Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination: The Matters of Britain in the Twelfth Century by Michael A. Faletra (review)

Abstract

MICHAEL A. FALETRA, Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination: The Matters of Britain in the Twelfth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2014. Pp. xv, 243. isbn: 978-1-137-39102-5. $90Michael A. Faletra's Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination is welcome as a more thoughtful addition to a group of studies over the last decade or so that have taken a postcolonial approach in arguing for a medieval view of Wales as 'England's original repressed Other, the unruly subaltern that England sees in its mirror, the barbarian standing at the threshold' (1). This book's greatest strengths lie in its attention to Norman military ambitions in shaping post-Conquest views of Wales and in its awareness of the importance of a small body of early authors (Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chapter One; John of Salisbury, Walter Map, and Marie de France, Chapter Two; Chretien de Troyes, Chapter Three; and Gerald of Wales, Chapter Four) in actively creating the 'Matters of Britain'-that is, 'all manner of texts about the British insular past' (10), not just Arthurian material-as a literary tradition. These authors are not passive 'heirs to a native British tradition' but rather 'shapers and often even exploiters of their Brittonic sources, oral or written' (13). While there are problems with a postcolonial framework that finds 'Anglo-Norman/English modes of colonial discourse' (11) in the twelfth century and not all of Faletra's individual readings are ultimately convincing, this study turns important attention to the Matters of Britain as the product of Anglo-Norman authors who 'iterate the past of the isle of Britain-and, implicitly or explicitly, the future of the Welsh-in ways that often facilitate and occasionally contest the establishment of Anglo-Norman power over the insular present and future' (10), and it should be read by anyone working on post-Galfridian Arthurian literature.This study logically begins with the Historia Regum Britanniae, the cornerstone text of the Matters of Britain. Faletra's argument that Geoffrey 'ultimately justifies the Normans and denigrates the Welsh' (16) is a difficult one. He is a skilled close-reader of the Historia-his attention to the geography of its Arthurian portion is particularly successful-but, despite a well-grounded discussion of medieval historiographic tradition, does not do enough to demonstrate that Geoffrey's depiction of 'the transferal of insular power to the Saxons and the transformation of the ancient Britons into the barbaric Welsh' is a 'distinctly colonialist historiography' (16) in ways that other narratives of the same historical moments are not. …