Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination: The Matters of Britain in the Twelfth Century by Michael A. Faletra (review)

"Wales," writes Michael A. Faletra in his opening paragraph, "is England's original repressed Other" (p. 1). The "Medieval Colonial Imagination" of Faletra's title is thus English: English, particularly Anglo-Norman, perceptions and oppressions and "erasures of Wales and the Welsh from the British insular past" (p. 3), especially in the twelfth century. Although Norman and Galfridian chroniclers regularly portrayed Wales and the Celtic Britons as a land and people ripe for conquest, the notion of British history and the promised return of a great Welsh king were problematic. For Faletra, modern readers must pay attention to the prevalence of British history and foundation myths that proliferate in Matter of Britain narratives in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Faletra's plural Matters of Britain thus comprises a complex synthesis of traditions and languages and genres, not just vernacular Arthurian romance, but also Latin and French historia and fabulae. Despite a somewhat inauspicious characterization of Norman and English invasions of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland between 1070 and 1283 as "the Second Conquest" (pp. 3–4), this is a valuable study, particularly due to Faletra's own synthesis of postcolonial theorists with old-school literary criticism and post-Conquest Insular history.

Chapter 1 focusses on the crucial role played by Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Historia regum Britanniae in establishing a firmly colonial Matter of Britain. For Arthurian scholars this seems a self-evident claim, even if we disagree about Geoffrey's politics; but Faletra points to several influential literary handbooks that downplay Geoffrey's status. Faletra largely agrees with a political Geoffrey but argues that the Historia ultimately denigrates the Welsh to justify Anglo-Norman rule, establishing the literary and historiographic template through which to negotiate colonial anxiety about and subjection of Wales. The idea, following R. William Leckie, is that Geoffrey's Norman readers would consider their 1066 Conquest as a "passage of dominion," a passage mirroring that which occurs in the Historia itself from the Britons to the Anglo-Saxons. But in twelfth-century history rather than Geoffrey's imagination, the translatio imperii is to the Norman English rather than to the Anglo-Saxons (pp. 36–37). In thus arguing against such influential critics as John Gillingham, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and Michelle Warren, Faletra plausibly establishes that Geoffrey consistently presents Wales as "a sort of Bermuda Triangle for wicked … kings" (p. 32). The idea of Arthur as a great British king might be thought to undermine Faletra's thesis, but he is careful to point out that Arthur brings Wales into an imperium centered firmly in Logres (England).

In Chapter 2 Faletra elucidates responses to Geoffrey found in mid-twelfth-century courtly writers John of Salisbury, Walter Map, and Marie de France. The courtly context in question is that of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine and their affinities, under whom these three writers continue or complicate the colonialist attitude, language, and themes established by Geoffrey. By this account, John of Salisbury's works betray his "distaste for" and "colonialist attitude" toward Wales, including its Church, which should be subject(ed) to Canterbury as "the Britanniarum mater," a Galfridian Britain that includes Wales (pp. 64–65). John's and Geoffrey's disparagement of the Welsh is however countered by Walter Map, a writer of likely Norman-Welsh parentage. Map satirizes the Angevin court and offers a more neutral vision of the Welsh as alternatively good and bad but nevertheless possessed of the potential to resist courtly English assimilation. Marie de France is even more proWelsh, with four of her Lais having Welsh settings, sources, and even sympathies. The result is a steady valorization of Welsh "honor and chivalric prowess" (p. 84). Faletra is frequently convincing, or at least stimulating, but much of this chapter suffers from the inevitable failing of postcolonial theory...