Abstract
Although Geoffrey of Monmouth’s meaningful inclusion of female figures in his account of the early British past is evident to readers of the Historia regum Britanniae, the uniqueness of his approach to historiography becomes fully apparent only when readers compare his book (commonly referred to as the Vulgate version) to the texts that his first redactor and first translator produced, for both the First Variant and Wace’s roman de Brut significantly alter the Galfridian account.1 The First Variant version of Geoffrey’s history is a redaction produced before Geoffrey’s death, while the roman de Brut is an Anglo-Norman translation of the history completed by Wace during the year in which Geoffrey is said to have died (1155)—a translation which draws upon both the Vulgate and the First Variant versions of The History of the Kings of Britain.2
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Notes
Françoise H. M. Le Saux defines the roman de Brut’s audience as “an aristocratic audience, and more specifically, the royal circle itself,” A Companion to Wace (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2005), p. 82.
Glyn S. Burgess, introduction to The History of the Norman People: Wace’s roman de Rou, trans. Glyn S. Burgess with notes by Glyn S. Burgess and Elisabeth van Houts (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2004), pp. xv–xvi [xi–xxxiv].
Significantly, the word corteis ‘courtliness’ also appears, a word “associated with leisure, wealth, witty and elegant conversation, style and fashion, esthetics, love, and the subordination of knightly prowess to the service of love, all of which flourish during the twelve-year period of pax arthu-riana,” Rupert T. Pickens, “Arthur’s Channel Crossing: Courtesy and the Demonic in Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace’s Brut,” Arthuriana 7.3 (1997): 4 [3–19]. In RB, readers can find medieval terms and details in lines 178, 317–36, 3027–48, 3527, 4346–48, 4845–49, 7704, and 10243–45; references to France in lines 793–1062, 1501–10, 1521–24, 2833–57, 3849–51, 8338, 10085–104, 10105–32, 10869–72, 10915–17, 11051–59, and 12417–28; references to place-name and regime change in lines 3762–74, 3772–84, 5567–68, 8175–78, 13657–58, and 13659–62; and references to continuity and conquest in lines 13643–52, 14719–28, and 14753–56.
Rupert T. Pickens, “Implications of Being ‘French’ in Twelfth-Century England,” in “Chançon legiere a chanter”: Essays on Old French Literature in Honor of Samuel N. Rosenberg, ed. Karen Fresco and Wendy Pfeffer (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, Inc., 2007), p. 383 [373–86]; Le Saux, A Companion, pp. 92 and 81 citing
Hans-Erich Keller, Étude descriptive sur le vocabulaire de Wace (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1953), p. 14; Weiss, introduction to RB, p. xxiii [xi–xxix].
Véronique Zara, “The Historical Figure of Arthur in Wace’s roman de Brut,” Arthuriana 18.2 (2008): 27, 19, and 23 [17–30].
Van Houts notes how Wace sets aside Empress Matilda’s hereditary right, “Latin and French,” in Writers of the Reign of Henry II, ed. Kennedy and Meecham-Jones, p. 62 citing Wace, Le roman de Rou, ed. A. J. Holden, 3 vols. (Paris: A. & J. Picard & Co., 1970–73), 1.7.132–33.
Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “Eleanor of Aquitaine Reconsidered: The Woman and Her Seasons,” in Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 12–13 [1–54].
Lori J. Walters, “Reconfiguring Wace’s Round Table: Walewein and the Rise of the National Vernaculars,” Arthuriana 15.2 (2005): 40, 42, 44, and 48 [39–58].
Lori J. Walters, “Re-Examining Wace’s Round Table,” in Courtly Arts and the Art of Courtliness: Selected Papers from the Eleventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 29 July-4 August 2004, ed. Keith Busby and Christopher Kleinhenz (Cambridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2006), pp. 721–22 [721–744] and “Wace and the Genesis of Vernacular Authority,” in “Li premerains vers”: Essays in Honor of Keith Busby, ed. Catherine M. Jones and Logan E. Whalen (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), p. 508 [507–16].
RB 9655; Walters, “Re-Examining Wace’s Round Table,” in Courtly Arts, ed. Busby and Kleinhenz, p. 739. Peggy McCracken discusses these rumors about Eleanor’s conduct, “Scandalizing Desire: Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Chroniclers,” in Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 248–55 [247–63].
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© 2013 Fiona Tolhurst
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Tolhurst, F. (2013). Undermining and Degrading Female Kingship in the First Variant and Wace’S Roman de Brut . In: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Translation of Female Kingship. Arthurian and Courtly Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329264_4
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