Arthur of England: English Attitudes to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance by Christopher Dean

Abstract

easier. It is to be hoped that the existence of this edition will increase interest in and study of the MSS. produced in post-Gonquest Worcester and environs. Brut, Ancrene Wisse, the “Katherine” and “Wooing” Groups, the South English Legendary, and WF are all major products of this general area within a relatively brief period. A consideration of their inter-relationships with each other and with other texts from the area, both in Latin and English, might well prove illuminating. jo h n jo h a n se n / Camrose Lutheran College Christopher Dean, Arthur of England: English Attitudes to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). xii, 229. $25.00 In its blurb for Arthur of England the University of Toronto Press promises that Christopher Dean will “show drastically” that Arthur was not an espe­ cially well-known figure in the Middle Ages and that medieval Arthurian literature, apart from Malory, “did not have large audiences” since “ordinary citizens” scarcely knew who Arthur was. That Arthur “is essentially a modem hero,” then, is the promised thesis of Arthur of Britain. Like most aspects of the book itself, the advertising terms seem vague and ill-defined, as well as difficult to establish. What, I wonder, is modern popular belief? Why is Malory singled out as an exception in terms of studies of manuscript frequencies, when only one manuscript of his work is known to survive? What on earth is an ordinary citizen and how does one gauge his popular knowledge? And why Arthur of England rather than of Britain, since much Arthurian lore is very specifically concerned with Wales and Scotland? If the press notices make one shiver, Dean’s own opening paragraph does nothing to allay these concerns. In the very first line, Dean speaks of “his­ torians” in the Middle Ages as if history as a distinct field in the modern sense of the word existed as early as the twelfth century. He then tells us that Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae was “published” in 1138, although nowhere does he make reference to Neil Wright’s immensely important recent work on the dating of this text. Next he assures us that the 1191 [sic] exhumation of Arthur’s remains at Glastonbury was an “out-andout fraud,” apparently dismissing out of hand C. A. Ralegh Radford’s ex­ tensive analysis of the archaeological factors involved in the dig. Finally, he concludes — without the slightest glance at what was happening in France through the writings of Chrétien de Troyes and others — that these two events gave Arthur “a reality and a dimension that he had never had before.” 347 The first chapter of Arthur of England deals with “Arthur and the Histori­ ans” and begins with the locus classicus in these matters: Geoffrey of Mon­ mouth. We have a fairly standard account of Geoffrey on Arthur (undocu­ mented in terms of the work by David Dumville and Neil Wright) with an emphasis on Geoffrey’s desire to find favour with the Normans. This is fol­ lowed by a relatively pedestrian and sometimes inaccurate discussion of the Glastonbury exhumation. Arthur’s bones, for example, were probably stored in the Treasury for almost a century before they were reburied in a mag­ nificent tomb in the main church at the time of the visitation of Edward I. They were moved, moreover, yet another time during the abbacy of Walter de Monington and it is this last tomb, before the High Altar, which John Leland recorded. Dean calls Adam of Domerham the “official” historian of the monastery, although he was no more “official” than William of Malmes­ bury or John of Glastonbury — in fact, considerably less so than the former. Dean’s Poweldon — the estate suposedly donated by King Arthur — is, of course, Polden. In any discussion of William of Malmesbury’s De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesie — of which at least two complete copies, pace Dean, page 9, exist — the standard authority is now John Scott, who should be quoted in full. Should Caradog of Llancarfan’s Life of Gildas not enter into any analysis of...