that the popularity and cultural usefulness of Monmouth’s fantasy of the Britons involves its ability to accommodate diverse uses. The manuscript history of Geoffrey’s text suggests, moreover, that representations of insular loss can help consolidate competing claims on insular inheritance, serving both the pleasures of parvenu Anglo-Norman aristocrats and their Welsh resisters. Chapter 2 moves to the uses of Geoffrey’s text in the fifteenth century, focusing particularly upon the oppositional politics of the Merlin Prophecies. I examine what it means that such prophecies, based upon Welsh vaticinative poetry, came to fuel diametrically opposed political agendas, and how those contestations led to the increasing identification of certain versions of Britain’s past with interpretive “truth.” Imaginative ambiguity, as the Merlin Prophecies suggest, is deeply useful to fifteenth-century English sovereigns who wish to imagine themselves, in the wake of losses in France, as Arthur’s insular heirs. Yet that same ambiguity is deeply disturbing to those in power, since it can also be used to legitimate the claims of rebel royal pretenders.
Part II, “Romancing the Throne,” examines the romance’s structure of longing and loss for a cultural imagining. In Chapter 3, I read Arthur’s status as both European emperor and British sovereign in the Alliterative Morte Arthure for collocations between European international identities and insular British ones. The Alliterative Morte Arthure provides a way of renouncing Arthur’s Welsh connections without having to jettison all hope for a united insular future. The poem’s poignant concern with the slaughter of innocents, moreover, encodes the longing and losses of conquest, losses that nonetheless offer consolation to the male, aristocratic subject. Chapter 4 examines the complicated Welsh geography of a text that makes use of French traditions, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I make the case for reconsidering the magical elements of the Green Knight and the geography of Gawain’s journey as a kind of colonial exoticism, one that nonetheless alludes to alternative (Welsh) claims on Arthurian sovereignty. Situated at a colonial frontier, Gawain deploys the intimacies of gender and sexuality to compensate for the limitations that a borderland position places on Gawain’s agency. The apparent evil machinations of women work here, moreover, to rescue Arthur’s sovereignty (and Gawain’s agency) from the implication that it might be unmanly and frivolous. Chapter 5 addresses, through the adultery plot of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, the common identification of women with the romance genre. I reconsider this Middle English version of an originally French story in the context of the militarized culture of the Hundred Years War. Like the previous two texts, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur addresses questions of insular community as it raises the issue of female guilt. And it links women with a particularly hopeless kind of loss. This poem thus suggests that medieval Arthurian romance might be a particularly tragic genre for women.
Where Part II focuses attention on a Welsh-French-English cultural triangulation, Part III, “Insular Losses,” examines insular and regional collocations in some fifteenth-century texts. In Chapter 6, rivalry and brotherhood take center stage in two shorter romances from the north of the island: The Avowing of Arthur and Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn. Both texts offer poignant evidence that chivalric rivalry disciplines knights. Knightly victimization and sacrifice remain crucial to the creation of Arthur’s brotherhood. In the context of the Wars of the Roses, moreover, these texts suggest regional critiques of Arthur that can be read as contestations over the geography of insular British union. Female aggression and brotherly heterosexuality function in these texts as means to cope with the losses and deaths required by militarism. My final chapter considers Malory’s massive tome, Le Morte Darthur. I join those who position this volume in the context of England’s territorial losses in France; yet, against the grain of Malory’s text, I read the poignant tale of Arthur’s loss as a fantasy that can provide hope for historical coherence while accommodating innovation and change, the very things Malory deplores as “newfangleness.” Le Morte Darthur thus implies the necessity of eschewing old loyalties for new ones; by the early modern period, Welsh and English, Yorkist and Lancastrian have all had to refashion their hearts and memories to a London-based Britain and for an Arthur whose court is at Winchester. The Afterword moves this study into the early modern period, suggesting very briefly the implications of this work would have for a reading of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
In its analysis of legend and its attention to historico-literary fantasies, this study foregrounds the fantasmatic character of communitarian loyalties and loves. The nation is always an illusion, a fantasy of wholeness that threatens again and again to fragment from the inside out. Fantasies of national identity teach peoples to desire union; they help inculcate in a populace the apparent “truth” that unity, regulation, coordination, and wholeness are always better, more satisfying and more fascinating, than the alternatives. Yet in order to promote desires for national unity, the nation, its core identity, must appear to have always already been there, poised to fascinate its people, and ready to be desired.25 And this too, as we will shortly see, is one of the riches of Arthurian romance. Arthurian tales constitute powerful fantasies because they trace a heritage to the most ancient of British days. Through Arthur an increasingly literate public can learn to desire a unified future by delighting in the imagined glories of a unified past.
PART I
The Matter of Britain
CHAPTER ONE
Arthurian Imagination and the “Makyng” of History
I have not been able to discover anything at all on the kings who lived here before the Incarnation of Christ, or indeed about Arthur and all the other who followed on after the Incarnation. Yet the deeds of these men were such that they deserve to be praised for all time. What is more, these deeds were handed joyfully down in oral tradition, just as if they had been committed to writing, by many peoples who had only their memory to rely on.
—Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae1
This is the Arthur about whom the trifles of the Britons rave even now, one certainly not to be dreamed of in false myths, but proclaimed in truthful histories—indeed, who for a long time held up his tottering fatherland, and kindled the broken spirits of his countrymen to war.
—William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum
KING Arthur has long been subject to controversy. Even in the twelfth century, as the quotes from William of Malmesbury and Geoffrey of Monmouth suggest, Arthur’s relationship to Britain’s past was a vexed one. Malmesbury, on one hand, deplores some stories about Arthur as “delirium”; Monmouth, on the other, seems troubled that such Arthurian traditions had not yet influenced the “official” histories of his time.2 In response Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae offers the fullest (and most influential) account of Arthurian sovereignty of his day, rendering stories of Arthur in the prestigious, and official, language of Latin. But twelfth-century history writers (followed by more than a few of their twentieth-century readers) would vehemently condemn Geoffrey’s work as an excessively extravagant fiction.
William of Malmesbury, Gerald of Wales, and William of Newburg all judge Geoffrey’s history to be flawed, and unflatteringly contrast his work with the Venerable Bede’s sacred history. Their criticisms emphasize the falseness of Geoffrey’s popular account, characterizing the distinction between Geoffrey’s and other narratives of early Britain in the opposition of fiction
