Merlin in Cornwall: The Source and Contexts of John of Cornwall's Prophetia Merlini

ad narracionem pertinent preterita, ad diuinacionem futura

—Walter Map¹

I.

The twelfth century witnessed the heyday of the Merlinic prophecy as a topic of special—and sometimes even obsessive—interest among European literati. The publication of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Prophetiae Merlini ca. 1135 was doubtless the pivotal moment in the development of the new intellectual hobby of interpreting and glossing the corpus of vaticination attributed to the semi-legendary poet-prophet-magician.² Within the next two generations, writers as diverse as Gerald of Wales, Suger of St. Denis, Orderic Vitalis, and Alain de Lille had all weighed in with interpretations of Geoffrey's obscure (indeed, probably obscurantist) prophecies.³ That the glossing of Geoffrey's work became a fad among the intellectual luminaries of the twelfth century tends, however, to elide the very salient fact that Geoffrey's presentation of these prophecies represents a co-opting of a thriving native British literary genre. While scholars have noted that Geoffrey's Prophetiae seem to draw from the same textual well as Welsh Merlinic prophecies like the tenth-century Armes Prydain Fawr, no systematic attempt has been made to understand the nature of Geoffrey's uses of and attitude toward these traditions.⁴ On the whole, current scholarship tends to remain agnostic about the issues of Geoffrey's political alignment and of his claim to be drawing upon material from "a certain very ancient book in the British tongue" given to him by his associate, Walter, the Archdeacon of Oxford.⁵

What scholars of the period often overlook or underestimate, however, is the import of one of Geoffrey's earliest imitators, John of Cornwall, whose Prophetia Merlini (ca. 1153) offers a rich and overtly critical response to Geoffrey's project.⁶ As Geoffrey's contemporary and as a writer working within (and reworking) the same traditions from which Geoffrey draws, John of Cornwall's Prophetia Merlini constitutes a key piece of evidence in understanding Geoffrey's political alignment, at least as it is presented in his own Merlinic prophecies. In what follows, I shall argue that John of Cornwall bases at least part of his prophecy upon a genuine Brittonic source, specifically a roughly contemporary Cornish prophecy dating from about the early twelfth century. This Cornish material, taken in tandem with the overt political stance of John's Latin verse Prophetia, affords us in turn a view of Geoffrey of Monmouth as a writer who depoliticizes the content of earlier Merlinic prophecies, creating a text whose studied ambiguity would both please his Anglo-Norman audiences and provide an elaborate parlor game for European intellectuals for generations.⁷

John of Cornwall's importance as a writer both in relation to Geoffrey of Monmouth and in his own right has been largely overlooked; Julia Crick, for example, implies that John's Prophetia is a derivative version of and commentary upon Geoffrey's Prophetiae.⁸ Although John of Cornwall's Merlinic prophecy is extant in only a single manuscript, Vatican City, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Ottobonianus Latinus 1474 (fols 1r-4r), it sheds significant light both on the possible sources of Geoffrey's prophetic material and on the political alignment of the Historia Regum Britanniae as a whole. If prophecy is, as Marjorie Reeves suggests, history told backwards, then the composition of prophecy and of prophetic commentaries in the Middle Ages is certainly as politically charged as the writing of history.⁹ Like Geoffrey of Monmouth, John of Cornwall claims his Prophetia to be a translation of an authentic political prophecy in the British tongue, but he presents a far more unambiguously pro-British vision of the Insular future, implicitly correcting and critiquing Geoffrey's Merlinic material in the process. In light of John of Cornwall's far more polemic and overtly anti-Norman prophecy, one can gauge more accurately the limits of Geoffrey's careful ambivalence. Even more importantly, the means by which John of Cornwall legitimates his own work reveal a potential new source for Geoffrey's own prophecies. While Geoffrey leads us to believe that the source...