SOURCE: “Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Translation of Insular Historiography,” Arthuriana, Vol. 8, No. 4, Winter, 1998, pp. 42-57.

[In the following essay, Robertson explains how Geoffrey distanced himself from rhetorical historians and the prevailing practices of historiography by asserting that his chronicle was a translation. Robertson also discusses the problem posed by Geoffrey's writing in Latin, a language associated in the Middle Ages with conveying the truth.]

In claiming to translate his Latin history from a Celtic source, Geoffrey attempts to disrupt the received Anglo-Latin historical tradition. The divergent responses of monastic writers and secular rulers to the HRB later in the twelfth-century attest the success of his project.

(KR)

The Trojan vernacular was the most influential language never spoken in the British Isles during the Middle Ages. As one of the first (and most conspicuous) promoters of this hitherto undocumented language, Geoffrey of Monmouth has attained an ascendancy among the practitioners of so-called ‘rhetorical historiography.’ Attached to many twelfth-century chronicles by later historians, this designation acts as a kind of caveat lector, alerting the modern reader to the partial views and factual infelicities (such as a preoccupation with Trojan origins) that characterize many of these writings. And yet most twelfth-century historians were not coy about the overtly rhetorical nature of their writings. Since history was seen as a branch of literature, the task of the historian was to marry historical truth with rhetoric. In the preface to his Gesta regum Anglorum (ca. 1125), William of Malmesbury explains that the writing of history requires an author ‘to season rough materials with Roman wit’ [‘exarata barbarice Romano sale condire’] (1:2). Later in this same work, William praises Bede as a writer whose true stories were conveyed in an eloquent idiom, finding in him a model for later writers to follow.¹ These comments document a belief shared by many early twelfth-century historians: textual truth did not exist in spite of rhetoric but rather was only fully revealed through its agency. Classical rhetorical figures were not mere stylistic affectation for these historians; this manner of speaking was seen to be the appropriate literary counterpart to the ceremonies and symbolic events which these writers described. Rhetorical writing thus had a social dimension, for, as John Ward has pointed out, it ‘functioned, like liturgy, to close out doubt and encourage and create certainty: it was practiced by the technical leaders of society, many of whom were linked with the best families: the bishops, the abbots’ (148).

If Geoffrey of Monmouth is often included among this group of rhetorical historians, by his own account he does not belong in such company. In the preface to his HRB, Geoffrey describes the genesis and methodology of his history, an ostensible translation from a certain ‘britannici sermonis librum vetustissimum’:

Rogatu itaque illius ductus, tametsi infra alienos ortulos falerata uerba non collegerim, agresti tamen stilo propriisque calamis contentus codicem illum in Latinum sermonem transferre curaui. Nam si ampullosis dictionibus pagin

(2:6-12)

[Guided by the request of that man [i.e. Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford], I have taken care to translate the book into the Latin language, though in doing so, I have not gathered ornamental words from other gardens, but have instead been content with a simple style and my own reed pens. If I had covered the page with bombastic figures, I would have bored my readers, for it would have been necessary for them to spend more time in expounding the words than in understanding the story.]²

In contradistinction to William, Geoffrey claims that rhetorical prose works against the historian's desire to craft smoothly flowing narrative. Note that this is not an apology (a conventional instance of the humility topos) but a renunciation (a rejection of the norms of rhetorical history altogether); he does not say that he has done it badly, but rather that he has not done it at all. Geoffrey's wholesale rejection of rhetoric is odd for several reasons. First, the HRB's narrative, loaded as it is with circumstantial detail and direct dialogue, tends to be more rhetorical than contemporary histories that explicitly embraced a rhetorical view of the past. Second, Geoffrey claims to disdain rhetorical figures within the narrative, while he adopts the topos of translatio as a legitimate place from which to narrate his history. I will argue that Geoffrey's announced rejection of rhetorical prose can be seen as symptomatic of his rejection of a particular strain of historical certainty, and his substitution of translation for rhetoric attests the ideological differences that mark out his own work from the works of historians like William of Malmesbury and Bede. If these writers viewed rhetorical prose as a necessary means of legitimating historical truth, Geoffrey asserted that his work could claim an authority from its status as a translation rather than from its dependence on the tradition of classical eloquence. In this way, Geoffrey's HRB opposes an ostensibly ‘British’ historiographical tradition to an Anglo-Latin one. Indeed, the HRB actively resists the tacit Anglo-Latin alliance that was Bede's legacy and that had governed the writing of history on the island since the ninth century.

THE TRANSLATION OF TROY

In the well-known colophon found in several manuscripts of the HRB, Geoffrey differentiates his own project from those of contemporary historians like William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, whom he advises to occupy themselves with historical writings that do not demand a knowledge of the island's British pre-history. William and other early twelfth-century historians (following Bede) saw the history of Britain as a continuation of the history of classical Rome, a past transmitted solely via the act of translatio studii; Geoffrey emphasized the island's Trojan origins, a lineage communicated to the present through the Welsh people and their language in Walter's old book.

Geoffrey refashions the classical past emphasizing the Trojan rather than the Roman past of the island, the British rather than the exclusively Saxon. His narrative foregrounds disruptions to the historical continuum established by Bede (and then embraced by later historians): Britain was founded by Brutus who came to the island via Troy rather than directly from Rome; Caerleon (where Arthur holds his plenary court) is said to be Rome's rival in imperial splendor; the British defeat the Roman general Lucius Hiberius and nearly capture Rome itself. If Rome was for writers like William the emblem of learning and civilization from which contemporary Britain was regretfully alienated, for Geoffrey such alienation was inseparable from the island's origins and reinforced by the continual British struggle against Roman imperium. The HRB's narrative thus poses an unusual critique of Roman history, disarming this historical model not as Augustinian historians did the Virgilian one—that is, by suppressing secular history in favor of salvational—but rather preferring an alternative model of secular history to the Virgilian one. Geoffrey's resistance to the centrality of Rome in insular history allows him to differentiate a British historiographical space distinct from an English one. In this way, Geoffrey's resistance to a rhetorical classicism expressing itself as ‘Roman nostalgia’ witnesses his opposition to the tacit alignment of the Anglo-Saxon with the Roman that prevailed in insular historiography more generally.

Moreover, Geoffrey claims to reverse the tide of translatio studii in which Bede and William participate. In asserting that his work is a translation from an old British book, Geoffrey moves knowledge from west to east, from vernacular into Latin instead of the other way around. Geoffrey returns to this unusual claim at several points in the work, and he is the first writer to explore the potential of such a topos in Anglo-Latin writing (though he was not, of course, the first historian to translate such materials).³ Geoffrey announces in the HRB's preface that his translation was necessary to fill in the gaps left by Bede with reference to British history; he says, in effect, that his translation arose out of a disjunction within the tradition of insular historiography. Yet history writing in the twelfth century (as today) occurred primarily through acts of affiliation (for example, both William of Malmesbury and Henry Huntingdon say that they follow Bede and merely continue where he has left off). The gesture of disaffiliation with which the HRB begins is reinforced by Geoffrey's introduction of the translation topos into twelfth-century historiography as well as his elaboration upon the Trojan origins of the British people.

In the first section of the HRB, Brutus names the capital of his new-found land, ‘Troia Nova,’ the name by which, Geoffrey tells us, it was known for a long time until through corruption it came to be called Trinovantum. This etymology inscribes Trojan origins on the insular landscape, a rhetorical conversion of the existing Roman topography that gives a new past to the Welsh people.⁴ ‘Trinovantum’ does not actually denote an ancient Roman town (as earlier historians tell us), but only appears that way because of the corrupting influence of time. In this way, the HRB repeatedly shows how rhetoric can constitute, and not merely describe, historical events. To claim Trojan origins is to set yourself up as the rival of Rome, rather than its descendant (and indeed this competition unfolds in the narrative as Arthur first challenges and then defeats the Roman forces). The emergence of the new nation coincides with the emergence of a new language, for what used to be called ‘Trojan or Crooked Greek’ is now called ‘British’ (21:11-13). If Trojan origins offer resistance to Roman ones, similarly, a Trojan-derived vernacular will offer resistance to Latin (as it does in Geoffrey's preface).

But what does Geoffrey's narrative, written in Latin, gain from a staged resistance to Rome and its language? Why claim to be a translator at all? The answer lies partly in the relation of Latin to the other languages spoken on the island in the twelfth century and partly in the received tradition of insular historiography out of which Geoffrey was writing. It is a commonplace that Latin conveyed the authority of both the patristic and academic past; as the public discourse, it stood against an essentially private and parochial vernacular culture. A passage taken from the opening of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica attests this view of the relations among the various languages spoken on the island:

Haec in praesenti, iuxta numerum librorum quibus Lex Divina scripta est, quinque gentium linguis, unam eandemque summae veritatis et verae sublimitatis scientiam scrutatur et confitetur, Anglorum videlicit, Brettonum, Scottorum, Pictorum et Latinorum, quae meditatione Scripturarum ceteris omnibus est facta communis.

(1:16)

[This island at this present, with five sundry languages equal to the number of the books in which Divine Law hath been written, doth study and set forth one and the same knowledge of the highest truth and true majesty, that is, with the language of the English, the Britons, the Scots, the Redshanks [i.e., the Picts], and the Latin, which last by study of the Scriptures is made common to all the rest (trans. King)].

Latin has a kind of ‘transparency’ in relation to the other languages, a transparency that comes from the fact that Latin is not connected to a particular nationality but rather unites them all. If Bede's comment witnesses the cultural (and epistemological) priority assumed by Latin, at the same time, it claims to witness Latin's impartial communality in relation to the insular vernaculars. Latin was not shared equally among the speakers of all the languages on the island, however. Writers like Bede positioned the English people and their Anglo-Saxon language as the natural heirs both to the Roman empire and its church as well as to the Latin learning that accompanied them.

Geoffrey's project, in opposition to Bede's, was to make Latin ‘visible’ in insular historiography. By giving the British language Trojan roots and foregrounding the agency of translatio in his narrative, Geoffrey is able to approach the issues of language and nation as categories worthy of scrutiny rather than merely historical givens. Geoffrey is attempting something new, to establish what Deleuze and Guattari (in their discussion of Kafka) call somewhat ambiguously a ‘minor literature’—a label that describes a work's perspective rather than its quality. This term refers to a literature composed in a ‘major’ language but from a peripheral place (for example, the kind of writing produced by Kafka as a Czech Jew writing in German).⁵ Writing in the dominant discourse, but from a different perspective, allows a writer to ‘deterritorialize’ language; in Deleuze and Guattari's phrase, such deterritorialization makes it possible for a writer to enter into his language ‘as if he were a stranger’ [‘entre dans sa propre langue comme un étranger’] (48). Geoffrey's claim that he is translating from Trojan-derived Welsh challenges not only the authority of an Anglo-Saxon that is privileged in its relation to Latin, but also the Anglo-Latin historiographical tradition in which the Welsh were seen as morally corrupt and their subjugation to the Saxons read as the appropriate corollary to translatio imperii. Bede portrayed the British as recalcitrant first in the face of Roman missionaries and later in the face of the ecclesiastic hierarchy that was Rome's legacy. Bede's narrative continually conflates English and Roman history so that Latin was neither impartial nor transparent in the way that Bede had described, but was instead aligned with one of the insular vernaculars. If for Bede (as for more recent writers like Homi Bhabha) nation is narration, for Geoffrey of Monmouth nation originates in translation. In order to write a history that could address the past of the whole island, Geoffrey had to resurrect the British language as a viable historical medium, one on a par with Latin, which he does by giving it Trojan origins within his narrative.

‘CICERONIAN ELOQUENCE’: MODELS OF SECULAR AUTHORITY

If Geoffrey resists the view of Rome common in Anglo-Latin insular historiography, that does not mean he has no use for the Roman writers found so frequently in the works of contemporaries like William of Malmesbury. This classical past authorizes a particularly British model of speech within the narrative. The defining moment of Britain's relationship to Rome occurs when messengers from Rome arrive at Arthur's plenary court in Caerleon and demand the payment of tribute withheld by Arthur as well as the return of lands seized from the empire. This challenge is interpreted directly by Cador, Duke of Cornwall, as a sign from God that the Britons have succumbed to sloth and that divine intervention has provided them this opportunity to redeem themselves and restore their former reputation for virtue and bravery (158:27-36). His response echoes religious arguments frequently marshalled behind the notion of translatio imperii, a concept originating in the Bible (Ecclesiastes 10:8) and amplified in patristic writings that tried to make sense of Rome's decline. Writers like Jerome portrayed a Rome needing purification of its sins in order to regain the paths of both heavenly salvation and earthly dominion.⁶ The British response to the Roman challenge calls into play the rhetoric of translatio imperii; but rather than casting itself in the role of fit receptacle for an imminent transfer of Roman dominium, Britain feels the impending threat of dominium passing away. In Geoffrey's HRB, the conflict between Rome and Britain stems from the fact that each believes that it occupies the same historical position.

More importantly, however, this confusion over the correct site of empire masks Geoffrey's transfer of translatio imperii from the religious to the secular realm. Arthur stigmatizes Rome's claims as illegal rather than immoral:

‘Nichil enim quod ui et uiolentia adquiritur iuste ab ullo possidetur. Qui uiolentiam intulit irrationabilem ergo causam pretendit qua nos iure sibi tributarios esse arbitratur. Quoniam autem id quod iniustum est a nobis presumpsit exigere, consimili ratione petamus ab illo tributum Rome’.

(159:17-21)

[‘Nothing that is acquired by force and violence can ever be held legally by him who has done the violence. Therefore he pleads an unreasonable case in so far as he maintains that we are his tributaries by law. Since he presumes to demand something illegal from us, let us by similar reasoning seek from him the tribute of Rome.’]

In biblical and Hieronymian accounts, the historical movement of translatio imperii was the result of moral iniquity, rather than political transgression. In Geoffrey, the movement of power between countries is not so much redemptive as retributive: Britain will not redeem the injustices perpetrated by Rome but will rather reenact them just as we have seen in the narration of Arthur's brutal campaigns in Gaul and Ireland that precedes the description of his plenary court. In effect, Arthur's rhetoric witnesses Geoffrey's ‘translation’ of translatio imperii, not only from Rome to Britain, but from the religious sphere into the political and legal realm.

Arthur's response to the Roman challenge prompts Hoel, leader of the Armorican Britons, to declare that Arthur's speech ‘“adorned with Ciceronian eloquence”’ [‘“tua deliberatio Tulliano liquore lita”’] has inspired them to defend their liberty against Rome (160:6-7). Hoel's seemingly fatuous comment points to the fact that Arthur uses the rhetorical tools of the very power he opposes. To employ the rhetoric of Rome is to occupy the imperial position of Rome. This ‘Ciceronian eloquence’ attests the model of kingship which Arthur embodies in the HRB, one based not only on the assumption of the rhetoric of dominium but also on the appropriation of Latin rhetoric more generally. The rhetoric rejected by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his preface is here employed by the character of Arthur, and its appearance raises the question of what precisely ‘Ciceronian eloquence’ comes to signify in the HRB. In addition to his numerous rhetorical treatises, Cicero had come down to the Middle Ages as the advocate for a res publica in which a citizen's primary duty was not to religion, but to his country. Arthur's response to the Roman challenge paints him as an inheritor of this type of pro patria language. Patria was a word frequently employed by Arthur, but we also see it in the speech of Dubricius, Bishop of Caerleon. In exhorting Arthur's troops to bravery in the coming battle, he urges them: ‘“Fight for your fatherland, and endure death willingly for it if you should be killed”’ [‘“Pugnate pro patria uestra et mortem si superuenerit ultro pro eadem patimini”’] (147:6-7). This patria coincides with the entire island in Geoffrey's account, for, after the death of Utherpendragon, Arthur is said to inherit by rightful claim, ‘totius insule monarchiam’ [‘rulership of the whole island’] (143:18-19). This sense of a unified patria, defined geographically as the entire island, is found in neither Bede nor William of Malmesbury. Neither of these histories admit common ground in the political and religious divisions that rule the island; the only common ground shared among the various racial groups in these accounts is the legacy of Rome. If patria was originally a term defined on the basis of a Roman ‘us’ versus a foreign ‘them,’ Geoffrey changes the referents. In turning the Roman idea of patria against Rome, he uses it as a national rallying cry to repel Roman threats to British empire. Arthur becomes a kind of cultural heretic: he is a Briton who speaks with Roman eloquence against the Romans, the embodiment of the cultural difference Geoffrey stages throughout his history. Arthur's speech, like the Trojan origins of the British people, opens up a new space in insular historiography.

THE RECEPTION OF GEOFFREY AND ARTHUR

If Arthur's speech detailed a translatio imperii that moved according to secular rather than sacred imperative, we find similar translations of power to a secular realm elsewhere in the narrative. Arthur appoints two archbishops and several bishops at his plenary court with only the consent of his nobles (157-58). In this scene, investiture has become a court-orchestrated ceremony that effectively bypasses the prerogatives of the church. Lay investiture was already a controversial subject at the time Geoffrey was writing as it had caused a rift (documented by Eadmer) between Henry i and Anselm in the early years of the century; the subject would only grow more heated under Henry ii.⁷

The HRB's perspective on these matters can in part be explained by Geoffrey's own circumstances: charter evidence suggests that he was a canon of the college of St. George's in Oxford. As a chapel and secular college attached to a royal castle, St. George's was patronized by and received its privileges from the king, a situation that allowed the college a good measure of freedom from local episcopal jurisdiction (this situation lasted at St. George's until its assumption by Osney Abbey in 1149).⁸ Secular colleges occupied an unusual position in the medieval church, since the deans of such colleges were appointed by letters patent and installed by lay officers (the deans, in turn, oversaw the appointment of the canons).⁹ This arrangement showed ‘the possibility of royal supremacy and independence from Rome in an age when the control and discipline of churches were usually matters of episcopal or papal jurisdiction’ (Denton ix). A model of rulership that promoted the king's spiritual prerogative would not be unexpected in Geoffrey's work, since it was this model that governed the workings of colleges like St. George's. Geoffrey's generally secularizing view of history can thus be traced to his position as a secular canon.

Valerie Flint rightfully points out that ‘all of [Geoffrey's] sees are secular sees. There is no monk-bishop to be found in the whole work’ (465). It is, in fact, difficult to find any reference to monastic houses in the HRB, and they are certainly never mentioned in the role for which they were best known, as channels for the dissemination of knowledge on the island. As a secular canon, Geoffrey wrote from outside of the monastic tradition which had controlled both historiographical production and the preservation of classical knowledge on the island. Geoffrey's own situation was anomalous in much the same way that the HRB was anomalous in terms of the received norms of insular historiography. What the narrative omissions of the HRB attest implicitly—that is, the rivalry between secular and regular orders—is witnessed explicitly in the HRB's epigraph, which warned away the monastic historians William of Malmesbury and Henry Huntingdon from discussing the British subject matter Geoffrey had claimed as his own. Geoffrey's denunciation of rhetorical history writing in the preface to his HRB can be seen, in part, as a response to his own situation outside of the tradition which produced this kind of history.

Geoffrey's role as a secular canon is also significant because colleges and chapels of royal castles maintained a special relationship with the king's household.¹⁰ The status of St. George's explains why we find Geoffrey as a witness to many royal charters, including the 1153 treaty in which Stephen named Henry his heir. That St. George's was a center of royal patronage may also help explain the wide circulation of the HRB. Though Geoffrey probably began writing the HRB ‘on spec’ (as the array of dedications suggests), he found magnanimous, if unfortunately posthumous, patronage in his dedicatee Robert of Gloucester's nephew, Henry ii. Lee Patterson and Francis Ingledew have written persuasively about how the HRB's Trojan genealogy was used by Henry ii to sanction his shaky succession to the throne from Stephen (as well as how the HRB's resistance to the Anglo-Latin alliance on the island was helpful to the Norman political agenda more generally). But the Arthurian model of secular power was also useful to the new king, and the project of translating Geoffrey became the site of specific political claims for Henry, claims which brought him into conflict with the regular communities. Henry's simultaneous attempts to curb their liberties (while expanding royal privilege) was resented, and monasteries became organized centers of opposition to the demands of Henry's increasingly bureaucratic government. Henry had a series of run-ins with religious houses, most notably the Cistercians with the untimely death of Thomas Becket.

The Becket conflict was in part a conflict over lay investiture. As Beryl Smalley notes, the core of Henry's case against Becket, and in defence of royal prerogative more generally, depended not on readily available political or theological precedents, but on the customs of his forebears (160-4). These ‘customs’ were finally codified at the Council of Clarendon in 1164 where Henry had summoned Becket along with his other bishops. Henry demanded that all assent to a document codifying such customs as had been observed at the court of his grandfather. The resulting constitutions gave Henry significant powers over investiture (among other privileges), insisting that when an archbishopric or bishopric became vacant, ‘the election ought to take place in the lord king's chapel with the assent of the lord king.’¹¹ In Arthur, Henry had found a model of kingship that mixed spiritual with temporal oversight, a model consistent with Henry's attempts to establish certain inalienable rights of the crown (including royal control over investiture). Henry's appeal to the vague customs and usages of his ancestors made it desirable for him to have a work that documented such customs entering the mainstream of the vernacular; this is one reason we find the project of translating Geoffrey's translation associated with Henry's court. My point in rehearsing these events is to show that the reception of the HRB is to some extent the result of the tensions between monastic and secular authorities in the twelfth century. This is to discuss not necessarily what the HRB means (or less, what Geoffrey may have intended), bur rather how the work got used in the second half of the century.

We see this dynamic not only in Henry's use of the HRB but also in the response of later twelfth-century historians to this work. Modern historians always note that William of Newburgh and Gerald of Wales (both writing in the 1190s) were virtually the only two critics to voice scepticism of Geoffrey throughout the Middle Ages, but no one questions why it was these two writers or why it occured at this particular time. In the preface to his Historia rerum Anglicarum (ca. 1196), William begins by reaffirming the norms of rhetorical historiography in the face of a specifically British historiography, such early histories as Gildas's on account of its ‘unpolished and rude language’ [‘sermone … impolitus atque insipius’] (1:11). He then compares Geoffrey's history to Bede's, and finds the former lacking. He attacks Geoffrey both as a historian and as a translator:

Gaufridus hic dictus est, agnomen habens Arturi, pro eo quod fabulas de Arturo, ex priscis Britonum figmentis sumptas et ex proprio auctas, per superductum latini sermonis colorem honesto historiae nomine palliavit

(1:13).

[This man is called Geoffrey and bears the sobriquet Arthur, because he has taken up the stories about Arthur from the old fictitious accounts of the Britons, has added to them himself, and by embellishing them in the Latin tongue, he has cloaked them with the honorable title of truth

(trans. Walsh).]

William objects to the translation of Merlin's prophecies because ‘in translating them into Latin, he has published them as though they were authentic prophecies resting on unshakeable truth’ [‘dum eas in Latinum transfunderet, tanquam authenticas et immobili veritate subnixas prophetias, vulgavit’] (1:12). He again describes Geoffrey as the one ‘who translated the infantile stories of these prophecies from the British tongue’ [‘qui divinationum illarum nenias ex Britannico transtulit’] (1:12). William objects to Geoffrey's assertion of a new historiographical order which substitutes fables about Arthur for latinitas, correctly identifying translatio as the agency through which Geoffrey is able to suppress earlier historical narrative. In the Itinerarium Kambriae (ca. 1191), Gerald of Wales voices a similar concern over Geoffrey's trustworthiness when he recounts the story of a Welshman called Meilerius who, as a result of his possession by evil spirits, had the ability to point out false passages in books even though he was illiterate. During one such bout of possession, the Gospel of John was placed on his chest, at which point, all the spirits fled, but when the Gospel was replaced with Geoffrey's HRB, the spirits returned more thickly than before (I. 5).

We can read the accounts of William and Gerald as ‘stigmatizing narratives’ whose characterizations of Geoffrey illustrate the increasing anxiety over the proper relation between vernacular and Latin in the realm of rhetorical historiography. In the broadest sense, both of these writers affirm that Bede's view of the relation between the insular languages still holds; they also affirm proper ecclesiastical history in the face of Geoffrey's ‘improper’ history. In so doing, they have to distinguish between a true and a false Latin textuality. The possibility that Latin did not convey historical truth was obviously a cause of some anxiety for William since he pointedly accuses Geoffrey of using Latin to ‘cloak’ his vernacular fables. If Latin was supposed to be the transparent language of truth (as we saw in the earlier quotation from Bede), Geoffrey's sin was to make Latin opaque as a historical medium. This anxiety is implicit in Gerald's Meilerius anecdote as well. The illiterate Meilerius has access to Latin texts only through demonic agency, a demonic agency that is, in turn, identified with Geoffrey's HRB. The paradox at the center of the Meilerius story—the illiteratus who can separate true Latin history from false—speaks to both Gerald and William as writers and readers of such histories. It was a talent that Gerald especially would have loved to possess, since he uses Geoffrey's material in a number of places.¹² Taken together, Gerald's fable and William's indignation point to their own fears about using ‘false’ Latin sources. Both accounts stigmatize translation as an act which introduces ambiguity into Latin as the language of historical truth, questioning its status as the sole authorized conveyor of that truth.

These concerns over language and the canonicity of historical writing do not sufficiently account for the virulence of their attack on Geoffrey, however. Indeed William's attack on Geoffrey seems singularly unprovoked in light of the fact that his post-Conquest subject matter does not overlap with Geoffrey's narrative, which ends in the seventh century with the reign of Cadwallader, a good four centuries before William's narrative begins. In this context, it is significant that both William of Newburgh and Gerald of Wales were writing their histories at the request of powerful Cistercian patrons. William announces in the preface of the Historia rerum Anglicarum that he writes at the behest of Ernald, abbot of the Cistercian house of Rievaulx. In 1188, Gerald had accompanied Baldwin, the Cistercian Archbishop of Canterbury, on a preaching tour of Wales, a trip that resulted in Gerald's Itinerarium Kambriae. If these writers were unsympathetic to the translation of Troy that had allowed Geoffrey to unfix the linguistic (and related national) alignments that were currently in place in historical writing in the early twelfth century, they were even less sympathetic to a historian whose work had been adopted by Henry ii. Gerald in particular was a fanatical devotee of Becket and took every opportunity in his writings to attack Henry, a treatment he seems more than happy to extend to a writer whose work had become associated with the king's court. If Geoffrey's reception at the end of the century witnesses the primacy of this linguistic realignment to his project, it equally witnesses the significance of the Becket conflict to the writing of insular history at this time.

In the historical writing of the twelfth century, debate over which version of the classical past would be used resonated keenly with contemporary events. Geoffrey's recourse to a primarily Trojan rather than Roman past licensed his reapportionment of historical agency on the island. In the preface to the HRB, he substitutes the authority of translation from a supposedly authoritative British source for the rhetorical tradition that had licensed the writing of insular history for several centuries, while, in the narrative, he calls on classical rhetoric to define a new model of secular leadership. The model of centralized power embodied by Arthur was eloquent to the unsettled 1130s and 1140s, and it would only become more so as Stephen's reign progressed (or rather, deteriorated). In the HRB Henry had found a model of secular authority that represented an idealization of his own dream of acceding to rulership of the entire island, of possessing a power less fettered by the religious orders that would prove so troublesome during his reign. Both William of Newburgh and Gerald of Wales, on the other hand, saw the potential threats posed by Geoffrey's HRB, not only to ecclesiastical prerogative, but also to the traditional alignment of Anglo-Saxon and Roman in Latin insular historiography. If Henry emphasized Trojan genealogies and Arthurian ‘custom,’ these later historians would affirm the priority of Bedean history with its emphasis on the Roman continuity that underwrote monastic privilege. To read the indignation of these later twelfth-century historians against Henry's appropriation of Geoffrey is to see how the HRB's refashioning of the classical past became part of a larger conversation about the rights of the clergy as opposed to those of secular powers.

Notes

1. John O. Ward notes that William appears to be more interested in linking the style of his work to that of Bede than in proving the veracity of his sources (119). For a more general discussion of the aims and effects of medieval rhetorical historiography, see Southern (esp. 177-83).

2. All citations from Geoffrey of Monmouth refer to Neil Wright, ed., The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth I: Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS. 568 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1984), and translations are my own.

3. The concatenation of the terms ‘history’ and ‘translation’ appears throughout the work. For example, when Geoffrey dedicates the prophecies of Merlin independently to Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, he once again stresses its status as a translation [‘Coegit me, Alexander Lincolinensis presul, nobilitatis tue dilectio prophetias Merlini de Britannico in Latinum transferre antequam historiam parassem quam de gestis regum Britannicorum inceperam’] (110:1-4). In describing the decline of the British empire at the hands of the Saxons near the end of the HRB, Geoffrey mentions the Welsh flight into Brittany and promises to translate another work describing this event more fully [‘Set hec alias referam cum librum de exulatione eorum transtulero’] (186:16-17).

4. Although Geoffrey derived the Trojan origins of the British people from Nennius's Historia Brittonum, he was the first to enlarge on these origins. In the HRB, the arrival of Brutus and his Trojan band displaces the indigenous population of the island; the establishment of a new Troy occurs at the expense of a place that used to be called Albion and that was inhabited by some unruly giants. This narrative act of displacement covers up the actual historical displacement that occurs, since it is not giants but rather Romans who are being purged.

5. Homi Bhabha describes a paradigm of ‘cultural translation’ in The Location of Culture that complements the idea of ‘minor literature’ formulated by Deleuze and Guattari. This kind of translation ‘desacralizes the transparent assumptions of cultural supremacy, and in that very act, demands a contextual specificity, a historical differentiation within minority positions’ (228). In Geoffrey's translation, linguistic difference signifies cultural difference; it demonstrates that the British have a historical existence outside of the position allotted to them in the Saxon narrative of martial and moral domination on the island.

6. For the idea of a ‘penitent Rome’ and its relation to translatio imperii, see Curtius (29-30).

7. For details of this conflict, see Eadmer's preface to his Historia Novorum in Anglia. Investiture is but one example of how the HRB repeatedly describes a society in which the role of the ecclesiastic hierarchy is diminished in favor of a more centralized, secular administration (another example of this bias is to be found in Geoffrey's transfer of jurisdiction over sanctuary from the church to the state). Henry ii's interest in lay investiture is discussed below.

8. Salter documents the relevant charter evidence on Geoffrey's position as a canon (‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Oxford’). Secular canons were collegiate clergy; unlike regular canons, they lived communally but did not follow the Augustinian rule. On the difference between the two in the twelfth century, see Bynum (2). For the particular situation of the college at St. George's, see Denton (118-21). The spiritual freedoms of royal colleges and chapels apparently mirrored those enjoyed by religious houses; thus secular canons and monks occupied similar yet exclusive positions. Denton asserts that the spiritual privileges associated with such secular colleges began to decline in the late twelfth-century (135-36).

9. For an overview of the workings of secular colleges, see Thompson (81-83).

10. According to Denton, ‘privileges were granted by the king to St. George's, and the king claimed for the canons of the college that they held their lands in frankalmoign’ (120). Evidence of royal intervention on behalf of St. George's is evident in charters dating from about 1127 (Salter, Facsimiles nos. 57 and 58). Additionally, Thompson notes that the deaneries and canonries associated with royal secular colleges were frequently the ‘perquisites of king's clerks’ (83).

11. Article twelve: the text of these constitutions is translated in Douglas (2:718-22). The constitutions stipulate that, in addition to the conditions laid down therein, ‘there are, moreover, many other great customs and privileges pertaining to holy mother-Church and to the lord king and his barons of the realm which are not contained in this document. Let them be safe for holy Church and for our lord the king and his heirs and the barons of the realm. And let them be inviolably observed for ever and ever’ (722).

12. It seems that Gerald must share Meilerius's ability to distinguish between true and false passages in historical works. The Meilerius passage can be read as an anxious gloss on Gerald's own literary production in so far as it directly follows his description of Arthur's plenary court at Caerleon, the details of which are taken directly from Geoffrey.

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