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This chapter moves to medieval Wales and examines the first appearances of the ideal of prophecy from the heavens in Welsh literature. It demonstrates that some of the perhaps 11th or 12th century poems in the Book of Taliesin (N.L.W. MS Peniarth 2) show a consciousness of the occult value of knowledge of the heavenly bodies, and that this knowledge increases the prestige of the mythic poet-prophet Taliesin. This is concentrated in the word sywedydd, which implies ‘sage’ or ‘astrologer’. Geoffrey of Monmouth was concerned to emphasise the astrological nature of prophecy in his Historia Regum Britannie (1137) and Vita Merlini (1150/1), two texts which scholars have acknowledged to draw on Celtic sources analogous to the poems of the Book of Taliesin. In these two texts, which are fundamental sources for the development of the Merlin legend, Geoffrey displays a strong awareness of the new learning associated with the translations of Arab astrological texts — learning which he wittily transposes to the legendary British past. Thus, he is drawing both on the new knowledge of astrology which had become available in his time, and also on Welsh traditions which connected prophetic poetry with an understanding of the cosmos.

This chapter explores the origins of Merlin the Magician and shows that he was a creation of the twelfth century. The medieval Merlin was not a figure of legend but an apparently documented, long-lost maker of British history. Despite his gradual move from the pages of history to those of literature, the key elements of his magical powers have not changed significantly. According to a story first told by the cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth, Merlin was the semi-human child of a Welsh Christian princess and a demon. His powers ranged from seeing into the depths of the earth to interpreting the motions of the stars, and, although he was never under the control of powerful kings, he had the option to either reveal his knowledge to them or not. Merlin was master of all the forces, of all the languages and meanings, of the earth and the stars above it.

This chapter examines the increasing quantity and variety of Welsh history writing produced between the late eleventh and late thirteenth centuries. Much of this responded to political changes, both attempts by Welsh rulers to expand and consolidate their power, and foreign conquest and settlement that led to the creation of marcher lordships and to attempts by kings of England to assert their overlordship over Wales which culminated in the Edwardian conquest. It begins by focusing on accounts of the ancient and early medieval history of the Britons of Wales written between the late eleventh and mid-twelfth centuries: saints’ Lives and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s hugely popular Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of Britain’), a cornerstone of medieval Welsh historical writing. This section concludes by examining the reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the writings of Gerald of Wales and Welsh translations of Geoffrey’s History. The rest of the chapter turns to narrative works in which secular rulers occupy centre stage. It begins with the only surviving medieval biography of a medieval Welsh ruler, the Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan (d. 1137), before discussing Latin chronicles, especially those underlying the Welsh-language chronicles known as Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’). After addressing some of the textual problems these pose, the chapter assesses how the chroniclers portrayed Welsh rulers and the extent to which they promoted the idea of a united Wales.

In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, medieval thinkers disagreed about what they called “marvels,” that is, phenomena in the natural world that cannot be understood according to the laws of Nature, and about Merlin, the preeminent performer of marvels. Rationalists denied the existence of marvels because they denied that anything natural was beyond human comprehension. They argued that, because Merlin was not a saint, enacting miracles with divine aid, he must have been a limb of the devil, enacting magic with demonic assistance. Contemplatives affirmed the existence of marvels because they affirmed the irreducible mysteriousness of God’s existence. They maintained that Merlin possessed a natural power, neither divine nor demonic, to predict the future. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Life of Merlin and History of the Kings of Britain and Robert de Boron’s Merlin, Merlin demonstrates that time is not a linear sequence of points but a web of correspondences, where marvelous portents (like dragons) anticipate the future and marvelous memorials (like Stonehenge) recall the past. One should respond to a marvel, these texts suggest, not by trying to understand it, but by delighting in it, as one responds to romance.

This chapter describes women's participation in spiritual relationships with churchmen. The role of twelfth-century secular noblewomen in procuring, commissioning and selecting literature is developed here in an examination of their role as patrons of books and literature. Spiritual relationships were an expression of aristocratic social cohesiveness and a route whereby women could exert power. There is evidence that secular women of the lesser nobility patronised writers and poets, actively fostered the production of books and were themselves literate. Geoffrey of Monmouth's view of women gives an insight into the ideal roles of women in society. Women's acquisition of books, historiography, genealogies, prayers, poems and saints' lives was an important channel of political, religious and social influence. The examples of Alice de Condet and Constance fitz Gilbert illustrate that some twelfth-century women of the nobility were able to read and participate in the production of literature.

This chapter provides a chronological introduction to the history of York, concentrating on the period before 1068. It surveys both medieval histories of the origins of the city such as those provided by Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth, and histories of the city developed since the eighteenth century. Similarly the chapter surveys the geographical context and setting of York with a particular focus on representations of York on medieval maps and its position in relation to Northumbria and Yorkshire before 1066. Finally the chapter sets out the main approaches and methodology of the whole book including an introduction to developing forms of land tenure in the period after 1068.

Chapter 2 surveys the transmission and reception of the Destruction of Troy in the Middle Ages, from the earliest attestations of the text in Carolingian Francia to the height of its popularity in twelfth-century England. Specifically, it examines how medieval scribes and compilers packaged the text in multi-text manuscripts, which survive today in great numbers. Many of these codices continued Dares with accounts of the Trojan origins of the Franks, Britons, and other medieval peoples. In this fashion the Destruction of Troy morphed from an ancient history into a medieval genealogy—it functioned as a means of linking the medieval present to the ancient past through claims of Trojan ancestry. The latter portions of the chapter explore Dares’ many connections with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, a twelfth-century pseudo-history that famously claimed Britain had been founded by the Trojan Brutus.

The chapter compares different uses of the legend of Troy as a ‘Trojan preface’ to historical and literary texts in medieval England, Wales, and Ireland. Typically used to introduce narratives of nationalist significance, the ‘Trojan preface’ forms a distinctive genre that functioned to establish or confirm myths of national origin. The work of early historians such as Henry of Huntingdon and Geoffrey of Monmouth provides examples of the uses of Troy to construct a particular kind of English identity. In Welsh and Irish texts, the Trojan legend was inserted as a chronological milestone which aligned the ethnic histories of Wales (or Britain) and Ireland with world events. The legacy of Rome was another source of English identity which worked to exclude the early British people and their descendants, the Welsh. Rome was also an important point of reference for the Welsh and Irish, who established their claim to ancient lineage through literary references to Britain under the Romans and through adaptations of Latin epic. The ambiguity of Troy, represented by Aeneas as a figure of both heroic endeavour and treacherous betrayal, is addressed in different ways by English, Welsh, and Irish writers. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Trojan prefaces in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer’s House of Fame, suggesting that these prefaces are motivated comments on the questionable historical construction of English identity.

This chapter explores the defence and reaffirmation of ancient British origins and their refashioning as instruments for legitimizing both religious and dynastic change in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Particular attention is given, first, to the defence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History by the Welsh Renaissance scholars Sir John Prise and Humphrey Llwyd, and, second, to Bishop Richard Davies’s preface to the 1567 Welsh translation of the New Testament, which portrayed early British and Welsh Christianity as independent of the papacy in order to argue that the Protestant Reformation was a restoration of the Church’s pristine purity. In countering Polydore Vergil’s scepticism about Geoffrey’s account of ancient British history, Welsh scholars addressed themselves in Latin to a learned readership, especially outside Wales, and sought to demonstrate the merits of the British History related by Geoffrey and its relevance for Britain as a whole. In engaging with debates about the reliability of sources Prise and Llwyd laid particular emphasis on the importance of the Welsh language as authentic testimony to British antiquity, while in adapting the historical arguments of English Protestant apologists Davies privileged the Welsh on account of their being the direct descendants of the Britons, enjoying a special claim on the inheritance of the Britons’ apostolic Christianity.

This chapter explores two apparent opposites, wild man and knight. Neither term is stable, as each draws upon the other to confirm its own identity. As the two sides skirmish, the boundary between them is re-invented as a site of play. First, the ‘bodies’ of wild men and knight are examined, with reference to Bakhtin's analysis of the grotesque, ‘open’ body in contrast to the opaque, ‘closed’ body of courtly convention. The chief text examined is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The next section discusses those knights who, temporarily, become wild men — Partonope, Sir Orfeo, Chrétien's Yvain, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Merlin, Orson in Valentine and Orson. The last section focuses specifically upon the late romance of Valentine and Orson, and the ways in which themes of wildness and courtliness are figured within it.

The medieval reception of classical historiography is a story of negotiation: between 'secular' and 'sacred' subject matter; between 'cyclic' and 'salvific' notions of temporality; between the appropriation of classical forms and ambivalence about the principles underpinning those forms. This chapter explores these negotiations of form and subject matter as they appear in the writings of English authors, from the early medieval historians Gildas, Bede, and Nennius, through the biographers Einhard and Asser, to post-Conquest authors including Henry of Huntingdon, John of Salisbury, Geoffrey of Monmouth, William of Malmesbury, and Gerald of Wales. It examines the claims these writers made about their works, and argues that medieval English authors always appreciated the opportunities and obligations that attended the writing of history and biography, but it was not until the post-Conquest period that authors exploited the tension between the form and the substance of those genres in a manner comparable to their classical predecessors.

The extraordinary success enjoyed by Arthurian romance in Plantagenet domains has led most historians and specialists in twelfth-century literature to see it as part of a propaganda exercise orchestrated by the dynasty itself. Today, there is a tendency to accept the idea in a more tempered form; people prefer to talk about ‘diffused’ propaganda' for the Plantagenet ideology. Thanks to the success of Geoffrey of Monmouth's work, the Historia regum Britanniae, the prestige of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere rubbed off onto Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose ancestors they were taken to be now that the court of King Arthur had been ascribed historical status. This chapter states with some confidence that the Plantagenet court adopted the Arthurian one and made it its own by assimilation, for a variety of ideological motives.

This chapter argues that the founding of the Arthurian world rests on otherness thanks to the role of Merlin, a character simultaneously good and bad. Examining works spanning the centuries from Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace to the late thirteenth-century Claris et Laris, the study traces the tale of Merlin’s origins along with the story of Arthur’s conception. Whether the texts treat the material directly or indirectly through allusions, they all elicit questions concerning the relationship between history and fable, truth and lies. While early works privilege the historical aspects, Robert de Boron blurs the boundary between fiction and history, and Claris et Laris abandons claims to historical truth and chooses to underscore fiction instead. Ultimately, the chapter concludes, the genre of romance resides on the permeable boundary between history and fiction.

Having begun as a short-lived peace treaty in 1215, Magna Carta grew to acquire a quasi-sacral status over the course of the thirteenth century. This chapter traces the development of the “Great Charter,” arguing that literary modes of invention contributed vitally to its elevation as a symbol for the rule of law. It looks to three sites for the production of the “idea” of Magna Carta: in the chronicling traditions of St. Albans Abbey, in the legal historiography of London, and in the Latin, Anglo-French, and Middle English verse ephemera that proliferated in the margins of law books and histories. In all of these instances, literary forms of invention and historical modes of finding precedent converge, with the result that Magna Carta comes to embody both “old law” and the prospect of future reform.

Chapter 2 introduces John Higgins’s first contribution to the corpus, and considers the ways in which his Mirror prequel works with Baldwin’s interest in textual transmission to retell the story of Britain’s legendary foundation. Contrasting the learned humanism of Higgins’s paratextual statements of intent with the dream vision in which his history is embedded, the chapter explores the anxieties attendant on Elizabethan historians of the English past, and what was at stake in the absence of a reliable national origin myth. We see Higgins employing a series of distancing techniques which evoke the inaccessibility and contested nature of ancient British history, such as medieval dream vision, while at the same time he draws his subjects closer by emphasizing the affective power and benefits of tragic narrative.

This chapter assesses the significance of the unprecedented growth in Welsh historical writing, mostly in the Welsh language, in the period from the Edwardian conquest of Wales to the Reformation and Acts of Union. This consisted mainly of curating and consolidating works produced earlier in the Middle Ages rather than the composition of new texts. For scribes and patrons, the history that mattered most concerned the Britons and their Welsh successors under the princes whose rule had ended in 1282. By contrast, accounts of the period after the Edwardian conquest were few, brief, and focused on events in England more than those in Wales. The first part of the discussion surveys the main Welsh historical texts composed from the late thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries, with particular attention to the efforts, deeply influenced by Geoffrey of Monmouth, to give the history of the Welsh canonical form in a sequence of texts which between them narrated events from the Trojan War to 1282. The second part focuses on the poet, genealogist, and scribe Gutun Owain (fl. c.1451–1499), the most prolific writer of history in medieval Wales, including his borrowings from the first printed edition of the Middle English prose Brut chronicle published by William Caxton in 1480. These borrowings reflect how, for Gutun Owain, the history of the Welsh in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was inextricably linked to the kingdom of England and predicated on loyalty to its monarch, while nevertheless retaining a distinctively Welsh inflection.

Poised between two worlds, liminal between the known and the unknown, the figure of the wild man brings to a head questions about the dividing line between animals and humans. The Giant Herdsman in Chrétien's Yvain reflects the putative ugliness of ‘peasants’ back to a courtly readership, while other texts discussed, including Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, Mandeville's Travels, and the Prose Life of Alexander probe the vital question, ‘Is the wild man a man?’ (and therefore a candidate for salvation?). The iconography of the wild body is explored, particularly the motif of hairiness. It is argued that the wild man's hairy body stands at one end of a spectrum that extends the other way to the over-tended ‘fanne’ of Absolon in the Miller's Tale. In the ‘dressing’ of the wild man that happens in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight there is often deliberate play around his borderline identity.

This chapter addresses the scarcity of avenging daughters in early modern texts, arguing that Shakespeare’s Cordelia in King Lear provides an exception to this paradigm. In scripting such an unexpected part for a female character, Shakespeare subverts the traditionally male gendered role of the avenger son and reconfigures earlier versions of the legend (such as those found in accounts by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Holinshed, and John Higgins and the anonymous King Leir). The chapter demonstrates the play’s structural affinities with the revenge genre, arguing that King Lear offers ethically contrasting forms of requital that are also gendered: while Goneril and Regan correspond to negative stereotypes about vengeful women, Shakespeare’s Cordelia (particularly in the 1623 folio), resembles the ‘male-like’ Cordelia depicted in the historical chronicles. Finally, the chapter asks what commentary on injustice, filial duty, and revenge Shakespeare’s harrowing, unsentimental dramatization of the Lear legend offered its early seventeenth-century audiences.