King Arthur’s European Realm: New Evidence from Monmouth’s Primary Sources by Paul Sire

Abstract

Paul Sire, King Arthur's European Realm: New Evidence from Monmouth's Primary Sources. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2014. Pp. 212. ISBN: 978-0-78647801-9. $35.Five hundred years ago, the humanist scholar Polydore Vergil radically altered the long-standing medieval historiographical assumption, deriving primarily from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, that King Arthur had embarked on a series of conquests that had netted him a European empire that rivaled, if not surpassed, Charlemagne's. Vergil pointed out that there were absolutely no contemporary continental sources that could verify the existence of this Arthur or his empire; in fact, much of the historical record as it has come down to us would make such a series of conquests impossible. Since the sixteenth century, many a man of letters-taking offense at Vergil's decisive dismantling of any historical basis for the Arthurian legend-have taken to various forms of special pleading. In early modern England, poets like Michael Drayton and Edmund Spenser chose simply (and perhaps wisely) to ignore Polydore Vergil's historiographical intervention entirely, while antiquarians like John Leland rushed rather desperately to Geoffrey of Monmouth's defense. Although there have been a few responsible scholars since then who have sought plausible prototypes for King Arthur in Dark Age Britain (John Morris and Geoffrey Ashe spring to mind), there have also been many studies that attempt to resuscitate wholesale a fully actualized King Arthur that would fly in the face of Polydore Vergil and, indeed, of the preponderance of all the historical evidence. Paul Sire in his book King Arthur's European Realm: New Evidence from Monmouth's Primary Sources makes just such an argument.Despite its subtitle, this book does very little analysis of Geoffrey of Monmouth's actual known primary sources (mainly Bede, Gildas, and pseudo-Nennius), and does not offer anything approaching real evidence for any hitherto-unknown primary source. Instead, the book dangles the endlessly deferred term 'primary source' as a way to grant itself an authority it cannot have. In fact, Sire's most heavily consulted source for the intricate politics of Dark Age Europe is in fact Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And although he does occasionally cite a few other primary sources-chiefly early Scottish chronicles and the early Irish Expulsion of the Deisi-he never demonstrates that these were actually known sources for Geoffrey of Monmouth. Sire's use of other types of evidence is equally problematic. For instance, he treats the patently fictional tale told of the Roman emperor Magnus Maximus as it appears in the twelfth-century Welsh Breuddwyt Maxen as historical fact. Throughout the book, he weaves treacherously between topography, hagiography, and prosopography, as well as from the often unreliable speculations on early medieval genealogy by Christian Settipani and from modern historical genetics in the popularizing vein of Stephen Oppenheimer's The Origins of the British. …