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Introduction

A HISTORY without the imagination,” wrote Jacques Le Goff, “is a mutilated, disembodied history” (5). Imagination, Le Goff implies, has the power to repair historical fragments, turning mutilated details into a coherent whole. Le Goff’s striking image of a “disembodied” history without imagination links materiality with the imaginative faculty. History’s special claim to the material and embodied comes not merely from facts about the past, but from what an imagination does with those facts. Le Goff thus rearranges what has been until recently the standard opposition between history (the Real, the material, and the embodied) and fiction (the imagined, the literary, and the textual). Our histories need imagination, Le Goff and many medievalists since insist, at least in part because, as Gabrielle Spiegel has suggested, “imaginary dreams” have the power to “motivate human behavior” (86). Such work has helped us see that fantasy and history have had a long acquaintance, and not simply because medieval writers about the past cared less for verisimilitude than did their modern or early modern counterparts. Indeed, as the 1839 text of the Middle English version of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville suggests, the imaginative faculty can assist in the very real process of creating empires. Imperial governments use, as that text puts it, “[a]lle here lust and alle here Ymaginacioun … for to putten alle Londes undre hire subjeccioun” [all their desire and all their imagination so as to put all lands under their control] (251).¹

Le Goff emphasizes the unifying and synthetic power of the imagination; imagination, in this view, repairs mutilation, places pieces together, crafts wholeness out of parts. The remarks attributed to “Mandeville,” in contrast, emphasize the role of the imagination in processes of conquest, annexation, and subjugation, thus hinting at the sinister side of imaginary unifications. Unity is an imaginary quality valuable to imperial governments and to processes of colonization. And yet processes of conquest, annexation, and subjugation can be said to unify only if we take a conqueror’s perspective. As the history of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland suggests, the value of unity is a matter of perspective: what from one view constitutes a longed-for unification, can also be experienced as a painful separation, a destructive fragmentation. Analyses of the imaginary syntheses of medieval history have had little to say about the colonizing uses of imagination and fantasy; medievalists have not examined as frequently as we might what traumas, losses, imaginary fragments, or contradictions fuel historic medieval legends. We have, as a result, often had less to say about the alternative histories, alternative imaginings also legible in medieval texts; we are often silent about the other dreams and desires sacrificed, often forcibly, to traumatic imperial, or national, unities.

This study takes seriously the role of imagination in making (and contesting) notions of union in late medieval Britain. Sovereign Fantasies examines romance narratives of Arthur from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the context of changing political and cultural identities in late medieval Britain. I argue that late Middle English Arthurian romance offers a fantasy of insular union, an “imagined community” of British sovereignty. Stories of Arthur, King of Britain, rework notions of insular British unity because Arthurian sovereignty can be used to designate an indigenous tradition (based upon its Welsh associations). As “native” folk hero, Arthur offers a royal legend grown on British soil. Yet tales of Arthur also point to the complications of community, the disaffections and aggressions that inhabit, and threaten, union. They thus offer a view of both how unions are crafted and how they break apart. In this way Arthur’s court becomes a fiction of historic British sovereignty useful for competing accounts of British identity. Arthur’s story can serve both those who wish to praise union and recommend centralization and those who wish to indict centralized power. The ambiguities of Arthurian geography—is his court at Caerlion or Carlisle, at Winchester or Camelot?—allude to historic struggles over the geography of British union, particularly to relations between central England and the regions of its so-called “Celtic Fringe.” Tales of Arthur encode utopian hopes for communitarian wholeness; yet they also poignantly narrate the impossibilities, the aggressions, and the traumas, of British insular community.

The question of Arthur’s “indigenous” British roots is, of course, a complicated one. Welsh fantasies of Arthurian sovereignty, for example, remind us that the colonized cultures of insular Britain had utopian dreams of their own, dreams pertinent to Arthurian traditions. While focused on Middle English texts from the later period, my study attempts to take seriously such dreams and the political and cultural oppositions they signify. Middle English romances of King Arthur are important in this regard for two reasons: first, they emerge with force at times of insular instability and change; second, they occupy (even in the twelfth century) a shared border between cultural identities of historic importance to British sovereignty: English, Welsh, and French.² Because of these specific attributes, Middle English Arthurian traditions offer an important site for viewing the intersections and dialogues between “oppositional” discourses and dominant cultural modes. These texts offer access to the shared dreamings and political contestations between England and Wales in the late medieval period. The historic legend of Arthur’s rule over a lost insular wholeness (what Geoffrey of Monmouth terms the totius insulae of Britain) is important both to Welsh (and Scots) claims as rightful heirs of Britain’s crown and to the ambitions of late medieval English kings in annexing Wales and Scotland. Fantasies of a pastoral, ancient, and united Britain ruled by sovereigns such as Arthur were at play differently, at different historical moments, and deployed by different groups. At stake both in the wide circulation of Arthurian traditions in the late Middle Ages, and in the difficulty in recognizing some of those stories as history, are contestations over the ownership of a British imaginary past, indeed of Britain itself.

To be sure, late Middle English texts emphasize the tragedy of Arthur’s loss, only hinting at the glorious possibility of Arthur’s return. Malory’s Morte Darthur moves inexorably toward its tragic culmination; the Alliterative Morte Arthure mourns Arthur’s fall from Fortune’s Wheel; even the delightfully fantastic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens with a history of British kingship linked to treachery, war, and woe.³ Late Middle English tales return again and again to the loss of fellowship and the death of Arthur. Because of their repetitive and poignant delectation of this tragic sovereign and his fragile, fractured community, these Middle English tales can help us see that narratives of fragmentation, of sovereign mutability and loss, might be just as culturally useful as stories that emphasize cultural unity, wholeness, or recovery. When romance stories of King Arthur narrate the mutability, failures, and infidelities surrounding the sovereign, they raise doubts about an unwavering united British past. Such doubts allude to a contested history of Britain, to other desires and lost dreams. Arthur’s apocalyptic story can also, however, calibrate desire for a sovereign future. The tragic fragility of Arthur’s fellowship heightens our longing, since we gain only the briefest glimpse of Arthurian chivalry and justice. Traditions of Arthur as the Rex quondam, Rexque futurus answer such longing with the image of a dying sovereign body passing away yet ever poised to recover the throne. This Arthur is already lost, yet still somehow perpetually surviving.

This image of the legendary King Arthur, lost and yet surviving, resonates with Ernst Kantorowicz’s description of the influential early modern political theory known as the King’s Two Bodies. Stories of Arthur past and future anticipate the combination of sovereign death and survival that will, in the early modern period, structure orthodox notions of sovereign power. Arthurian traditions of the past and future king gesture toward what Kantorowicz will term sovereign sempiternity,” a “plurality” of kingship that, according to Kantorowicz, “did not expand within a given Space but was determined exclusively by Time” (387). Sovereign sempiternity stabilizes the sovereign’s right to rule by imagining his place in an unbroken train of rulers stretching out of the distant past. Sempiternity offers an “imagined community” of rulers through the ages, a fiction of sovereignty apparently unharmed by loss, death, or other “natural defects.” It imagines a transcendent, sovereign “body politic” untouched by age or disability: “The king’s body politic is a Body utterly void of Infancy and Old Age and other natural defects and imbecilities which the body natural is subject to, and for this cause what the king does in his Body politic cannot be invalidated or frustrated by a disability in his natural body.” Despite its use of the metaphor of the royal body, the theory of the King’s Two Bodies nevertheless disavows all the problems of bodiliness. The physical facts of “Infancy and Old Age and other natural defects and imbecilities” are imagined as utterly unlike the apparent durability of sovereign power. Power vests in a mystical body beyond particular times; it is transcendental power acting upon the material world. The King’s Two Bodies thus homogenizes the multiplicity of rule and the fractious moments of state politics into the image of a solitary, united sovereign will, offering a tendentious image of state power as a monolithic unity. When the theory of the King’s Two Bodies splits the physical mortality of kings from the “sempiternity” of the line of kingship, it promises state survival despite the vicissitudes, failures, and changeabilities of particular times and particular monarchs. It recasts sovereign death as a transcendental union outside individual sovereign bodies and lives, and thus copes with the poignant problem loss poses to individual agency and to state power. Its success as a political theory is marked in part by the ease with which histories of British sovereignty, despite prodigious “defects and imbecilities,” can nonetheless trace a genealogy from Britain’s early days.

Yet the political theory of the King’s Two Bodies proved culturally powerful precisely because the survival of particular sovereigns was not, historically, so easily assured. Late medieval English aristocrats and royals had cause to fear for their perpetuity. Throughout the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, various groups vied for control of large portions of British territory. The fifteenth century is, of course, infamous for its problems of royal succession; it is also a period throughout which the English throne responded to crises of identity which, while “international” in scope, had “national” implications. Between 1380 and 1485 the crown, while at war with its putatively most infamous enemy, France, solidified the annexation of its geographically most intimate Celtic ally, Wales.⁴ Welsh soldiers fought variously against the French and against the English during the Hundred Years War; Scottish soldiers more consistently supported the French against their colonizing enemy beyond the Tweed; the exiled English King Richard II fled to Cheshire seeking rebel support for his beleaguered monarchy; not far from Cheshire, Owain Glyn Dwr organized what would become a very nearly successful home rule rebellion against Henry IV, appealing to the French crown for assistance; the Wars of the Roses fractured aristocratic communities in both London and the North; Henry Tudor, with ties to Wales and to France, killed a crowned Richard III at Bosworth field under the banner of Arthur, king of the Britons. The messianic figure of the Sovereign Returned (or the Welsh Mab Darogan), an image variously and repeatedly identified with Arthur Pendragon, appears in the politics of Glyn Dŵr’s Cymric home-rule movement, and in the mythology of the apparently “British” Tudor who claims to unite Wales and England in his rule from a London court. This same period, moreover, witnessed a significant increase in the manuscript production of tales of Arthurian romance in England: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Arthur; The Red Book of Hergest (containing, among other things, the Welsh tales “Owein,” “Peredur,” “The Dream of Rhonabwy”); The Marriage of Sir Gawaine; the Stanzaic Morte Arthur; the Alliterative Morte Arthure; Awntyrs off Arthure; Avowynge of King Arthur; Henry Lovelich’s History of the Holy Grail; Henry Lovelich’s Merlin; Weddyng of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnall; the prose Merlin; Malory’s Morte Darthur; Grene Knight.⁵ This book examines the intersection between this remarkably prolific cultural production and the political disputes over the meaning of Arthur’s legendary kingship.

From the late fourteenth to the fifteenth century English sovereigns, the last Plantagenets, lose many of their territorial holdings in France. Adversarial relations with France (seen in the Hundred Years War) and aristocratic fragmentation in England (as in the Wars of the Roses) will urge the elaboration of a specifically insular set of affairs. Middle English Arthurian traditions become a crucial means to explore England’s historic indebtedness to, and intimacies with, insular cultures; yet those same traditions will also, in part, be the means whereby English sovereignty claims Welsh (and eventually Scots) loyalty away from the French. In is in this context that I read Arthurian tales as “sovereign fantasy”: these stories allow nobles to repudiate their dynastic ties to their French cousins and (in the wake of the Hundred Years War) to claim an insular heritage. This “imagined community” across time enables the imagination of a parallel community across the space of a realm and united under its “sempiternal” kingship.⁶

A number of scholars have argued the case for linkages between late medieval theories of political sovereignty like that of Kantorowicz and Malory’s Morte Darthur. Scholars are likewise examining the political import of individual Arthurian tales.⁷ Those studies have made important interventions into an earlier opposition of the romance genre to the politics of history itself. The current study, while certainly interested in political readings of particular texts, foregrounds aspects of Arthurian romance thought to compromise the genre’s political nature: its link to legend, its delectation of loss, its interest in death, its fascination with prophecy, its incorporation of strangeness and magic. These are the aspects of legend usually thought to be opposite the realpolitik of statecraft; yet these same attributes impel the material power of Arthurian fantasy. This is, I argue, because they offer a way of understanding the fascination with loss, trauma, fragmentations, and disaffections—the drives and desires that circulate within group identities, yet which rhetorics of union or enduring sovereign genealogies seek to disavow. I will argue that late-medieval British Arthurian legend has broad and far-reaching cultural ambitions. Those ambitions can be read in the tropes that signal the failures of and resistances to a monolithic community: in the losses that accrue to Arthur, and in the various Arthurs imagined in the contradictory multiplicities of romance and legend.

Middle English Arthurian traditions organize an extended meditation on British ruin, a poignant and abjected sovereignty that fascinates through its representations of pleasure and pain, longing and loss. This “sovereign fantasy” obtains in both senses of the phrase: sovereign here means both the King and the power (pretended or legitimate) to hold or to contest rule; fantasy signifies both (as often in the colloquial sense) utopian hopes for imagining a different world and (as often in psychoanalytic use) the jouissance (enjoyment) that surfaces through desire. Psychoanalytic treatments of fantasy emphasize the limitations fantasy places on pleasure, structuring an enjoyment that resides “beyond the pleasure principle.” Arthurian romances, especially in their Middle English emphasis upon destruction and death, fascinate through stories of hopeless impossibility.⁸ I am thus interested in a psychoanalytic notion of fantasy for its explication of enjoyment as, paradoxically, “pleasure in unpleasure”; yet I also deploy the term fantasy to signal more utopian possibilities.

Louise Fradenburg has shown us that the fascinations of romance can offer subversive pleasures, since both “the transformation and preservation of relations of power depend on the fantastic pleasure of imagining the world otherwise” (“Fulfild of Faerye” 220). My interest in claiming Arthur as “sovereign fantasy” registers these fantastic pleasures too: the imaginative expansiveness and interpretive play of Arthur’s rule over archaic Britain signals hope for utopian community, for insular wholeness as a promise of satisfaction. I explore when and how the Arthurian promise of satisfaction “preserves” the power of English rule, yet I also note when and how it encodes the desire to transform or to resist such rule. In its psychoanalytic meaning, moreover, sovereign fantasies gains a purchase upon the material consequences of imaginative texts. It can help us read the longstanding controversies over the “truths,” historical or otherwise, of Arthur’s story. Shared fascinations with Arthur, furthermore, channel antagonisms across insular space, between (for example) the Welsh and Anglo-Norman audiences of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, or among England’s regions.⁹ Early modern Arthurian editors (as in William Caxton’s edition of Malory’s Morte Darthur) or authors (as in Edmund Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queene) view Arthur as the genealogy necessary for imagining a British national future; those imaginings depend upon the losses and the antagonisms crucial to this earlier romance tradition. Finally, my use of the term fantasy is meant to signal an interest in how these romances work both subjectively and culturally, that is, both for exploring the desires of particular subjects and for encoding broad contests concerning a British “imagined community.”

I have, up to now, avoided using the term nation, while also repeatedly deploying the phrase that cannot help at the present moment but evoke it: “imagined community.” My phrase, like my thinking, is indebted to Benedict Anderson’s monumentally influential Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. The present study marks a set of medieval identifications that suggest the need to qualify Anderson’s (but not only his) insistence on the “nation’s” modernity, on what Anderson calls its “astonishing youth.” I do not, however, simply appropriate Anderson’s analysis for a late medieval case. It would be difficult to do so since Anderson, as Kathleen Davis has shown in detail, conceptualizes nation precisely through an absolute difference from things medieval. Anderson defines national affiliations as possible only after the loss of three “medieval” perceptions: sensibilities having to do with religion (a consciousness of international Christendom), state power (a confidence in dynastic sovereignty), and time (typological notions of history). The importance of these “medieval” sensibilities to his analysis means that Anderson must ignore the particularity and variability of medieval cultures in favor of the familiar caricature of historical difference which “medieval” so often signifies in scholarship of later periods. This has made Imagined Communities an account of nation that medievalists love to hate; but Anderson’s work has also been useful for medievalists, as Michelle Warren argues, precisely because “imagined community” offers a substantial conceptual flexibility. Deploying this flexibility, medievalists have, sometimes without referencing Anderson explicitly, offered lots of examples that belie Anderson’s historicism.¹⁰

There is, pace Anderson, a tradition within medieval studies suggesting the significance of national formulations to medieval politics. More than fifty years ago, V. H. Galbraith linked medieval concepts of nationality with the content of a people’s language and customs. Joseph Strayer stressed the “medieval origins” of the “modern state.” Susan Reynolds suggested confluences between the term gens and later developments of nation, arguing that “regnal communities” developing around a particular court have similarities to later formulations of nationhood. With Reynolds’s work in mind, R. James Goldstein demonstrates the profoundly nationalistic aims of the “regnal communities” in medieval Scotland. And in a recent study of English language and literature for England, the Nation in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Thorlac Turville-Petre argues that “the similarities between medieval and modern expressions of national identity [are] fundamental, and the differences [are] peripheral” (v).¹¹

Yet my work diverges from these accounts in various ways. In Galbraith’s and Strayer’s account, for example, nation figures as a relatively organic identity, a modern wholeness that can be traced genealogically back to a point of medieval origin. Interested as they were in tracking stable coherences through time, these studies tend to depend upon a progressive chronology, imagining the history of “a people,” as a teleological trajectory from early origins to a fully realized national present. I seek, on the other hand, to analyze the psychic and political instabilities of such fictions of wholeness so as to read the political and cultural disputes over the people’s identity. I am not, therefore, arguing for a teleological history, nor am I claiming that Arthurian texts “develop” into later discourses of the nation. This would be a foolish claim since, from the long view of history, Arthurian traditions play out very differently even in the different insular spaces of England, Wales, and Scotland. Welsh prophecies linked to Merlin, for example, will appear in texts of Welsh resistance to English control well into the eighteenth century; but this is not, of course, the case in England, where Arthurian traditions (after Spenser’s Faerie Queene) nearly vanish altogether until their reemergence in Tennyson’s nineteenth-century medievalism.

Sovereign Fantasies argues that medieval community is imagined not through homogeneous stories of a singular “people,” but through narratives of sovereignty as a negotiation of differences, of ethnicity, region, language, class, and gender.¹² While I am indebted to Susan Reynolds’s suggestion that aristocratic groups identified with a particular king (what she usefully calls “regnal communities”) cohere with later ideas of a nation, I also wish to show that such identifications work variously for different groups, often through antagonisms, or in oppositional ways. Reynolds suggests that dynastic formations can produce “imagined communities”; I hope to show that corporate desire for legendary sovereignty suggests not—as Anderson would have it—confidence in a divinely ordained ruler, but controversial and contentious identifications with sovereign power, identifications that channel anxieties about, even critiques of, specific royal genealogies. This also suggests that, unlike many (but not all) modern imaginings, this nation takes the sovereign as a primary organizing figure around whom divergent groups build or contest alliance. And while I share Turville-Petre’s interest in noting similarities between medieval and modern, especially in response to the claim that “medieval nation” is an oxymoron, I remain wary of assigning differences (whether historical or cultural) to a “periphery,” both because the politics of the “periphery” are very much at issue here, and because nation is such a variable, protean concept.

Yet difference is still only half of the story I want to tell. The historic shared sovereignty (not to mention the relative geographic nearness) of England and Wales demonstrates in a particularly intense way that “difference” here is not absolute, signifying instead a complex of shared spaces, histories, and imaginings. It is the combination of shared imaginings and differential politics embedded in British Arthuriana that I attempt to convey through the concise term national fantasy, one that I will employ throughout this study.¹³ I hope in what follows it will be clear that while this oppositional “imagined community” shares some attributes with later such imaginings, it is not their teleological ancestor.

Focusing on a particular time of imagining and contesting British identity, I am also surveying broadly, hoping to contribute to an analysis of the similarities and differences that mark this identity across a longue durée. The legendary, prophetic return of a British totam insulam suggests that the cadence of this insular identity might not be linear and chronological so much as recursive, repeating at times of cultural instability, or during transitional periods.¹⁴ As a lost yet promised figure of insular wholeness, a late medieval imaginary tota insula alludes to ancient British days while it also encodes massive political, geographic, and military losses for England, Scotland, and Wales, not the least of which involves the loss of England’s long-standing claims to sovereignty in France. Those claims, from one view a lingering consequence of Norman Conquest, suggest the complex dynamics of the insular with the continental, and demand that we frame the history of medieval Britain as a study of the interdependence of cultures, of histories of exchange, violent as well as peaceful, traumatic as well as pleasurable, sexual as well as political.¹⁵ The polyglot culture of late medieval Britain deploys a language and custom forged out of repetitive intercultural encounters. The conquering ambitions of Roman, Viking, Saxon, and Norman follow in succession in an insular history of intercultural exchange, migration, conquest, and coexistence. Scholars of the relations between medieval England and the regions of its insular neighbors continue to disentangle the legacies of conquest from the narratives of “British” history, literature, and culture.¹⁶

This longue durée of Britain’s identity is thus embedded in a history of conquest.¹⁷ Of course medieval Britain is also one of the formerly colonized spaces of the Roman Empire. The colonial inheritance of Britain’s early years—an imperialism J. S. P. Tatlock nearly fifty years ago described as an “unavoidable” motif in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae—haunts the fantasy of British insular wholeness. Arthur’s association with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story of imperialism, and with a conquered Welsh “native” tradition, marks this story as a particular scene of such literary and historiographic engagements. Many of the Middle English tales make explicit reference to Britain’s colonial past or to Emperor Arthur’s imperial ambitions. Admittedly the medieval understanding of the category of emperor, as Felicity Riddy recently put it, “has to do with royal sovereignty and jurisdiction, not territorial expansion.” She continues, “it means that the king has the powers of the Roman emperor within his own realm” (69).¹⁸ From the view of the English kings, then, claims to territory they considered part of England (even if the territory was in France or in Wales) amounted to their recovery of a rightful inheritance. The assumption that medieval definitions of sovereignty were therefore non-imperial deserves interrogation, however. For as Riddy also suggests, from the perspective of vanquished peoples, those who disputed England’s claim in the first place, English kings were imperialist “in the modern sense [since they] held [territory] by terror” (69). Furthermore, Roman imperial models of sovereignty gesture toward long-standing legacies of Rome’s colonization of Britain, indeed, of Europe. Territorial claims of rightful inheritance have a long history of imperial uses; in the twentieth century Afrikaner landowners used such justifications as part of the political mythology of apartheid.¹⁹ Those justifications testify to the complexity and intransigence of relations of conquest and settlement rather than to their absence.

The difference between medieval and modern colonialisms has exerted substantial influence on the growing number of medievalists working on the topic.²⁰ The list of medievalists analyzing settlement, conquest, linguistic minorities, and crusade is a long and vibrant one, to which much has recently been added. Recent work inspired, implicitly and explicitly, by the rich and powerful insights of postcolonial cultural studies, suggests that medievalists can contribute much to an analysis of the repetitions and patternings of conquest, violence, and desire at different historical moments, and different geographic sites.²¹ As is probably clear by now, I am particularly interested here in the relations between dominant European cultures and those groups Felipe Fernandez-Armesto calls Europe’s “internal primitives,” among whom he numbers the Welsh. Specifically the intimacies of conquest, the complicated interminglings of cultures different from, yet also in proximity with, one another are of crucial importance to me. Recent theorists of postcolonial cultural studies (particularly Homi Bhabha and Sara Suleri, but also, if in a different way, Benita Parry) have addressed just such questions and, as a result, their work will be important to the analysis that follows.

Yet, from the vantage of historical chronology, the premodern period seems far indeed from a postcolonial one. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, editors of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, offer a definition of postcolonial that moves its signification from a temporal chronology to the spaces of opposition. They write, “post-colonial … does not mean ‘post-independence,’ or ‘after colonialism,’ for this would be to falsely ascribe an end to the colonial process.” They continue, “Post-colonialism, rather, begins from the very first moment of colonial contact. It is the discourse of oppositionality which colonialism brings into being. In this sense, postcolonial writing has a very long history” (117).²² With this definition in mind one could rightly say that medieval studies has a long history of postcolonial inspirations. Yet other areas of overlap exist between medieval and postcolonial cultural studies. For one thing, postcolonial scholars and medievalists share a common appreciation of the problems that progressivist, or teleological chronologies pose for an understanding of the complicated sophistication of so-called primitive cultures. Medievalists navigate the problem of teleology in various ways, sometimes stressing what has been called the “orientalism” of medieval studies, its historical disciplinary development during the nineteenth-century Age of Empire. Other approaches try to replace a linear temporality from medieval to modern with a sense of time as multiple and overlapping, what Jeffrey J. Cohen has called the “interminable difficult middle” (“Midcolonial,” 5).²³ I hope to contribute to the longstanding medievalist concern for oppositional histories of linguistic minorities; yet I will also, if obliquely, address this “‘difficult middle.” In the case of Wales, for example, we can mark no time after colonization (Wales remains a colony of England to the present), nor is it possible to recover a pure space before. I offer no claim about Welsh Arthurian origin, nor would I insist upon pure “Celtic” or “English” texts. I wish instead to take seriously the repetitive temporal returns to Arthur, as well as the oppositions, the heterogeneities, and the overlapping cultures legible in the difficult middle spaces, the shared Arthurian texts produced amidst conquest.

My interest in this approach has developed from a concern for the politics of “imagining community” during transitional times in Britain’s insular identity. Scholars increasingly argue that the nation emerges not prior to, but in relation with, the conquering impulse. Their insights gesture toward, but do not adequately develop, the poignant losses produced by unified national identities. By joining a sovereign “imagined community” with an attention to the oppositional imaginings of Britain in the later Middle Ages, I hope to provide a way of registering some of the losses that, in early modern England, silently serve formal discourses of nationhood.

Interested as I am in the multiple and conflictual elements that are (seemingly) surmounted by narrations of cultural unity, my study shows debts to Homi Bhabha’s analysis of the slips and misses of apparently unequivocal national discourses. Bhabha’s insights have been helpful, yet the medieval case also registers certain differences. Bhabha reads “the language of culture and community” as “poised on the fissures of the present becoming the rhetorical figures of a national past” (Location, 142). I wish to construct an account of early ruptures and contests frequently deemed inconsequential to later “British” cultural identity. Bhabha argues that national discourses stabilize a culture’s present instabilities by imagining those difficulties in the past, surmounted through modernity. My work suggests that those same discourses can, for all their interest in past antagonisms, obscure oppositional histories, trivializing the antagonisms and fissures on which they nonetheless depend. The medieval “middle spaces” of a longue durée of British identity, thus, encode losses of important material consequence.

A sustained attention to loss and mourning elucidates the dynamics of cultural identities in conquest, helping us to analyze who is served most by the gains and sacrifices of community. The losses produced by national centralization can be seen particularly clearly by scholars of periods before centralization was bureaucratically solidified. What has not often been noted about national imaginings is the extent to which fantasies of unification encode mournful things even as they try to disavow them. National fictions must imagine a coherent identity that crosses both time and space despite the passings that constitute history, or the aggressions that constitute community. They must, to recall Le Goff’s formulation with which I began, cope precisely with the mutilations and disembodiments produced by death. Coping which such facts can involve (as it does in the theory of the King’s Two Bodies) disavowing the threatening, physical facts of death, “old age and other natural defects and imbecilities,” removing these attributes of loss from the fiction of a transcendent, abstract, community outside particular bodies and beyond the reach of the grave. In this fantasy the community both requires particular bodies and can nonetheless outlast them; the sempiternal community apparently remains above the particular desires, disabilities, and lives on which it nonetheless depends.

Gender and sexuality have long been linked—in psychoanalytic, feminist, and anthropological theory—to the power to cope with the psychic and cultural problems of death, loss, and submission. Thus, the work of feminist, psychoanalytic, and anthropological theorists will also be important to my readings. Elisabeth Bronfen reads images of dead or deadly beauties for their ability to translate “an anxiety into a desire,” that is, to make the image of death appear desirously irresistible, rather than anxiously so. Julia Kristeva suggests that abject images and the “death-bearing woman” can help the male author cope with fears of individual annihilation. Klaus Theweleit has examined the psychoanalytic logics of such “male fantasies,” poignantly arguing that gendered imaginaries like these have material power with tragic consequences for women’s lives. Anthropologist Maurice Bloch describes the cultural assignment of physical decay and fragmentation to women. He argues that hierarchically structured “traditional societies” cope with the threats that bodily decay pose to belief in a community’s survival by splitting the morbid aspects of physical decay from the notion of death as a spiritual union, a life beyond the grave. Death as transcendent community, Bloch argues, remains linked to men and to brotherhoods. Triumph over “death (in its polluting and sad aspects),” Bloch argues, “is achieved by breaking through, vanquishing the world of women, of sorrow, of death and division” (217–18). Women’s cultural relation to the particularity of individual birth means that women come to stand for the individuality of particular dying bodies and particular fragmented lives, an image of division that threatens the fiction of the transcendent, unified clan or community. Fradenburg has noted the extent to which psychoanalytic analyses of loss work to install loss as the condition of individual subjectivity with disastrous consequences for women’s lives.²⁴

The long-standing cultural identification of women with particularity and with particularly fractured losses can readily be seen in stories of Arthur’s death; these texts, moreover, frequently raise questions about women’s complicity in the destruction of fellowship. Putatively disordered, even destructive, female desires, rendered through figures like Guinevere, Morgan le Fey, or Bertilak’s Lady, prove powerful enough to threaten, if not entirely dismantle, sovereign community. As the previous discussion implies, I will be arguing that the national fantasy emerging in late Middle English Arthurian texts deploys a gendered structure of loss so as to define community as a brotherhood that can accommodate a certain amount of regional and ethnic difference. Women are powerful in these texts, and their desires are important. They constitute repetitive obstacles to communitarian wholeness, disruptions to communitarian desire. These are nonetheless stories of a certain kind of female power, and thus they hint at alternative desires for other kinds of groupings.

Given the sheer volume of late Middle English texts of Arthurian romance, I cannot hope to offer satisfying accounts of the entire Middle English corpus. The study that follows, therefore, makes no claims to be exhaustive. Part I, “The Matter of Britain,” makes the case for the subtle cultural relation between Arthurian history and Arthurian fantasy. Chapter 1 begins with the controversies over the historicity of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, and their pertinence to current debates on history and textuality. Emphasizing Geoffrey’s ambiguity, I argue that the popularity and cultural usefulness of Monmouth’s fantasy of the Britons involves its ability to accommodate diverse uses. The manuscript history of Geoffrey’s text suggests, moreover, that representations of insular loss can help consolidate competing claims on insular inheritance, serving both the pleasures of parvenu Anglo-Norman aristocrats and their Welsh resisters. Chapter 2 moves to the uses of Geoffrey’s text in the fifteenth century, focusing particularly upon the oppositional politics of the Merlin Prophecies. I examine what it means that such prophecies, based upon Welsh vaticinative poetry, came to fuel diametrically opposed political agendas, and how those contestations led to the increasing identification of certain versions of Britain’s past with interpretive “truth.” Imaginative ambiguity, as the Merlin Prophecies suggest, is deeply useful to fifteenth-century English sovereigns who wish to imagine themselves, in the wake of losses in France, as Arthur’s insular heirs. Yet that same ambiguity is deeply disturbing to those in power, since it can also be used to legitimate the claims of rebel royal pretenders.

Part II, “Romancing the Throne,” examines the romance’s structure of longing and loss for a cultural imagining. In Chapter 3, I read Arthur’s status as both European emperor and British sovereign in the Alliterative Morte Arthure for collocations between European international identities and insular British ones. The Alliterative Morte Arthure provides a way of renouncing Arthur’s Welsh connections without having to jettison all hope for a united insular future. The poem’s poignant concern with the slaughter of innocents, moreover, encodes the longing and losses of conquest, losses that nonetheless offer consolation to the male, aristocratic subject. Chapter 4 examines the complicated Welsh geography of a text that makes use of French traditions, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I make the case for reconsidering the magical elements of the Green Knight and the geography of Gawain’s journey as a kind of colonial exoticism, one that nonetheless alludes to alternative (Welsh) claims on Arthurian sovereignty. Situated at a colonial frontier, Gawain deploys the intimacies of gender and sexuality to compensate for the limitations that a borderland position places on Gawain’s agency. The apparent evil machinations of women work here, moreover, to rescue Arthur’s sovereignty (and Gawain’s agency) from the implication that it might be unmanly and frivolous. Chapter 5 addresses, through the adultery plot of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, the common identification of women with the romance genre. I reconsider this Middle English version of an originally French story in the context of the militarized culture of the Hundred Years War. Like the previous two texts, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur addresses questions of insular community as it raises the issue of female guilt. And it links women with a particularly hopeless kind of loss. This poem thus suggests that medieval Arthurian romance might be a particularly tragic genre for women.

Where Part II focuses attention on a Welsh-French-English cultural triangulation, Part III, “Insular Losses,” examines insular and regional collocations in some fifteenth-century texts. In Chapter 6, rivalry and brotherhood take center stage in two shorter romances from the north of the island: The Avowing of Arthur and Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn. Both texts offer poignant evidence that chivalric rivalry disciplines knights. Knightly victimization and sacrifice remain crucial to the creation of Arthur’s brotherhood. In the context of the Wars of the Roses, moreover, these texts suggest regional critiques of Arthur that can be read as contestations over the geography of insular British union. Female aggression and brotherly heterosexuality function in these texts as means to cope with the losses and deaths required by militarism. My final chapter considers Malory’s massive tome, Le Morte Darthur. I join those who position this volume in the context of England’s territorial losses in France; yet, against the grain of Malory’s text, I read the poignant tale of Arthur’s loss as a fantasy that can provide hope for historical coherence while accommodating innovation and change, the very things Malory deplores as “newfangleness.” Le Morte Darthur thus implies the necessity of eschewing old loyalties for new ones; by the early modern period, Welsh and English, Yorkist and Lancastrian have all had to refashion their hearts and memories to a London-based Britain and for an Arthur whose court is at Winchester. The Afterword moves this study into the early modern period, suggesting very briefly the implications of this work would have for a reading of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

In its analysis of legend and its attention to historico-literary fantasies, this study foregrounds the fantasmatic character of communitarian loyalties and loves. The nation is always an illusion, a fantasy of wholeness that threatens again and again to fragment from the inside out. Fantasies of national identity teach peoples to desire union; they help inculcate in a populace the apparent “truth” that unity, regulation, coordination, and wholeness are always better, more satisfying and more fascinating, than the alternatives. Yet in order to promote desires for national unity, the nation, its core identity, must appear to have always already been there, poised to fascinate its people, and ready to be desired.²⁵ And this too, as we will shortly see, is one of the riches of Arthurian romance. Arthurian tales constitute powerful fantasies because they trace a heritage to the most ancient of British days. Through Arthur an increasingly literate public can learn to desire a unified future by delighting in the imagined glories of a unified past.