Religion and the Church in Geoffrey of Monmouth

Abstract

Few authors inspire as many conflicting interpretations as Geoffrey of Monmouth. On one proposition, however, something close to a consensus reigns: Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote history in a manner that shows remarkable indifference toward religion and the institutional church. Antonia Gransden, in her fundamental survey of medieval English historical writing, says that “the tone of his work is predominantly secular” and even that he “abandoned the Christian intention of historical writing” and “had no moral, edificatory purpose”, while J.S.P. Tatlock, author of what is still the fullest study of Geoffrey, speaks of a “highly intelligent, rational and worldly personality” who shows “almost no interest in monachism ... nor in miracles”, nor indeed in “religion, theology, saints, popes, even ecclesiastics in general”.1 Yet, even if these claims reflect a widely shared view, it is nonetheless startling that they should be made about a writer who lived in the first half of the 12th century. Some commentators find Geoffrey’s work so divergent from the norms of earlier medieval historiography that they are reluctant to treat him as a historian at all. Gransden flatly describes him as “a romance writer masquerading as an historian”.2 More cautiously, Matilda Bruckner names Geoffrey among those Latin historians who paved the way for romance by writing a secular-minded form of history “tending to pull away from the religious model (derived from Augustine and Orosius) that had viewed human history largely within the scheme of salvation”.3 This Christian tradition of historiography, against which Geoffrey of Monmouth is said to have rebelled, had its origins in late antiquity in the works of Eusebius, Augustine, and Orosius. Leaving aside the important differences between these authors, their legacy may be summarized as follows. History had a clear beginning in Creation, and it would come to an equally clear end with the final Judgement. Everything that happened between those two points