Archipelagic Criticism and Its Limits: Milton, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the Matter of England

Abstract

Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1136) had an enormous impact on the young Milton, so much so that in his Latin poem Mansus he imagined re-writing it as an English national epic. The fact that he could identify with the Britons against the Saxons in this imagined poem has been taken by many to prove the instability or alterity of his Early Modern national identity. In demonstrating how early in its reception Geoffrey's history had become “Englished,” that is, how early it had come to articulate the matter of Britain as England writ large, I hope to indicate that even in his earliest works—especially the Maske at Ludlow Castle, Mansus, and Epitaphium Damonis— the Londoner Milton is not so much diffident about or unrecognizable in his understanding of national identity as party, however inadvertently, to a process of relentless Anglicization. And in this I hope not to refute but to suggest the limits of contemporary Archipelagic criticism.