The English Reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth

Abstract

Historical narratives in Middle English that translated or incorporated matter from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s DGB began as early as 1185, continued to be composed throughout the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, and were consulted by Tudor readers and historians of England across the 16th century.1 The earlier Middle English texts duplicated the historical span of the DGB, but by the end of the 13th century, the Geoffrey-derived history of ancient Britain began to appear in English as the first section of longer histories of Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and Plantagenet England. Some translations of Geoffrey’s work into Middle English altered the position of the DGB as providing a history of origins for the British (i.e. Britons), transposing that history into a teleological history of the English, to whom dominion over the island of Britain explicitly belonged. The collective term “Brut tradition” (referring to any history based on Brutus, Geoffrey’s Trojan-descended, legendary founder of ancient Britain), has been applied to any and all of these texts, but the nomenclature of “Brut” can be ambiguous and scholars must remain alert to possible confusion in the literature about which text, or genre, is actually under discussion.2 Whereas Geoffrey’s DGB was a significant catalyst for writing in Middle English from the 12th through the 15th centuries, many Middle English “Brut” histories