Ingham - Sovereign Fantasies

Imaginative writing can be used in a very real sense to create empires – especially when written from the conqueror’s perspective, when the writing can re-create the history to say what needs to be said to make the current dynasty seem inevitable, favored by history, etc. Ingham’s book looks at the ways in which imaginative writing worked to help create unity among the peoples in Britain, mostly so that she can explore the ways in which the imaginative writing is used by those people as a space where they can mourn the past, the way things might have been, the plight of the subaltern groups on the British Isles such as the Welsh, etc. The Romances are thus a way for the English to claim Welsh loyalties even as they can mourn the loss of the culture and the power.

Ingham is looking at conceptions of nationalism, especially in Medieval terms, as “nationhood” is usually a concept that isn’t thought to come into being until the Early Modern period and is often conceived in terms that are directly opposed to medieval modes of thought and organization. She looks at the concept of a nation as an “imagined community” where a sense of similarity and identity is created through, among other routes, literary imagination. The imaginative writings encode cultural losses as well as victories, and she argues that the losses encoded in the works are largely explored on a gendered basis. This allows for a community of men to for and work together as knights, thus forming a sort of imagined community, while the women in the Arthurian legends, always so potently drawn, are areas where desire, loss, and possibilities are inscribed. Women often come into the stories in ways that disrupt the male community, and thus explore and occasionally explode the fiction of the male community.

Geoffrey in particular is interesting in this way because his story of Arthur created a strong amount of discontent and uneasiness in other historians, especially William of Malmesbury, who described Geoffrey’s tale as an account of “false myths” and “Welsh ravings.” Ingham argues that the reason Geoffrey’s tale is considered so dangerous is because of the reaction it provoked in the Welsh – the figure of Arthur provided a rallying point for the disheartened Welsh, and various Welsh insurrections figured around leaders (like Owain Glyn Dwr) who would use the figure of the dragon (a symbol of Arthur) to raise their followers. Malmesbury’s discomfort with Geoffrey’s tale, as well as the risings that so often used Arthur as a rallying point, work to show the intense cultural power that mythology can have.

The myth of Arthur created by Geoffrey also proved to have cultural power in that several AngloNorman kings felt the need to commission genealogies somehow “proving” their family link to Arthur, as though being related in some way to Arthur provides a sort of stamp of legitimacy on kings. Geoffrey at several points in his book dedicates it to various leaders, which seems to point out the role that powerful political figures have in crafting history and its contents (and discontents) for people to read. Moreover, the way Geoffrey crafts the initial British colonization of Amorica reverses the eventual Norman colonization of England – the formulation can be used to imply that the Normans are descendents of the original Bretons who have come to reclaim the island.

Ingham makes an interesting note with regards to Geoffrey v. Bede: Geoffrey is castigated by other historians because the basis and assumptions he takes for his background of his history are fundamentally Welsh in origin, style, and pleasure. Bede, on the other hand, is regarded as being much more truthful (despite the fact that there are many things in Bede that would be considered bad history, irrational, or impossible) because the basis for Bede’s history is Christian, and thus more familiar and acceptable to the ruling class. Gildas is interesting in this vein as well, as he gives a tragic account of British history in terms of loss and divine wrath, seeing as he does that the British deserve their fate due to their unending civil wars in the post-Arthurian period.