Epilogue: The Birds of Rhiannon

Abstract

This book has charted a new course through the literary and cultural history of the British twelfth century, demonstrating how Anglo-Norman ambitions and fantasies about colonizing and annexing Wales were a crucial impetus behind the sudden flourishing of the Matters of Britain as a literary and courtly phenomenon. Geoffrey of Monmouth, despite the infectious charm of his writing and the sophistication of his friction with historiographical precedents, emerges as the central villain of this new literary history, with supporting roles accorded to John of Salisbury for his absorption and transmission of Geoffrey’s colonialist tropes, and especially to Chretien de Troyes for giving these tropes a highly effective new narrative form in his invention of the genre of the Arthurian romance. On the other hand, a number of writers, in their own ways, attempt to resist or subvert some or all of the colonialist aspects of the Matter of Britain. Marie de France does so quite openly— and courageously; with Walter Map, the irony and vertiginous wit with which he suffuses his De Nugis Curialium may threaten to derail his acts of textual resistance. Gerald of Wales, although he imbibes many aspects of the colonialist Galfridian ideologies, at long last finds his own voice in the end as he eschews historiography—and, to some degree, “pastness” itself—in devising a new way to think about the relationships of Welsh and English in his Itinerarium Kambriae.