The Arthurian legends are history written on the edge -- stories whose changing shape reflects the contested borders of medieval Britain. This is the argument Michelle R. Warren makes in this investigation of medieval history through the lens of postcolonial theory.
Warren shows how Geoffrey of Monmouth's foundational Historia regum Britanniae engages in an ambivalent cultural struggle with the past. She traces this history's travels through Wales, where translators and editors recast it as a narrative of resistance to colonialism, and into southern England, where, in English, it becomes a retaking of British history from Norman domination.
As the Arthurian texts cross the Channel, Warren shifts her focus to Continental narratives. Here we see how, in Normandy, Wace's Roman de Brut shares the aggressive vision of the Welsh, but from the perspective of the colonizers. In Champagne, resistance to the French monarchy engenders the monumental Arthurian prose cycle; and finally, in Brittany, Arthurian history becomes a moralized fable of acquisitive greed in the Gesta regum Britanniae. In conclusion, Warren turns to an exemplary scene of colonial contact -- Amerigo Vespucci's naming of America -- to demonstrate how medieval histories open new readings of modern colonial discourse.
