Reimagining History in Anglo-Norman Prose Chronicles by John Spence (review)

John Spence’s field of interest in this study of a specific group of later medieval texts is carefully and narrowly defined and his stated aim is crisply executed. His purpose is to examine a series of prose chronicle histories written in Anglo-Norman French during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Spence’s primary focus is on the ways in which these texts present their stories by adopting and adapting earlier material, including legends and romances as well as histories, in order to arrive at new versions of the contested British and English past. These ‘reimaginings’, to echo the book’s title, say more about their authors’ own priorities than they do about accurate historical representations. Notably, Spence is concerned neither with what his authors copy precisely from their sources, nor with additions which are completely original. The latter, in particular, might normally be of interest to literary scholars wishing to emphasise the importance of their text. Instead, Spence deals with the major alterations, and the minor amendments and changes of emphasis that can be identified when the original sources are well known, as they often are. These shifts, he claims, ‘provide the clearest insight into the intentions and historical methods of their authors’ (p. 23).

To illustrate, one might look at Spence’s second chapter, dealing with the legendary history of early Britain. The foundational works are Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae and several of its twelfth-century successors, especially Wace’s Roman de Brut, itself an Anglo-Norman verse translation and adaptation of Geoffrey’s Latin original. These well-known texts provided the raw material for a whole series of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Bruts with which Spence is concerned. One might consider the decision to focus solely on prose versions to be a somewhat arbitrary limitation, since later verse adaptations in Anglo-Norman, such as Langtoft’s fourteenth-century chronicle, are an important part of the literary genealogy in question. Spence gives his reasons – that prose texts, in his view, provide ‘echoes of an authoritative documentary culture’ (p. 23) – yet the distinction remains slightly unsatisfying and one almost feels that part of the story is missing.

All the same, within the parameters that he has set himself Spence’s analysis reveals a keen eye for detail. All of the authors in question struggle with how best to incorporate clearly apocryphal tales, especially those dealing with Arthur, into their historical narratives. Spence argues that their efforts to do so reflect both intellectual and political concerns, such as the need to justify Edward I’s claim of sovereignty over all of Britain. That Edward used Arthur in support of his claims has long been known and examined, but Spence’s study makes a valuable addition to this area of scholarship in that it can trace the progression of versions of the Arthurian story over several generations. Prose chronicles detailing the ‘passage of dominion’ from British to English rule needed to perform a delicate ‘balancing act’ weighing up the competing priorities of ‘historical credibility and narrative appeal’ (p. 73).

Other chapters examine the ‘rhetoric of confidence’ (p. 26) observable in the prologues of the major texts (this, Spence argues, represents a shift from an earlier authorial standpoint of humility in similar situations); the representation of ‘English’ heroes (Havelock, Guy of Warwick, and others) whose stories are grafted on to the ‘British’ content in order to create a new sense of national origins; and retellings of the Norman Conquest. One of Spence’s key texts in all of these cases is Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica. It typifies the hybrid nature of all the works which Spence studies in that it draws on earlier histories, the Bruts and the romance tradition, among others, to present a version of the English past that could be closely attuned to fourteenth-century sensibilities. A useful appendix includes two transcribed and translated extracts from Gray’s chronicle...