Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Life of Merlin as Feminist Text

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The preceding chapters have argued that the history to which Geoffrey of Monmouth gave the gender-neutral title De gestis Britonum provides a feminist point of origin for the Arthurian legend because in it female figures are valued, share political power with males, receive sympathetic treatment from Geoffrey as narrator, and offer models of heroism that complement—and sometimes surpass—the models their male counterparts embody. This argument gains additional validity, however, if readers examine Geoffrey’s presentation of female figures in the Arthurian poem he wrote late in his career: the Vita Merlini. Although its “radically altered” version of the Merlinus who appears in Geoffrey’s history has sparked most of the scholarly interest in the poem, the pivotal roles that The Life of Merlin assigns to both Merlinus’s sister Ganieda and the ruler of Avalon and healer named Morgen should encourage more interest than they have to date. 1 Because this poem was composed after Empress Matilda failed to secure permanent possession of the English throne, its positive presentation of both female figures and the exercise of power by them opens up an intriguing interpretive possibility: that Geoffrey’s creation and positive presentation of female kings in the non-Arthurian portion of his history and sympathetic treatment of all the female figures in its Arthurian section could be products of a personal interest in developing female figures as well as of the historical moment at which he wrote Concerning the Deeds of the Britons.KeywordsFemale FigureNarrative SpacePositive PresentationMedieval RomanceProphetic VoiceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.