The Construction of Vernacular History in the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle: The Manuscript Culture of Late Medieval England by Julia Marvin (review)

Julia Marvin is the ideal person to have written on the Anglo-Norman Brut tradition for this latest addition to the Writing History in the Middle Ages series. Her two-part study takes as its starting point and cornerstone the origins, composition, refashioning, and “textual afterlife” (my term) of what is usually now identified by modern scholars as the “Oldest Version of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut.” This is an anonymous late thirteenth-century text that shapes how Marvin considers the manner in which a vernacular (here understood as popular and secular) British history was written and appreciated by clerical and lay writers and readers throughout her chosen period. The attractions of returning to this significant vernacular point of origin for her latest study of late medieval English vernacular treatments of national origin myths (based on but not slavishly following earlier treatments in Geoffrey of Monmouth or Wace) are obvious. Put at its simplest, the Oldest Version offers a complete and relatively succinct continuous history of Britain from the Fall of Troy until the death of Henry III in 1272; it stands at the head of a range of other derivative treatments in Anglo-Norman, Latin, and, predominantly, Middle English (if the number and nature of the surviving manuscripts and variant texts are taken into account) that are collectively referred to by modern scholarship as the English Prose Brut tradition.

Marvin has already edited and translated the Oldest Version from its five extant manuscripts, each dating from the first half of the fourteenth century. Her publications include an extensive detailed scholarly commentary on the text that sets the tone for some of the painstaking close readings of the Oldest Version and its sources and analogues that are a continuing necessary feature for her work on the Anglo-Norman Brut treatments. Thus the first half of the book (“Construction”) demonstrates the distinctiveness of the Oldest Version from its Galfridian predecessors by close comparison of likely sources and analogues for key episodes. Over the course of five chapters, Marvin examines how the content and narrative style of the Oldest Version represent a transformation of what she describes as “the relentless Galfridian cycle of conquest and loss” (p. 16) into a new British history. She describes an editorial process often marked by compression, omission, and abridgment of sources and simple word substitution, through which the Oldest Version author fashions Galfridian episodes into a continuous narrative of identity and possession expressed in plain and accessible prose. For the reader well-versed in Virgilian and Galfridian themes, these changes might occasionally seem unnecessarily reductive, but the end result, Marvin argues, grants a persistent and different focus and sense of purpose for the Oldest Version narrative in comparison to its sources. In this way, the editorial changes are quietly cumulative in effect rather than dramatic. They offer a patterned narrative, “directed by the strategic repetition of events rather than an explicating, moralizing, authorial voice” (p. 239). They seem designed to allow a broad range of late medieval English writers and readers of this version of the British history to identify and find common cause more readily with their illustrious ancestors and other early inhabitants of the land. Such figures from the remotest reaches of nationhood and time are not infrequently shown to have challenged ideas of governance based on the dominance of imperialism, violence, misogyny, and social exclusion.

Part II (“Reconstruction and Response”) justifies the subtitle of the monograph by examining in four chapters how some later English writers and readers experienced, appropriated, and repurposed the Oldest Version through a highly selective study of a few of the over fifty surviving manuscripts preserving copies of Anglo-Norman Brut versions. Marvin...