Scholarship devoted to Geoffrey of Monmouth's HRB discusses the Historia's relationship to traditions of literary and historical writing. This dissertation likewise addresses this issue, and finds the Historia more compatible with the Deuteronomistic history in the Hebrew Bible and Virgil's Aeneid than with twelfth-century history and romance. The Historia differs little in story-line from Henry of Huntingdon's Historia Anglorum, following the rise and fall of Britain's rulers, although Henry continues his history beyond the time period chronicled by Geoffrey. For Henry a nation's inevitable rise and fall at the hands of divine providence vitiates all worldly success. Geoffrey, however, contends that striving for worldly success is worthwhile precisely because it has divine sanction: divine providence had promised the Britons a glorious destiny. Moreover, the loss of power which Henry ascribes to a generalized human immorality, is ascribed by Geoffrey to specific flaws in the British national character.;However, Geoffrey's purpose in writing the Historia is not entirely fulfilled in the interpretation of the rise and fall of the Britons. By creating the figure of Arthur in the image of the Normans, thereby achieving an identification between the past and present rulers of England, Geoffrey suggests that Arthur's fate may be shared by the Norman rulers he resembles. By bringing together past and present in a single narrative for the purpose of instructing his audience, Geoffrey finds common ground with certain aspects of the Aeneid. In the Aeneid, the triumph of pietas foreshadows the triumph of the future Rome and its savior Augustus. Geoffrey, however, working within the fall of Britain traditions, is constrained to show a failed Arthur. Arthur's failure and the eventual fall of the Britons provide a graphic demonstration of the consequences of excessive ambition, consequences which could easily come to the ambition-ridden Normans.;The contrast between a nation's glorious destiny and its wretched reality, explained in terms of national character and divine providence, is a definitive feature of the Historia and the Deuteronomistic history. A formal paradigm, structurally significant in each work, illustrates how the negative qualities of the Britons and Israelites, manifest at crucial moments in the reigns of their kings, contribute to the fall of the nation.
展开▼
