How England was Called Albion: The Legendary History of Britain in Script and Print, c.1330-1575
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2021-08-01
Date
2017-05-03
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
The legendary history of Britain’s first kings was given full form around 1138, when Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) introduced Anglo-Norman England to Brutus, the purported great-grandson of Aeneas and eponymous founder of Britain. Brutus—whose descendants included King Lear, Cymbeline, Constantine the Great, and King Arthur—was one of a number of Trojan ancestors invented by the historians of twelfth-century Europe. Now notable for its contributions to Shakespearean drama and Arthurian romance, by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the story of Brutus and the early Britons was most frequently encountered in chronicle histories of England, particularly the vernacular adaptations now known as Brut chronicles, which survive in over two hundred manuscript exempla as well as numerous printed editions.
This dissertation asserts that the histories of Britain’s foundation and early monarchy remained malleable, contestable, and potent throughout the Middle Ages and into early modernity. As history, the chronicles provided a framework for further reading, both into the history of England and into England’s place within the wider world. As Geoffrey’s Historia was translated and adapted by late medieval chroniclers, the Britons became increasingly grounded in time and place, making them useful historical subjects, but also opening their history up to critique and comparison.
Furthermore, the dissertation re-evaluates the role that chronicle histories played in England’s historical, political, and intellectual culture. By tracing the reading of history in manuscript and printed anthologies, it provides a clearer sense of how the legendary past was made real and relevant to generations of writers and readers across all strata of English society. The re-use and recombination of these manuscripts and printed books, moreover, provides a key context for explaining why, after centuries, the English continued to insist that their earliest ancestors had been the Trojans.
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Keywords
Brutus the Trojan (Legendary Figure), Medieval England, Early Modern England, Chronicles, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Origin Legends, William Caxton, John Dee, Incunabula, Manuscript, Books and Reading, Medieval Literature and Criticism