Jean Blacker - Böcker

'Whoever wishes to hear about, and to know about, kings and heirs, about who first ruled England and which kings it had, Master Wace, who is telling the truth about this, has translated this.'Wace's Roman de Brut (1155) can be seen as the gateway to the history of the Britons for both French and English speakers of the time, and thus to Arthurian history, as the first complete Old French adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin History of the Kings of Britain (late 1130s), in which Arthur appears for the first time as king of the Britons. The Roman de Brut was a foundational work, an inspiration for a series of anonymous verse Bruts of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries and for the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut -- the most widely read French vernacular text on this material in medieval England -- as well as a forerunner of the Middle English Brut tradition, including Layamon's Brut (c. 1200). Wace's poem thus inaugurates and shapes Brut traditions, including Arthurian tales, in verse and in prose, in historiography and in literature, including Wace's innovation of King Arthur's Round Table.This volume contains an English prose translation of Wace's Roman de Brut, accompanied by an introduction and notes, a select bibliography, a summary of the text, a list of manuscripts, and indexes of personal and geographical names.

The twelfth century witnessed the sudden appearance and virtual disappearance of an important literary genre-the Old French verse chronicle. These poetic histories of the British kings, which today are treated as fiction, were written contemporaneously with Latin prose narratives, which are regarded as historical accounts. In this pathfinding study, however, Jean Blacker asserts that twelfth-century authors and readers viewed both genres as factual history.Blacker examines four Old French verse chronicles-Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis (c. 1135), Wace's Roman de Brut (c. 1155) and Roman de Rou (c. 1160–1174), and BenoÎt de Sainte-Maure's Chronique des Ducs de Normandie (c. 1174–1180) and four Latin narratives-William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum (c. 1118–1143) and Historia Novella (c. 1140–1143), Orderic Vitalis's Historia Ecclesiastica (c. 1118–1140), and Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1138). She compares their similarity in three areas-the authors' stated intentions, their methods of characterization and narrative development, and the possible influences of patronage and audience expectation on the presentation of characters and events.This exploration reveals remarkable similarity among the texts, including their idealization of historical and even legendary figures, such as King Arthur. It opens fruitful lines of inquiry into the role these writers played in the creation of the Anglo-Norman regnum and suggests that the Old French verse chronicles filled political, psychic, and aesthetic needs unaddressed by Latin historical writing of the period.