Kingship, conquest, and Patria: Literary and cultural identities in medieval French and Welsh Arthurian romanc

This study explores the relation of political change to literary form, specifically tracing the development of two national corpora of medieval Arthurian romance in the historical contexts of insular Angevin expansion and later continental Capetian centralization. The romances of Chretien de Troyes and the three thirteenth-century Welsh rhamantau, despite being the products of opposing cultures in an age of conquest and colonialism, collectively participate in a dramatic revision of the figure of King Arthur created by Geoffrey of Monmouth and his influential Historia Regum Britannie. Unlike the hero of Geoffrey's Latin historiography, the romance king never fights or defeats foreign armies, his authority and court are increasingly sidelined to the margins of narrative action, and he is wholly divorced from the messianic prophecy of pan-British dominion that adds nationalistic flavor to the Historia. Such pointed decline in the literary image of kingship is considered here in the contemporary context of reinvigorated and centralizing monarchies that increasingly curtailed the independence of both northern French and Welsh principalities. Chretien and the Welsh rhamantau offer trenchant criticism of the exercise of sovereign kingship, and the waning King Arthur of vernacular romance counters contemporary political change with an ideology of knightly, baronial independence that coheres these two distinct national corpora.;Part I examines the figure of King Arthur in the long-standing tradition of insular national writing, with chapters concentrating on early Latin and vernacular Welsh narrative and on the Historia of Geoffrey of Monmouth. A historical consideration of monarchy, baronial autonomy, and aristocratic patronage in northern France and Wales provides the focus of Part II, which situates Arthurian romance in the wake of both the Norman Conquest and the twelfth-century rise of the Angevin empire and its rival Capetian monarchy. Turning to the romances, Part III analyzes the critique of Arthurian kingship inherent to both corpora before reflecting, in conclusion, on these texts as the separate products of opposing cultures in an age of conquest.