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Roman de Brut
Wace; Edited by Glynn S. Burgess; Translated by Jean Blacker
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'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 Benoit 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.
The 15 original essays in this volume represent only a few of the
paths that Glyn Burgess's research career has taken: lays, by Marie
de France and unknown authors; manuscript collections of lays and
fabliaux; episodic narratives, from ancestral/ outlaw romance and
Norman vernacular historiography; transformations of the Brendan
legend; and authorial voice in religious texts, including Wace's.
The diversity of content and approaches has created a volume which
will serve both as a fitting tribute to Burgess's continuing
influence and expertise, as well as a contribution to the growing
theoretical and applied work in the area of the short narrative,
which the authors extend to a very broad range of works, from
fabliau to hagiography, from history to myth. This breadth of
interest, within a close and analytical focus on short narrative,
make this an important, indeed unique, collection.
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