Written in the 1130s, Geoffrey's imaginative history of the Britons from Brutus to Cadwallader, the first work to recount the woes of Lear and the glittering career of Arthur, rapidly became a bestseller in the British Isles and Francophone Europe, with over 200 manuscripts surviving. Yet no critica[...]
Completed in 1136, "The History of the Kings of Britain" traces the story of the realm from its supposed foundation by Brutus to the coming of the Saxons some two thousand years later. Vividly portraying legendary and semi-legendary figures such as Lear, Cymbeline, Merlin the magician and the most f[...]
Fiona Tolhurst offers the first feminist analysis of the non-Arthurian portion of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain.[...]