Geoffrey of Monmouth: The History of the Kings of Britain. An Edition and Translation of the 'De gestis Britonum' [Historia Regum Britanniae] (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Geoffrey of Monmouth: The History of the Kings of Britain. An Edition and Translation of the 'De gestis Britonum' [Historia Regum Britanniae] Siân Echard Michael D. Reeve , ed., and Neil Wright, trans., Geoffrey of Monmouth: The History of the Kings of Britain. An Edition and Translation of the 'De gestis Britonum' [Historia Regum Britanniae]. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2007. Paperback, 2009. Pp. lxxvi, 307. ISBN: 9-781-8438-344-1-0. $47.95. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum britannie is indisputably a foundational document of the whole Arthurian tradition, yet paradoxically, it is this very importance that has presented would-be editors with an almost insurmountable task. The Historia survives in well over 200 manuscripts, and an editor must also contend with the variant traditions, and with the separate tradition for the Prophetie Merlini section of the text. The first modern editions all had limitations. Edmond Faral's 1929 attempt was frankly and modestly a reader's edition, with a variable and sometimes confusing apparatus. Acton Griscom's text, also appearing in 1929, surveyed most of the then-known manuscripts and made some use of three, but his base text was corrupt. Jacob Hammer's 1951 edition of the variant tradition was to have been followed by a scholarly edition of the main tradition, but Hammer died before he could complete the work. The editions which began to appear in 1985 in the Brewer Historia regum Britannie series focused on what one might think of as 'doable' projects: these are Neil Wright's editions of the Bern MS (to represent the Vulgate) and of the eight known witnesses to the First Variant tradition. While Reeve notes that Wright's base text for the 1985 edition is corrupt, the series it initiated has been a crucial resource for Galfridian scholars, and so it is a pleasure to see Wright's contribution, in this case as translator in Reeve's edition, to what is sure to be the standard text for the foreseeable future. Reeve's introduction is businesslike and occasionally funny (he calls the Prophetie a 'trailer' for the Historia, p. viii; he confesses to breathing a sigh of relief when Gualguainus and his difficult name finally perish, p. lii). A reader new to Geoffrey might wish for a little more on the biography and historical context, but this introduction is aimed squarely at the specialist reader, and in that respect does everything it needs to do. Reeve moves smartly to a discussion of his decision to collate eleven manuscripts in full and six in part, repeating some arguments from his 1991 Journal of Medieval Latin article on the transmission of Geoffrey's text. The edition does not collate all these manuscripts in its apparatus, but rather, aims to reconstruct the two most significant witnesses throughout, along with two other witnesses for certain sections of the text (Merlin's prophecies, and the narrative from that point to the end of the work). The textual introduction includes a manuscript stemma and several tables of variants. A casual user is unlikely to read all of Reeve's detailed analysis, which is a shame, for the admittedly forbidding technical sections are enlivened by touches of textual humor, as for example when Reeve observes that an omission is 'to the detriment of both sense and syntax' (p. xxi). Reeve himself notes that 'most readers... will prefer to skip' his survey of the whole of the manuscript tradition (p. xxxi)—that is, of the manuscripts beyond the seventeen forming the basis for his text—but this section, too, is full of useful detail. There follow brief sections on such issues as spelling, punctuation, Geoffrey's sources, and editions, and [End Page 129] a somewhat longer section of critical notes, where Reeve takes extra time to explain some particularly interesting or challenging editorial decisions. One of the shorter sections is where one finds the explanation for what is undoubtedly Reeve's most surprising decision—his choice of the title De gestis Britonum. Reeve notes that five of his manuscripts agree on this form of the title, and that Geoffrey uses it himself at the end of his Vita Merlini. I for one am...