Historical Fabrication, Ethnic Fable and French Romance in Twelfth-Century England

Abstract

This study addresses perceptions of national difference and affinity in the wake of the Norman Conquest and the use of a fabricated past variously to justify or to attenuate ethnic discord and dynastic conflict in Britain, Brittany and Ireland. Six of its chapters are devoted to the Insular romances of Wace and Benoit de Sainte-Maure; and six engage works produced by Latinate authors, some of them in equal measure canonical to the medieval period and sadly marginal to the modern discipline of medieval literary studies. Part One, Fabrications of Britain: ca. 1125-1150, demonstrates that the literary and nationalistic resurrection of Arthur was first formulated as a political necessity by William of Malmesbury and only then concluded by Geoffrey of Monmouth; and it collaterally shows that pseudepigraphic writing had become an Insular trend before the advent of Henry II Plantagenet, creating fertile circumstances in which England, and not France, witnessed the maturation of a new vernacular genre, the roman antique. The literary and historical circumstances that inform these developments are central to Part Two, Dynastic Legitimacy, Vernacular Translation, and the French Romance of England: ca. 1155-1180. Through analyses of the Roman de Brut, the Roman de Rou, the Roman de Troie and the Chronique des ducs de Normandie, Wace and Benoit emerge as self-conscious artisans of apocrypha, creating visions of a past they know to be false and employing their fabrications as a prism through which to dramatize, to interrogate and,