Abstract
Geoffrey of Monmouth has received recognition for his contribution to the development of Latin into the language of medieval “courtiers iers” as well as to the emergence of the genres of romance and political prophecy. 1 Even his minor contribution to the content of early modern plays has received acknowledgment.2 Literary critics have, however, misread the Arthurian section of Geoffrey’s Historia regum Britanniae and neglected to explore the most interesting aspect of his Arthurian poem, the Vita Merlini. Because The History of the Kings of Britain, a work completed shortly before its discovery in January 1139, is universally acknowledged as a foundational text in the medieval Arthurian tradition, it receives a good deal of scholarly attention.3 Nevertheless, the readings of it that scholars produce—whether those readings focus solely on the Arthurian section or discuss both the Arthurian and non-Arthurian material in the book— tend to position Geoffrey’s history as a patr ia rchal, problematic, and lowly predecessor of the medieval romances that followed it. In contrast to his well-known major work, Geoffrey’s Life of Merlin (completed ca. 1150) receives little scholarly attention; a likely reason for this critical neglect is the poem’s “extremely limited circulation” during the medieval period that prevented its having a significant inf luence upon subsequent versions of the Arthurian legend. 4
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Notes
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Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 26–27;
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Julia Briggs discusses the Vortiger and Uther Pendragon plays performed by Philip Henslowe’s company as well as William Rowley’s The Birth of Merlin and Thomas Middleton’s Hengist, “New Times and Old Stories: Middleton’s Hengist,” Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 29 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 108–9 [107–21].
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Tolhurst, F. (2012). Introduction. In: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Feminist Origins of the Arthurian Legend. Arthurian and Courtly Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337947_1
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