Kingship, conquest, and patria

About this book

First Published in 2005. Distinctly interdisciplinary, Kingship, Conquest, andPatria brings together French and Welsh studies with literary and historical analysis, genre study with questions of medieval colonialisms and national writing. It treats eight centuries' worth of insular and continental literature, placing the 12th- and 13th-century development of Arthurian romance in a history of fraught, ambiguous relations between Capetian France, Angevin England, and native Wales. Overall, the book aims to contextualize how French Arthurian romance and Welsh rhamant, despite being products of opposing cultures in an age of conquest, collectively revise the figure of King Arthur created by earlier insular tradition. At a time when contemporary monarchies sought to curtail the autonomy of both northern French and Welsh principalities, the literary image of kingship pointedly declines in romance and rhamant, replaced by an ideal of knightly independence. A focus on the romance portrait of King Arthur is the culmination of this study: Part I provides a survey of early British Arthurian material written in Latin and Welsh; Part II presents the historical contexts in northern France and Wales out of which the genre of Arthurian romance emerged; Part III turns to literary and sociopolitical analyses of Chrétien's five romances and the three Welsh rhamantau.