Les prophéties de Merlin et la culture politique (XIIe – XVIe siècle) (review)

Catherine Daniel’s book can be applauded on many levels. The scope is encyclopedic—from the Prophetiae Merlini as they appear in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae to political prophecy of the seventeenth century (III.2.5 ‘Merlin le parlementaire contre la monarchie d’Angleterre’). The table of contents alone fills seven pages, outlining the subdivisions of the three chapters of the book. Chapter One is entitled ‘Naissance des Prophetiae Merlini: la tradition merlinienne en marche.’ Chapter Two is ‘Merlin et la guerre: le prophète des vainqueurs.’ And Chapter 3 is ‘Merlin à la cour des puissants: papes, rois et princes sous l’emprise de la prophétie merlinenne.’ Likewise, the amount of research is prodigious, and the author’s engagement with the tremendous range of material is unwavering. However, the book suffers from precisely the aspects that make it praiseworthy. Albeit this book was probably not intended to be read from cover to cover but rather to be consulted per topic, there is so much material as to render navigation difficult, particularly without an index of themes or concepts; while there are the three indexes of authors, texts, and personnages (historical figures), none has subcategories and each has only very occasional cross-references, and thus if one seeks particular information, for example, on the Historia Regum Britanniae, one has to look indiscriminately at the over eighty sets of pages listed in the hopes of finding what one is seeking. This somewhat frustrating presentation raises the question of the intended audience for this book; to have been more helpful to students or researchers less versed in medieval prophecy than experts, Daniel would have needed to have been much clearer, in addition to including much more detailed notes and reference to sources. In addition, perhaps because Merlin and other figures were so readily believed in the Middle Ages—as R. W. Southern put it, ‘the strange phenomenon of apparently unrelieved gibberish claiming the anxious attention of men of high intelligence and sophistication’ (‘Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: 3. History as Prophecy,’ 1972, p. 168) —Daniel also needed to provide readers with frequent reminders that Merlin was a historico-literary construct and not a ‘real person.’

For experts, one of the most unsettling characteristics of this book is that Daniel blurs the line between critical distance—positing the literary, political, and historical uses of Merlin—and believing in an historical Merlin. Merlin, that is, seems to become historical for the author by virtue of his very omnipresence over the centuries. In emphasizing the wide-spread fascination with this figure, his universality, Daniel unintentionally introduces ambiguity regarding Merlin’s status in statements such as ‘Merlin, devin celtique des forêts galloises, écossaises et irlandaises, est devenu, dès le XIII^e siècle, prophète de l’Europe, aussi fiable que les prophètes bibliques’ (489), and ‘En réunissant le personnage d’Ambroise avec celui du Myrddin gallois, qu’il nomme Merlin, Geoffroy unit la tradition historique officielle, du chef prophète du pseudo-Nennius, dont l’autorité est indéniable, avec la tradition celtique orale de l’époque du devin prophète de la forêt. C’est ce Merlin, populaire, dont l’historicité ne fait plus de doute, qui va entrer dans l’histoire et conquérir l’Europe, grâce à la rationalisation de son histoire par Geoffroy de Monmouth’ (16). In a dense, rich resource on an extremely obscure topic, this reader at least would have been grateful for a few qualifiers to increase confidence such as ‘Merlin…became in the eyes of many from the thirteenth century on...as reliable as the Biblical prophets’ or ‘this Merlin… whose historicity was considered no longer in doubt…’

However, when one suspends one’s worries about the author’s beliefs in her subject, one will more readily find...