Abstract
The Prophecies of Merlin Silvester is the name given to a thirteenth-century collection of Latin prophecies, which has long been, problematically, understood to be a translation from an earlier Welsh text. This article offers a new study of early manuscripts containing the Prophecies, and considers their place in English political culture. It argues that the Prophecies were composed in England during the reign of John, articulating anxieties about threats from France and domestic misrule, situated in a long historical view. In this respect, the Prophecies are revealed as a mode of commentary on English history.
Highlights
The Collection and Its Early Reception HistoryThe Prophecies of Merlin Silvester survive in a number of early manuscript witnesses from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, most of which were produced in monastic or ecclesiastical contexts (the early manuscripts are itemised in Table 1). This provides the most plausible conditions for its original production
This article presents a new study of the Prophecies of Merlin Silvester, a collection of prophetic texts incorporating a retrospective of English history from the Norman Conquest to the reign of John
Critics have accounted for the collection’s supposed obscurity by its long assumed status as a Latin translation from a Welsh bardic original (Sutton and Visser-Fuchs 1990, 294; McCauley 1993). This argument takes its force from correspondences between one component prophecy of the collection and the prophecies of Merlin Silvester, which Gerald of Wales quotes in his account of the late twelfth-century conquest of Ireland, the Expugnatio Hibernica (c. 1189) (Scott and Martin 1978)
Summary
The Prophecies of Merlin Silvester survive in a number of early manuscript witnesses from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, most of which were produced in monastic or ecclesiastical contexts (the early manuscripts are itemised in Table 1). This provides the most plausible conditions for its original production. This provides the most plausible conditions for its original production. The political interests and sympathies of the collection (discussed below) suggest that it was produced in England. It was received with particular enthusiasm in the south and the Midlands, and may well have originated somewhere in this wide region
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