Northern Ireland suggests, the value of unity is a matter of perspective: what from one view constitutes a longed-for unification, can also be experienced as a painful separation, a destructive fragmentation. Analyses of the imaginary syntheses of medieval history have had little to say about the colonizing uses of imagination and fantasy; medievalists have not examined as frequently as we might what traumas, losses, imaginary fragments, or contradictions fuel historic medieval legends. We have, as a result, often had less to say about the alternative histories, alternative imaginings also legible in medieval texts; we are often silent about the other dreams and desires sacrificed, often forcibly, to traumatic imperial, or national, unities.
This study takes seriously the role of imagination in making (and contesting) notions of union in late medieval Britain. Sovereign Fantasies examines romance narratives of Arthur from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the context of changing political and cultural identities in late medieval Britain. I argue that late Middle English Arthurian romance offers a fantasy of insular union, an “imagined community” of British sovereignty. Stories of Arthur, King of Britain, rework notions of insular British unity because Arthurian sovereignty can be used to designate an indigenous tradition (based upon its Welsh associations). As “native” folk hero, Arthur offers a royal legend grown on British soil. Yet tales of Arthur also point to the complications of community, the disaffections and aggressions that inhabit, and threaten, union. They thus offer a view of both how unions are crafted and how they break apart. In this way Arthur’s court becomes a fiction of historic British sovereignty useful for competing accounts of British identity. Arthur’s story can serve both those who wish to praise union and recommend centralization and those who wish to indict centralized power. The ambiguities of Arthurian geography—is his court at Caerlion or Carlisle, at Winchester or Camelot?—allude to historic struggles over the geography of British union, particularly to relations between central England and the regions of its so-called “Celtic Fringe.” Tales of Arthur encode utopian hopes for communitarian wholeness; yet they also poignantly narrate the impossibilities, the aggressions, and the traumas, of British insular community.
The question of Arthur’s “indigenous” British roots is, of course, a complicated one. Welsh fantasies of Arthurian sovereignty, for example, remind us that the colonized cultures of insular Britain had utopian dreams of their own, dreams pertinent to Arthurian traditions. While focused on Middle English texts from the later period, my study attempts to take seriously such dreams and the political and cultural oppositions they signify. Middle English romances of King Arthur are important in this regard for two reasons: first, they emerge with force at times of insular instability and change; second, they occupy (even in the twelfth century) a shared border between cultural identities of historic importance to British sovereignty: English, Welsh, and French.2 Because of these specific attributes, Middle English Arthurian traditions offer an important site for viewing the intersections and dialogues between “oppositional” discourses and dominant cultural modes. These texts offer access to the shared dreamings and political contestations between England and Wales in the late medieval period. The historic legend of Arthur’s rule over a lost insular wholeness (what Geoffrey of Monmouth terms the totius insulae of Britain) is important both to Welsh (and Scots) claims as rightful heirs of Britain’s crown and to the ambitions of late medieval English kings in annexing Wales and Scotland. Fantasies of a pastoral, ancient, and united Britain ruled by sovereigns such as Arthur were at play differently, at different historical moments, and deployed by different groups. At stake both in the wide circulation of Arthurian traditions in the late Middle Ages, and in the difficulty in recognizing some of those stories as history, are contestations over the ownership of a British imaginary past, indeed of Britain itself.
To be sure, late Middle English texts emphasize the tragedy of Arthur’s loss, only hinting at the glorious possibility of Arthur’s return. Malory’s Morte Darthur moves inexorably toward its tragic culmination; the Alliterative Morte Arthure mourns Arthur’s fall from Fortune’s Wheel; even the delightfully fantastic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens with a history of British kingship linked to treachery, war, and woe.3 Late Middle English tales return again and again to the loss of fellowship and the death of Arthur. Because of their repetitive and poignant delectation of this tragic sovereign and his fragile, fractured community, these Middle English tales can help us see that narratives of fragmentation, of sovereign mutability and loss, might be just as culturally useful as stories that emphasize cultural unity, wholeness, or recovery. When romance stories of King Arthur narrate the mutability, failures, and infidelities surrounding the sovereign, they raise doubts about an unwavering united British past. Such doubts allude to a contested history of Britain, to other desires and lost dreams. Arthur’s apocalyptic story can also, however, calibrate desire for a sovereign future. The tragic fragility of Arthur’s fellowship heightens our longing, since we gain only the briefest glimpse of Arthurian chivalry and justice. Traditions of Arthur as the Rex quondam, Rexque futurus answer such longing with the image of a dying sovereign body passing away yet ever poised to recover the throne. This Arthur is already lost, yet still somehow perpetually surviving.
This image of the legendary King Arthur, lost and yet surviving, resonates with Ernst Kantorowicz’s description of the influential early modern political theory known as the King’s Two Bodies. Stories of Arthur past and future anticipate the combination of sovereign death and survival that will, in the early modern period, structure orthodox notions of sovereign power. Arthurian traditions of the past and future king gesture toward what Kantorowicz will term sovereign sempiternity,” a “plurality” of kingship that, according to Kantorowicz, “did not expand within a given Space but was determined exclusively by Time” (387). Sovereign sempiternity stabilizes the sovereign’s right to rule by imagining his place in an unbroken train of rulers stretching out of the distant past. Sempiternity offers an “imagined community” of rulers through the ages, a fiction of sovereignty apparently unharmed by loss, death, or other “natural defects.” It imagines a transcendent, sovereign “body politic” untouched by age or disability: “The king’s body politic is a Body utterly void of Infancy and Old Age and other natural defects and imbecilities which the body natural is subject to, and for this cause what the king does in his Body politic cannot be invalidated or frustrated by a disability in his natural body.” Despite its use of the metaphor of the royal body, the theory of the King’s Two Bodies nevertheless disavows all the problems of bodiliness. The physical facts of “Infancy and Old Age and other natural defects and imbecilities” are imagined as utterly unlike the apparent durability of sovereign power. Power vests in a mystical body beyond particular times; it is transcendental power acting upon the material world. The King’s Two Bodies thus homogenizes the multiplicity of rule and the fractious moments of state politics into the image of a solitary, united sovereign will, offering a tendentious image of state power as a monolithic unity. When the theory of the King’s Two Bodies splits the physical mortality of kings from the “sempiternity” of the line of kingship, it promises state survival despite the vicissitudes, failures, and changeabilities of particular times and particular monarchs. It recasts sovereign death as a transcendental union outside individual sovereign bodies and lives, and thus copes with the poignant problem loss poses to individual agency and to state power. Its success as a political theory is marked in part by the ease with which histories of British sovereignty, despite prodigious “defects and imbecilities,” can nonetheless trace a genealogy from Britain’s early days.
Yet the political theory of the King’s Two Bodies proved culturally powerful precisely because the survival of particular sovereigns was not, historically, so easily assured. Late medieval English aristocrats and royals had cause to fear for their perpetuity. Throughout the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, various groups vied for control of large portions of British territory. The fifteenth century is, of course, infamous for its problems of royal succession; it is also a period throughout which the English throne responded to crises of identity which, while “international” in scope, had “national” implications. Between 1380 and 1485 the crown, while at war with its putatively most infamous enemy, France, solidified the annexation of its geographically most intimate Celtic ally, Wales.4 Welsh soldiers fought variously against the French and against the English during the
