Along the way, Geoffrey provides the first narrative accounts of Shakespeare's Cymbeline and Lear, of Old King Cole of nursery-rhyme fame, of the boy-prophet Merlin, and, most importantly, the first birth-to-death account of Britain's most famous king, Arthur.
The Historia chronicles the almost two-thousand-year history of Britain's pre-Anglo-Saxon (i.e., Celtic) kings, from the foundation of Britain by the Trojan exile Brutus through the decline and fall of British sovereignty in the seventh century after the death of its final king, Cadwallader. And by anyone's measure, the book was a bestseller, with 217 surviving copies still found throughout Europe. His pseudo-history, the Historia Regum Britanniae ( History of the Kings of Britain) shaped medieval Britain's understanding of its own past like no other text. Geoffrey of Monmouth justly takes his place among the most influential and creative minds of the Middle Ages.
0 kommentar(er)
