English Chronicle Research Articles

The Revolt of Owain Glyndwr in Medieval English Chronicles, by Alicia Marchant

The Revolt of Owain Glyndwr in Medieval English Chronicles, by Alicia Marchant

Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period. Edited by Jon Whitman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xi+317.

<i>Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period</i>. Edited by Jon Whitman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xi+317.

The Viking outgroup in early medieval English chronicles

AbstractThis paper relates diachronic change in discourse strategies of the Viking-age historical writing to political changes of the period and to communities of practice that produce these histories and chronicles. It examines the labels and stereotypes applied to the Vikings and establishes their sources and evolution by applying a fourfold chronological division of historical sources from around 800 to 1200 (based on the political developments within Anglo-Saxon history and on the manuscript history of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). The data for the study come from both Old English and Anglo-Latin chronicles. The results are interpreted in terms of critical discourse analysis. It is demonstrated that the chroniclers employ strategies of dissimilation exploiting the notion of illegitimacy and criminality of the Viking outgroup. These strategies change over time, depending on the political situation (raiding vs. settlement vs. reconquest period) and communities of practice involved in the maintenance and dissemination of a particular political discourse.

Open versus closed recensions (Pasquali): Pros and cons of some methods for computer-assisted stemmatology

By comparing the results obtained through traditional qualitative stemmatics with those obtained through computer-assisted quantitative stemmatology, when both approaches are applied to two authentic data sets (the Old English Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and a Latin epitome of Marco Polo’s Devisement dou Monde ), this study aims at bringing to the fore the advantages and the disadvantages of some recent methods for the automatic grouping of witnesses, most of which are based on phylogenetic models. The analysis will show that not all the methods provide results which can be considered reliable in light of the evidence offered by a thorough scrutiny of the documentary history of the texts under inspection. In particular, the majority of computer-assisted methods succeed in providing very good information for detecting the grouping of witnesses, as well as for a preliminary evaluation of their variant readings. Yet, few offer some valuable guidance as to define the sub-groups. This limitation becomes crucial when the existence of more than one codex interpositus has to be postulated, i.e. when the historical evidence makes it clear that the actual textual transmission cannot conform to the mathematical ideal of cladistic parsimony. The latter case is particularly evident with ‘closed’ recensions, where mechanical reconstruction plays a heavier role, and the choice of variants follows rigorous stemmatic steps. On the other hand, the application of computer-assisted methods to ‘open’ recensions seems to give better results.

The Revolt of Owain Glyndŵr in Medieval English Chronicles by Alicia Marchant

The Revolt of Owain Glyndŵr in Medieval English Chronicles by Alicia Marchant

The Development of Papal Provisions in Medieval Europe

AbstractThe system of papal provision – through which medieval clergy were appointed to ecclesiastical benefices across Christendom – has remained controversial ever since its inception in the 12th century. Xenophobic contemporary commentators, such as the 13th‐century English chronicler Matthew Paris, lambasted the appointment of large numbers of foreign clergy to church livings through papal intervention – criticism that has endured in the modern historiography on papal provisions. The predominant historiographical interpretation remains that popes proactively developed an autocratic and nepotistic system of provision, expanding their own powers to reserve benefices through encyclicals such as Licet ecclesiarum, so as to increase their authority over the western Church, and to finance the curia by rewarding cardinals and kinsmen with valuable benefices in local churches throughout the West. An unresolved tension in the historiography has been created, however, by a newer approach that emphasises the importance of petitioners, rather than the popes, in fuelling the development of curial institutions. This article maps the state of the historiography, synthesises the differing scholarly traditions and suggests avenues for future research.

'WE WANTED þE TREWE COPY þEREOF': JOHN PAGE'S "THE SIEGE OF ROUEN", TEXT AND TRANSMISSION

Introduction: in search of 'pe trewe copy'London, British Library, Eger ton MS 650 is a manuscript of the Middle English prose Brut chronicle, the work descended from Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Anglo-Norman prose Brut that recorded British history from its Trojan origins and its mythical past up to its medieval present in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The prose Brut was hugely popular: it survives in almost two hundred manuscripts (second in number among Middle English works only to the Wycliffite Bible), and over twenty versions and continuations, as successive generations of historians brought its accretive narrative up to date.1Eger ton 650, however, is a unique copy of the Brut. Its text is one of the standard early fifteenth-century continuations, until it reaches the account of Henry V's siege of the city of Rouen in 1418. At this point the scribe broke off, and instead of finishing the account of the siege, he wrote in red ink and a decorated script, as though it were a capitulum rubric:Here is no more of the sege of Rone and joat is be cause we wanted j^e trewe copy hereof bot who so euer ow[n]ys jois boke may wryte it oute in he henderend of his boke or in he forh end of it whene he gettes he trew copy Where it is wryttyn wryte in heis iii voyde lyne where it may be foundyn.2This is a remarkable intervention, not only for the direct address it makes to imagined future owners and readers, but also for the specific codicological instructions issued to them (rivalled only, perhaps, by the famous marginal note to the Roman d'Alexandre in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud 264, fol. 67')d Many things about it merit comment: the tantalizing insight it offers into the workings of the community of readers, book-owners, and copyists of the chronicle, which it clearly envisaged; the lack of a dividing line between readers and writers, addressed together and indiscriminately as 'who so euer ow[n]ys his boke'; and the tension implied between the neat visual presentation of the rubric (suggesting that its scribe was concerned with the cosmetic appearance of his book as a finished product) and the implication of its content that he explicitly did not envisage his chronicle as a finished product, but anticipated a recopying that would attend the future discovery of a 'trewe copy', and would occupy the flyleaves and margins. All of this is peculiar to the context of the Brut, a work that was unusual in being authored not individually but collectively and serially; and in being deliberately and permanendy unfinished, imagining (and in this case soliciting) its own continuation.Most pertinent to the purposes of this article, however, is the idea of a 'trewe copy', the implications and complexities of which the following argument will seek to unravel. For whatever reason, the scribe regarded his exemplar for the account of the siege of Rouen as defective. On a practical level, the ubiquity and availability of the Brut in many different versions presumably made the chances of a later reader finding a 'trewe copy' fairly high; although the rubricator seems to take for granted that the anticipated continuator would agree with him on what exacdy what would constitute such a 'trewe copy'. But on an ideological level, the concept of a 'trewe copy' was far from straightforward in the textual culture of the Middle Ages (as if we needed persuading of this, Chaucer's exasperated 'wordes unto Adam' to 'wryte more trewe' come to mind).4 This article suggests that the reason the rubric appears where it does, and the motivating factor underpinning its concern over the absence of a 'trewe copy', is that behind the Bruts account of the siege of Rouen stood another work, John Page's The Siege of Rouen, whose manner of preservation and incorporation in the chronicle was the particular source for this rubricator's unease. It then ponders what exacdy that phrase might mean in relation to that text, whose own trajectory of transmission and variation fundamentally challenges the assumptions on which the idea, and the possibility, of a 'trewe copy' hinges. …

Ceremony and Conflict in Fifteenth-Century France: Lancastrian Ceremonial Entries into French Towns, 1415-1431

The renewal of the Hundred Years' War by Henry V led to the rapid expansion of Lancastrian power in northern France. Although England's military campaigns have been studied in great detail, historians have paid little attention to the Lancastrian monarchy's use of ceremony to establish its rule in France. This article will principally focus on the ceremonial entry, which was a dynamic and versatile rite that could be adapted to suit the rapidly changing conditions engendered by Lancastrian successes in France. The ceremonial entry underwent a period of intense development in England and France during the later Middle Ages. Following the inclusion of multifaceted dramatic performances in England from 1377 and in France from 1380, entries became increasing complex. A ceremonial entry was the moment at which a ruler took formal possession of a town, and these entries were used frequently in zones of persistent conflict, such as northern France, where towns regularly passed from one lord to another. Indeed, the Lancastrian rulers of France made at least twenty-three ceremonial entries in the sixteen years running from 1415 to 1431. This article will look at Lancastrian ceremonial entries during the period running from Henry Vs invasion of France in August 1415 to his son's coronation at Paris in December 1431. It will provide a wider contextualisation of the Lancastrian monarchy's use of ceremony and relate the developments made to the form and function of the entry to the wider political and economic conditions created by war in northern France. It will show how French ceremonial practices crossed political and cultural borders in the early fifteenth century, when the establishment of Lancastrian rule in northern France led to a range of cultural exchanges among England, France and Burgundy. While the Dual Monarchy was short-lived, several of the ceremonial innovations produced in the early fifteenth century had a lasting impact on French political culture. This article utilizes a wide range of contemporary evidence to investigate the evolution of Lancastrian ceremony in France. Visual material depicting Lancastrian entries in France is scarce; indeed, with a few notable exceptions, much of the visual material relating to French entries of the early fifteenth century comes from illuminated manuscripts created in the later fifteenth century, such as the illustration of Charles VU's entry into Paris in 1436 made by Jean Fouquet in 1484 (BnF, f. fr. 5054: 93v). In addition to the lack of visual material, there are also difficulties with the municipal sources, which are much less complete for the 1420s and the 1430s than they are for the mid-fifteenth century. The lack of good municipal documentation is compensated for by the large number of English, French and Burgundian chronicles (including those written by Monstrelet, Jehan de Wavrin, Pierre Cauchon and Thomas Basin), which give detailed accounts of the entries made by the Lancastrian rulers of France. The most important of these is the chronicle of the so-called bourgeois de Paris, most likely a doctor of theology and a canon of Notre-Dame, even possibly Jean Chuffart, who was also chancellor of the University of Paris (Beaune, Bourgeois 12-13; Bjork 1:282). His place amongst the Parisian social elite put him in a good position to provide detailed accounts of Lancastrian ceremonial entries into the capital of the kingdom; indeed, much of our knowledge about the civic organisation of the entries comes from his journal. Unlike many of the contemporary chroniclers who provided second-hand accounts of the ceremonies, the bourgeois de Paris actually witnessed the entries taking place; moreover, it is probable that he also participated in some of the ceremonies, including those surrounding Henry Vi's coronation in 1431. This makes his work an invaluable source for the study of Lancastrian entries during this period. In addition to these narrative accounts of the ceremonies, we also possess the abundant administrative sources of the Lancastrian monarchy, most notably the Norman rolls (TNAC64). Using the full range of the surviving records, this article will demonstrate that there was an evolution in form of Lancastrian ceremonial entries in France between 1415 and 1431, which reflected the growth in power and scope of English rule in northern France. The article begins with an analysis of the entries made by Henry V during his conquest of Normandy, when he posed first as a conqueror and then as duke of Normandy. It will then examine the ceremonial developments which came in the wake of the sealing of the treaty of Troyes in May 1420, which made Henry regent and heir to the throne of France. The final section of the article considers the resurgence of Valois power in 1429 and how the Lancastrian monarchy utilised ceremony to respond to this threat, most notably with the entry of Henry VI into Paris as king of France.

An Introduction to British Arthurian Narrative by Susan Aronstein (review)

Susan aronstein, An Introduction to British Arthurian Narrative. New Perspectives on Medieval Literature: Authors and Traditions. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012. pp. xvi, 189. isbn: 0-8130-4189-9. $69.95This new series from the University Press of Florida offers introductory surveys aimed at undergraduate students, graduate students, and general readers. To create a 'compact' survey of so sprawling a subject as the British Arthurian tradition is a particular challenge, and in many ways Susan Aronstein's engaging book succeeds admirably. The author's careful historical contextualizing of her many texts (starting with a helpful Chronology at the beginning of the book) creates a persuasive thread of continuity from pre-Conquest Arthurian 'history' through to Thomas Malory's late-medieval summa Arthurianica. There are times when the detail is subject to challenge or correction, but a reader new to this literary tradition is certain to enjoy, and learn much from, Susan Aronstein's overview.After a brief introduction that demonstrates both the persistence of the tradition and the nostalgia that has always characterized it, the first section of the book is devoted to 'the circumstances that made the legend particularly appealing to writers and their audiences' (p. 13). These circumstances are, Aronstein argues, a British history of crises of legitimacy, warfare, and persistent appropriations of useful stories from the past. A survey of some 500 or so years of this history forms a bracing prelude to the meat of the chapter, a discussion of the English chronicle tradition. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Laaeamon all code the Arthurian story as history, though for somewhat different ends; but the themes of conquest, imperialism, and confrontation/ control of various 'others' are common throughout the discussion. Next are two poems focusing on the death of Arthur, the Alliterative Morte Arthure and the Stanzaic Morte Arthure. While the first starts with a vision of Arthurian plenitude, the second is already marked by a wistful sense of days gone by, and Aronstein's evocation of the atmosphere of 'transience and loss' (p. 54) is telling and moving.Chapter Two, 'British Arthurian Romance,' deals with works concentrating on the 'golden age of Arthurian plenitude' (p. 55). In contrast to the relentless forward motion of the historically-inflected chronicle texts, the romances in this chapter pause to focus on the individual. Aronstein begins with Welsh texts, moving through Culhwch ac Olwen's nostalgia for the good old days of the Welsh warrior nobility to the reflection of Welsh politics in the Welsh Arthurian romances. A section on popular Arthurian romances follows; the texts are presented 'as both fantasy and critique' (p. 80), speaking to and of the fractured social landscape in the wake of the Black Death. By organizing these texts around the themes of War and Conquest, Chivalric Adventures, Chivalric Identities, and Otherworldly Encounters, Aronstein weaves the many works into a coherent presentation. Particularly striking is how her concentration on the Gawain romances allows her to present Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as part of a unified, often popular, tradition. It is potentially misleading to argue that the importance of Arthurian popular romances is suggested in part by their being 'among the first printed books at both London and Edinburgh' (p. …

Renée R. Trilling, The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English VerseThe Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse. Renée R. Trilling. Toronto and Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Pp. ix+296.

<i>Renée R. Trilling</i>, The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse<i>The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse</i>. Renée R. Trilling. Toronto and Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Pp. ix+296.

Gower’s Chronicles of Invention: Historiography and Productive Poetry in Book 4 of the Confessio Amantis

For Nowlin, passage in CA 4.2362-2745 that Macaulay headed Uses of Labour actually consists of three separate of invention, detailing the greatest 'inventions' of human culture (183), and these chronicles, he argues, allow to speak to historical project of as a whole--that is, historical project of rewriting of past in order to help restore a fallen present (183). reveals his interest in historiography and his awareness that 'history' itself is a discursive construction (184) throughout his works, but particularly in Visio in VC Book 1 and also elsewhere in CA, where he claims the form as well as matter of (185). The chronicle form does pose a certain dilemma, however, for while offering instructive examples from past, also suggests inevitable decay, contrary to Gower's own purpose, as illustrated in discussion of gentilesse that precedes passage in Book 4 that Nowlin examines. This, then, is problem for chronicler: How can a poet activate productive aspects of chronicle form without reintegrating its potentially corrosive elements? (188). The answer lies in Gower's imitation of practices in late medieval English chronicles that embed within a historiographic expression a dramatization of processes of invention. The productive, imaginative, and ultimately generative work of counteracts corrupting effects of chronicle narratives (188). The model is provided by Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon and Trevisa's translation, which offer a model of both in their principles of selection and arrangement and in invitation to reader to participate in historiographic process. In Book 4, Gower carefully works through conflation of historiography and characteristic of Polychronicon. There, he locates and enacts a compositional process that works to restore productive potential of chronicle form and estrange that form from movement toward discord demonstrated by history of 'gentilesse' (192). The details of Nowlin's account of that process cannot adequately be summarized here. In brief, Gower begins in first chronicle of by emphasizing form and labor of historiographic production, then by narrating simultaneous emergence of and historiography from chronicle of cultural development (192). seems to offer analogue for poetic invention that might be able to 'invent' a way out of corrosive chronicle form established in history of 'gentilesse.' But opposite turns out to be case because of failure of modern alchemists to match their predecessors (195). Alchemy represents at once failure of historiographic narration and productive invention (196). final chronicle in book 4 is something of a restart. It focuses specifically on 'our Marches hiere' (4.2633), that is, Roman tradition that produced Latin grammar, rhetoric, and ultimately Ovid--and by extension, 'Confessio Amantis' (197). The operating principle is congruite (4.2646): the Roman chronicle operates through an appositional, congruous organization that combines tenets of poetic with chronicle form. encodes process of poetic composition into structure of Roman chronicle, replacing chronology with inventional topics. He thereby replaces temporal discord that characterizes progression of chronicles with a structural system that, by definition, encourages discovery, choice, and possibility (198). Here, then, generates a new kind of English poetry, one that invests chronicle form with a vitality that would seem to have productive consequences for of both historiography and poetry (199). In conclusion, These chronicles reveal Gower's working through central historical problem for Confessio--the effort to salvage form of historiography along with its matter, but in a 'newe' way. . . . Adapting a fourteenth-century chronicle practice and applying to his long poem about love, foregrounds mechanism of poetic and historiographic composition and transforms force of codified historical progression into productive poetic creation. His chronicles prompt reflection and investigation, but they also suggest how a massive English poem like might be imagined as self-sustaining, and capable of becoming a kind of imaginative algorithm for poetic posterity. The labor of an English poet-chronicler, Confessio itself becomes a new kind of chronicle that invents history rather than a poem that merely uses it (201). [PN. Copyright. JGN 33.1].

DAVID WOMERSLEY, Divinity and State.

WHAT today we think of as the English Reformation was anything but a straightforward cleansing of the English Church. In some ways it was a by-product of Henry VIII’s political and dynastic desire, his personal conflict with Rome amplified into a national conflict. But as David Womersley notes, Henry himself was no Protestant, and it is not surprising that his ‘theological conservatism’ (22) troubled and made ambiguous the entire Reformation movement in England. The identification of monarchical legitimacy with religious orthodoxy was not easily achieved, and in his excellent book Divinity and State Womersley traces the contradictions and revisions of English history (and ‘history’) that it entailed through the implications of early Tudor historiography, and through history plays, particularly those by Shakespeare. His stated aim is to show why authority feared the power of theatre to stage images that fused heresy and sedition. Womersley begins by considering how historiography developed through the rewriting and reediting of English chronicles in relation to quite topical polemical needs. He begins with an examination of Robert Fabyan’s Chronicle, which appeared in four editions over a period of about forty-five years after Fabyan’s death. Each reediting can be seen as a response to specific contemporary issues; thus the 1516 version stressed Fabyan’s attacks on the covetousness and worldliness of clerics, at a time when Wolsey was powerful. The 1533 edition stressed the Chronicle’s warnings against schism, at a time when relations with Rome were particularly strained. The 1542 edition shifted the emphasis of the account of the relations between Henry II and Thomas Becket, preferring the monarch to the churchman, who was presented as a traitor rather than a martyr. The 1559 edition, responding to the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, while ‘unmistakably Protestant’ (35) nevertheless suppresses some of the more radical attitudes of earlier versions. These different iterations of Fabyan’s text demonstrate, Womersley persuasively argues, ‘how a single historical work might be repeatedly adjusted to meet different religious emergencies at the hands of men of very different religious persuasions’ (40).

Henry I's dream in John of Worcester's Chronicle (Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 157) and the illustration of twelfth-century English chronicles

Henry I’s four-part dream sequence in John of Worcester’s Chronicle is well known to both historians and art historians as a rare but striking historical illustration. This article examines the location of the images within the manuscript itself as well as in the broader context of twelfth-century chronicle illustration. Despite the flourishing of history writing in England, the illumination of such works was rare. In the use of diagrams and narrative scenes, the images found in the Oxford manuscript are amongst the more innovative. Like the near contemporary illuminations in Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, the choice of subject and the approach taken, reflect the content of the text itself. It is by locating such manuscripts within the tradition of history-writing and historical illustration that both the inventive and more typical elements become clear.

Dramatic Function of the Chorus in Henry the Fifth

Shakespeare opens every act of his Henry the Fifth with chorus. This is quite unusual in his whole corpus, except Pericles. The chorus in Henry the Fifth does not merely function as a commentator on the dramatic action, but also narrates the main historical events of the play. However, in its narration and reading of main dramatic events, it is very selective in order to foreground Henry's heroic achievements as a warlord. The chorus emphasizes its limit of re-presentation of Henry's heroism on the stage. By admitting the physical insufficiency of the stage to contain the epic grandeur of a history play, the chorus appeals to the audience's sympathetic imagination to make up its limits. The heroic sublime is a Shakespearean strategy to make his audience participate in the critical appreciation of English historical events. Shakespeare's stage is a cauldron into which he puts 'the materials of English chronicles and historical narratives and reshuffles them to his dramatic plot. This Shakespearean re-forming of English history is analogous to the audience's creative and critical re-experience of their past. The chorus in the play incessantly tries to set up Henry as the national hero similar to William the Conqueror. In this sense the chorus stands in for the royalist view of English history. However, the discrepancy between the chorus's narration and dramatic action on the stage shows its partiality and even its distortion of historical significance. The traditional interpretation of the chorus's function was to equate it with Shakespeare the historian in his conservative support of the Tudor myth. This reading is proved wrong in the paper. The chorus ironically cancels and self-consumes its heroic image of Henry by appealing directly to the audience's imagination. The chorus always frustrates the expectations of the tantalized audience: the latter rather experiences painful bodily presence and national disunity disrupting a single and unified nation proclaimed by the chorus. The selective partiality of the chorus in the narration is implicitly juxtaposed with the historiography as a narrative emplotment. The audience experiences history as a story on the stage. Shakespeare's re-presentation of history is both re-forming and re-reading of it at once. He is sceptical and subversive of the Tudor myth, since he puts the whole English history of his dramatization in a hermeneutical circle which makes it refract and reflect itself.

An English chronicle entry on Robin Hood

This short article introduces a previously unknown pre-Reformation chronicle entry about Robin Hood. Until now, no English chronicle entry has been discovered, and only Scottish authors are thought to have set Robin in a chronological context. The new find places Robin Hood in Edward I's reign, thus supporting the belief that his legend is of thirteenth-century origin. It contains a uniquely negative assessment of the outlaw, and provides rare evidence for monastic attitudes towards him (topical, in light of the outlaw's anti-monastic behaviour). By mentioning Sherwood it buttresses the evidence for a medieval connection between Robin and the Nottinghamshire forest with which he has become so closely associated. It also constitutes more evidence for the strength of West Country Robin Hood traditions in the late middle ages.

Eleanor of Aquitaine, Twelfth-Century English Chroniclers and her ‘Black Legend’

Eleanor of Aquitaine, Twelfth-Century English Chroniclers and her ‘Black Legend’

Four Scottish indulgences at Sens

English interest in the great Cistercian abbey of Pontigny was stimulated by the exiles there of two archbishops of Canterbury, Thomas Becket and Stephen Langton.1 As archbishops of Canterbury, Langton and Edmund of Abingdon made gifts to Pontigny abbey in consideration of the welcome given to Becket.2 Edmund did not die at Pontigny, but was a confraterof the community, and the abbot claimed the body, asserting that Edmund had expressed a wish to be buried there. The process of canonisation was rapid.3 After Edmund's canonisation, Henry III sent a chasuble and a chalice for the first celebration of the feast, and granted money to maintain four candles round the saint's shrine.4 In 1254, en route from Gascony to meet Louis IX in Chartres and Paris,5 Henry visited Pontigny, as his brother Richard of Cornwall, who seems to have pressed for canonisation, had done in 1247.6 Archbishop Boniface of Canterbury ordered the celebration of the feast to be observed throughout his province.7 Pope Alexander IV granted a dispensation to allow Englishwomen to enter the precinct of Pontigny abbey on the feast of the translation of the relics of St Edmund8 (women were normally forbidden to enter a Cistercian monastery). Matthew Paris, the greatest English chronicler of the age, wrote a life of the saint.9 English interest continued into the fourteenth century. In 1331 an English priest was given a licence to visit the shrine,10 but it seems likely that the Hundred Years’ War made pilgrimage to Pontigny difficult.11 The indulgences preserved by the abbey reveal an interest in the shrine throughout the Western Church, granted as they were by prelates from Tortosa to Livonia and Estonia, and from Messina to Lübeck.12

The Death of John Comyn: What Was Going On?

The aim of this article is to explore in depth what was ‘going on’ - as opposed to simply what ‘happened’ - when John Comyn was killed by Robert Bruce in Dumfries on 10 February 1306, in one of the most dra-matic and pivotal events in Scotland's history. It divides into two parts. The first considers the main medieval sources. These were of course all written after the event, and so are invariably coloured by hindsight and what is nowadays called ‘spin’; hence they are not ‘true’ accounts but constructed narratives. Their treatment here aims to elucidate what each author was trying to present to his intended audience. The article deals with, in turn: the narratives in the English government documents produced in the killing's aftermath; the near-contemporary English chronicle narrratives; the rather later Scottish chronicle narratives; some additional Scottish narra-tives found within certain poems; and finally the lay-authored Scalacronica, which has a significantly different perspective from other English chroni-cles. In general, the narratives are revealingly complex; despite their slants, they are far from being exercises in crude propaganda. And, significantly, the Scottish chronicles (especially Wyntoun) and Scalacronica give emphasis to the fact that the victim of the killing, John Comyn, was the nephew of King John Balliol and grandson of Dervorguilla, lady of Galloway, and thus was a leading member of the senior Scottish royal line. Moreover, close reading of ‘The Scottish poem’ in Liber Extravagans (appended to Bower's Scotichronicon) reveals a contemporary plea for John Comyn to become king of Scots. In the second half of the article, the implications of this ‘Comyn-for-king’ concept are pursued. None of the standard accounts of the period pays serious attention to Comyn's royal descent; discussions of the killing invariably focus on Robert Bruce. Therefore an attempt is made here - despite the understandable absence of hard evidence - to consider the killing more from the victim's point of view. It is argued that, after the de facto collapse of Balliol kingship in 1303-4, John Comyn (because of his own lineage) would never have accepted Robert Bruce (whose line of descent had been declared inferior in 1292) as king. Consequently, political compromise between the two men was obviously out of the question. Therefore, although none of the chronicle narratives can be taken at face value, their consistent presenta-tions of the killing as premeditated are possibly valid after all, despite the denials of the main modern studies. And although (because of the problem of evidence) it is impossible to achieve certainty over this ques-tion, what does become clear is that Comyn's claim to the throne is the crucial factor for understanding what was going on when he was killed.

King Arthur's Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition by Carolyne Larrington (review)

REVIEWS1Ol in the field. With such a focused approach, Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan offers a fascinating analysis of Elis Gruffydd's chronicle, in light of the sources available to that Welshman serving at Calais and steeped in the sixteenth-century debate about Arthur's historicity. In an equally fascinating argument on hybridism in late romances, focusing on the Chevalier du Papegau ('The Knight ofthe Parrot'), Jane H.M. Taylor traces a shift from the quest's emphasis on self-testing to the travel narrative's inclusion ofa narrator who participates in marvelous discoveries. Edward Donald Kennedy cogently demonstrates why Robert de Boron's Christianized version of the grail story had so little influence on English chroniclers other than Hardyng, while Christopher A. Snyder challenges the assumption that the Arthur of the Nennian Historia Brittonum is not a king. Two careful essays reach more tentative conclusions: NorrisJ. Lacy ties the king's lack ofemotion in Lancelot-Grail to his public role and veiled private life, while Siân Echard suggests that Geoffrey of Monmouth's cyclic view ofhistory owes more to the discomforting spin ofFortune's wheel than to God. Despite an eclectic sense of audience within the volume, each essay achieves its purpose. TheFortunes is balanced by treatment ofthe Latin, Welsh, French, German, and English traditions, with scholars deftly handling the crossovers, as does Dennis Green when he surveys how British and French romancers mimic the truth claims of eyewitnesses before examining Hartman and Gottfried's use of such parodie techniques to blur the lines of historia andfabuh. The volume is rounded out by Joan Tasker Grimbert's contribution, which compares Lancelot and Guinevere's passion to that ofTristan and Yseut, in the French prose romances and the Italian TavolaRhonda. Alison Stones begins her essaywith manuscript illustrations ofArthur on Fortune's wheel, but as these are few, she moves to a too general treatment of the ways the king is depicted in the Lancelot-Grailcycle. In contrast, the best essays directly treat Fortune or mimic her wheel's turn in their cyclic structure. She and Arthur are lucky in having their fate handled by an editor as deft as Lacy. KAREN CHEREWATUK St. OlafCollege carolyne larrington, King Arthur's Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition. London: LB. Tauris, 2006. Pp. viii, 264. isbn: 978-1-84511113 -7. $35. £18.99. In King Arthur's Enchantresses, Carolyne Larrington surveys representations of Morgan Ie Fay, the Lady of the Lake, the Viviane/Niviene figure, and Morgause in medieval literature, Victorian re-imaginings, and modern popular culture. The introduction points out that in medieval texts the enchantresses are not witches but aristocratic women who have learned magic and whose actions defy traditional concepts of feminine behavior. Chapter one defines natural and demonic magic; identifies several magical elements appearing with one or more ofthe enchantresses, such as herbs, rings, enclosure, and shape-shifting; and concludes with the insightful claim that governs the remaining chapters: the magic performed by these Arthurian enchantresses 'cannot escape from central and contemporary questions about gender 102ARTHURIANA and power' (28). The next three chapters focus on Morgan, while the fifth concentrates on Viviane, the huntress/Niviene-figure, and the Lady of the Lake. Chapter 6 is devoted to Morgause, for although she is not an enchantress in medieval works, she becomes one in some modern media. Chapter 7 takes up Victorian literary and pictorial treatments of 'Vivien.' The final chapter turns to representations of the enchantresses from Twain's 1889 Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court to the wicker 'Nine Morgens' carried in the procession at the 2003 Glastonbury Goddess Festival. In developing the chapters on the medieval texts, Larrington summarizes episodes involving the enchantresses and weaves in interpretations based on selected scholarship as she emphasizes gendered aspects. For instance, in chapter three, we hear about women's words, such as Morgan's 'magically enhanced words of enchantment' keeping unfaithful knights in coerced fidelity in the VaIsans Retour (55), but Enide's cousin speaking only in the 'powerless sphere of female conversation' when her lover, Maboagrain, is liberated in Chretien's Erec (53). The second chapter's topic of Morgan and Arthur's sibling relationship is a welcome...

L'épithaphe d'Henri II Plantagenêt à Fontevraud

Three English chroniclers have passed on the epitaph of Henry Plantagenêt's tomb at Fontevraud. Half the epitaph recalls the glory of the king, new Alexander ; the other half reminds the dead that happens unexpectedly ; and it invites to do good during our life. These verses give an account of the impact of a suddenly interrupted career that was exceptionally brilliant.