Sovereign Fantasies. Patricia Clare Ingham
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“develop” into later discourses of the nation. This would be a foolish claim since, from the long view of history, Arthurian traditions play out very differently even in the different insular spaces of England, Wales, and Scotland. Welsh prophecies linked to Merlin, for example, will appear in texts of Welsh resistance to English control well into the eighteenth century; but this is not, of course, the case in England, where Arthurian traditions (after Spenser’s Faerie Queene) nearly vanish altogether until their reemergence in Tennyson’s nineteenth-century medievalism.
Sovereign Fantasies argues that medieval community is imagined not through homogeneous stories of a singular “people,” but through narratives of sovereignty as a negotiation of differences, of ethnicity, region, language, class, and gender.12 While I am indebted to Susan Reynolds’s suggestion that aristocratic groups identified with a particular king (what she usefully calls “regnal communities”) cohere with later ideas of a nation, I also wish to show that such identifications work variously for different groups, often through antagonisms, or in oppositional ways. Reynolds suggests that dynastic formations can produce “imagined communities”; I hope to show that corporate desire for legendary sovereignty suggests not—as Anderson would have it—confidence in a divinely ordained ruler, but controversial and contentious identifications with sovereign power, identifications that channel anxieties about, even critiques of, specific royal genealogies. This also suggests that, unlike many (but not all) modern imaginings, this nation takes the sovereign as a primary organizing figure around whom divergent groups build or contest alliance. And while I share Turville-Petre’s interest in noting similarities between medieval and modern, especially in response to the claim that “medieval nation” is an oxymoron, I remain wary of assigning differences (whether historical or cultural) to a “periphery,” both because the politics of the “periphery” are very much at issue here, and because nation is such a variable, protean concept.
Yet difference is still only half of the story I want to tell. The historic shared sovereignty (not to mention the relative geographic nearness) of England and Wales demonstrates in a particularly intense way that “difference” here is not absolute, signifying instead a complex of shared spaces, histories, and imaginings. It is the combination of shared imaginings and differential politics embedded in British Arthuriana that I attempt to convey through the concise term national fantasy, one that I will employ throughout this study.13 I hope in what follows it will be clear that while this oppositional “imagined community” shares some attributes with later such imaginings, it is not their teleological ancestor.
Focusing on a particular time of imagining and contesting British identity, I am also surveying broadly, hoping to contribute to an analysis of the similarities and differences that mark this identity across a longue durée. The legendary, prophetic return of a British totam insulam suggests that the cadence of this insular identity might not be linear and chronological so much as recursive, repeating at times of cultural instability, or during transitional periods.14 As a lost yet promised figure of insular wholeness, a late medieval imaginary tota insula alludes to ancient British days while it also encodes massive political, geographic, and military losses for England, Scotland, and Wales, not the least of which involves the loss of England’s long-standing claims to sovereignty in France. Those claims, from one view a lingering consequence of Norman Conquest, suggest the complex dynamics of the insular with the continental, and demand that we frame the history of medieval Britain as a study of the interdependence of cultures, of histories of exchange, violent as well as peaceful, traumatic as well as pleasurable, sexual as well as political.15 The polyglot culture of late medieval Britain deploys a language and custom forged out of repetitive intercultural encounters. The conquering ambitions of Roman, Viking, Saxon, and Norman follow in succession in an insular history of intercultural exchange, migration, conquest, and coexistence. Scholars of the relations between medieval England and the regions of its insular neighbors continue to disentangle the legacies of conquest from the narratives of “British” history, literature, and culture.16
This longue durée of Britain’s identity is thus embedded in a history of conquest.17 Of course medieval Britain is also one of the formerly colonized spaces of the Roman Empire. The colonial inheritance of Britain’s early years—an imperialism J. S. P. Tatlock nearly fifty years ago described as an “unavoidable” motif in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae—haunts the fantasy of British insular wholeness. Arthur’s association with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story of imperialism, and with a conquered Welsh “native” tradition, marks this story as a particular scene of such literary and historiographic engagements. Many of the Middle English tales make explicit reference to Britain’s colonial past or to Emperor Arthur’s imperial ambitions. Admittedly the medieval understanding of the category of emperor, as Felicity Riddy recently put it, “has to do with royal sovereignty and jurisdiction, not territorial expansion.” She continues, “it means that the king has the powers of the Roman emperor within his own realm” (69).18 From the view of the English kings, then, claims to territory they considered part of England (even if the territory was in France or in Wales) amounted to their recovery of a rightful inheritance. The assumption that medieval definitions of sovereignty were therefore non-imperial deserves interrogation, however. For as Riddy also suggests, from the perspective of vanquished peoples, those who disputed England’s claim in the first place, English kings were imperialist “in the modern sense [since they] held [territory] by terror” (69). Furthermore, Roman imperial models of sovereignty gesture toward long-standing legacies of Rome’s colonization of Britain, indeed, of Europe. Territorial claims of rightful inheritance have a long history of imperial uses; in the twentieth century Afrikaner landowners used such justifications as part of the political mythology of apartheid.19 Those justifications testify to the complexity and intransigence of relations of conquest and settlement rather than to their absence.
The difference between medieval and modern colonialisms has exerted substantial influence on the growing number of medievalists working on the topic.20 The list of medievalists analyzing settlement, conquest, linguistic minorities, and crusade is a long and vibrant one, to which much has recently been added. Recent work inspired, implicitly and explicitly, by the rich and powerful insights of postcolonial cultural studies, suggests that medievalists can contribute much to an analysis of the repetitions and patternings of conquest, violence, and desire at different historical moments, and different geographic sites.21 As is probably clear by now, I am particularly interested here in the relations between dominant European cultures and those groups Felipe Fernandez-Armesto calls Europe’s “internal primitives,” among whom he numbers the Welsh. Specifically the intimacies of conquest, the complicated interminglings of cultures different from, yet also in proximity with, one another are of crucial importance to me. Recent theorists of postcolonial cultural studies (particularly Homi Bhabha and Sara Suleri, but also, if in a different way, Benita Parry) have addressed just such questions and, as a result, their work will be important to the analysis that follows.
Yet, from the vantage of historical chronology, the premodern period seems far indeed from a postcolonial one. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, editors of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, offer a definition of postcolonial that moves its signification from a temporal chronology to the spaces of opposition. They write, “post-colonial … does not mean ‘post-independence,’ or ‘after colonialism,’ for this would be to falsely ascribe an end to the colonial process.” They continue, “Post-colonialism, rather, begins from the very first moment of colonial contact. It is the discourse of oppositionality which colonialism brings into being. In this sense, postcolonial writing has a very long history” (117).22 With this definition in mind one could rightly say that medieval studies has a long history of postcolonial inspirations. Yet other areas of overlap exist between medieval and postcolonial cultural studies. For one thing, postcolonial scholars and medievalists share a common appreciation of the problems that progressivist, or teleological chronologies pose for an understanding of the complicated sophistication of so-called primitive cultures. Medievalists navigate the problem of teleology in various ways, sometimes stressing what has been called the “orientalism” of medieval studies, its historical disciplinary development during the nineteenth-century Age of Empire. Other approaches try