Geoffrey’s History as Preparation for a Female King

Abstract

As noted in the introduction, scholars have consistently relegated female figures to the margins of their discussion of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae. A particularly striking example of this tendency, however, is medieval romance specialist Robert W. Hanning’s foundational study, The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth.1 Discussing the moment in Geoffrey’s account of the founding of Britain at which Brutus comforts his new wife Innogin as she mourns the loss of her homeland, Hanning positions both Geoffrey’s female figures and episodes in which warriors display emotional sensitivity outside the bounds of ‘history.’ He does so by defining Innogin as a romantic element marginal to what ‘history’ really is, an account of national origins and political freedom in which only male figures matter: “For a moment the issues of national birth and freedom are forgotten; history itself is forgotten, and attention is focused on the timeless problems of wives and lovers. This is but a momentary departure, however; Innogin is not spoken of again, except as the mother of Brutus’s children.”2 By treating this moment—despite its integration into the story of Britain’s first king—as a romantic anomaly that lacks a meaningful position within The History of the Kings of Britain, Hanning defines Galfridian females as incidental in, rather than integral to, the narrative of the past that Geoffrey constructs.