Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Translation of Female Kingship

by Tolhurst, Fiona

• ISBN13: 9781137277848
• ISBN10: 113727784X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-02-13
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Here, Fiona Tolhurst offers the first feminist analysis of the non-Arthurian portion of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain. After re-reading Empress Matilda as the first female king of England, she contrasts Geoffrey's feminist brand of historiography with the works of both his predecessors and his successors. This study documents how Geoffrey's redactors and translators of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries first undermined and then erased his uniquely pro-female version of the early British past.

Author Biography

Fiona Tolhurst is Maître Assistante in Medieval and Early Modern English at the University of Geneva. She is the author Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Feminist Origins of the Arthurian Legend and is the editor of a special issue of Arthuriana on Geoffrey of Monmouth as well as the co-editor, with Bonnie Wheeler, of On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries.

Table of Contents

Introduction Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Translation of Female Kingship
Re-reading Empress Matilda as a Female King
Geoffrey's History as Preparation for a Female King
Undermining and Degrading Female Kingship in the First Variant and the Roman de Brut
Delegitimizing and Erasing Female Kingship in the 'Epistola Warino Britoni,' the Chronica majora, and Layamon's Brut