Introduction

      A HISTORY without the imagination,” wrote Jacques Le Goff, “is a mutilated, disembodied history” (5). Imagination, Le Goff implies, has the power to repair historical fragments, turning mutilated details into a coherent whole. Le Goff’s striking image of a “disembodied” history without imagination links materiality with the imaginative faculty. History’s special claim to the material and embodied comes not merely from facts about the past, but from what an imagination does with those facts. Le Goff thus rearranges what has been until recently the standard opposition between history (the Real, the material, and the embodied) and fiction (the imagined, the literary, and the textual). Our histories need imagination, Le Goff and many medievalists since insist, at least in part because, as Gabrielle Spiegel has suggested, “imaginary dreams” have the power to “motivate human behavior” (86). Such work has helped us see that fantasy and history have had a long acquaintance, and not simply because medieval writers about the past cared less for verisimilitude than did their modern or early modern counterparts. Indeed, as the 1839 text of the Middle English version of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville suggests, the imaginative faculty can assist in the very real process of creating empires. Imperial governments use, as that text puts it, “[a]lle here lust and alle here Ymaginacioun … for to putten alle Londes undre hire subjeccioun” [all their desire and all their imagination so as to put all lands under their control] (251).¹

      Le Goff emphasizes the unifying and synthetic power of the imagination; imagination, in this view, repairs mutilation, places pieces together, crafts wholeness out of parts. The remarks attributed to “Mandeville,” in contrast, emphasize the role of the imagination in processes of conquest, annexation, and subjugation, thus hinting at the sinister side of imaginary unifications. Unity is an imaginary quality valuable to imperial governments and to processes of colonization. And yet processes of conquest, annexation, and subjugation can be said to unify only if we take a conqueror’s perspective. As the history of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland suggests, the value of unity is a matter of perspective: what from one view constitutes a longed-for unification, can also be experienced as a painful separation, a destructive fragmentation. Analyses of the imaginary syntheses of medieval history have had little to say about the colonizing uses of imagination and fantasy; medievalists have not examined as frequently as we might what traumas, losses, imaginary fragments, or contradictions fuel historic medieval legends. We have, as a result, often had less to say about the alternative histories, alternative imaginings also legible in medieval texts; we are often silent about the other dreams and desires sacrificed, often forcibly, to traumatic imperial, or national, unities.

      This study takes seriously the role of imagination in making (and contesting) notions of union in late medieval Britain. Sovereign Fantasies examines romance narratives of Arthur from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the context of changing political and cultural identities in late