an inalienable and permanent, private and public territory” (669).37 Ingledew offers a view of time that is useful for imagining, and then claiming, the unified space of a realm. Geoffrey’s Historia imagines a genealogical union (across time) that can prefigure the imagination of territorial unity, in the united (broadly familial) ownership of a realm. Yet, like so many other insightful analyses of the Historia, Ingledew’s work does not consider the significance of Geoffrey’s relation to Welsh traditions, wherein we might find a different account of the broad family descended from Brutus. Instead Ingledew emphasizes Geoffrey’s book as an exclusively Trojan history. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s genealogy of the Britons, while a Trojan story, also depends upon a view of British territory borrowed from very old popular Welsh traditions.38 Indeed Monmouth’s genealogical narrative will help sponsor Welsh claims to London’s crown.
At the time Geoffrey wrote, “Briton” was an equivocal category, referring both to the Welsh and to their linguistic kin in Brittany. While there is the sense that, for modern scholars, the early medieval term is liable to slippage between these two referents, scholars rarely consider what that slippage might have meant for Monmouth, or how its doubleness might have been useful to him. Instead scholars imagine Geoffrey’s identity in singular terms—he was, they assert, a Breton. Yet questions of flexibility and of cultural doubleness remain important to Monmouth who represents it as an important strategy for dealing with complicated cultural relations.39 Ambivalence
