axed

The final final final “sentence of the day” for this project (I tell you three times), which I meant to post earlier this morning:

As a chronicle Li Rei succeeds by avoiding the superlative strengths of other texts.

The dissertation’s title is “Textual Portability and Its Uses in England, ca. 1250-1330″; its abstract is after the jump–

Focusing on brief narratives that recount idealized lineages of kings of the English, my dissertation argues that these neglected texts exemplify a change in how writing the past was conceived during the later thirteenth century. They operate in contrast to their lengthy twelfth-century predecessors, which established a canonical sense of the past through the weight of their overlapping content. Though such texts arose from writers’ competitive desires to produce complete, nuanced accounts of the English past, later writers received the texts’ shared concerns as consensus, replacing the question of relative veracity amongst narratives with an intentional conflation of lineage and succession.

Chapter One establishes Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum as the key twelfth-century text that enabled the thirteenth-century developments I discuss. Historia Anglorum set a precedent: its uses of antecedent material showed later writers a way to embed textual authority as well as displace it by juxtaposing contradictory versions of insular history. From Henry’s text follow several that built upon his model: Gervase of Canterbury’s Gesta regum, Description of England, and Li Rei de Engletere. Li Rei is visible in manuscript from the mid-thirteenth century into the fifteenth, in four versions I have identified; it serves as extended example of a productive textual mutation and a focal point for the post-consensus activities I investigate. Chapter Two unravels Li Rei‘s organizational logic and attends to its manner of textual variation to explain its unusual viability as a short, anonymous condensation of twelfth-century histories.

This overview enables me to trace two paths showing that medieval readers construed Li Rei as a flexible, modular text. Thus, the third chapter investigates Li Rei‘s uses within several codicological contexts; it addresses an extension leading to Brenhinedd y Saesson and the prose Brut. My discussion concludes with a second extension that reconfigures Li Rei‘s text as illustration for genealogical diagrams: for this version, locking English lineage amidst the question of Scottish succession outweighed preserving the flexibility that enabled the text’s genesis. Finally, appendices provide four representative texts of Li Rei, transcribed diplomatically, as well as relevant manuscript descriptions.

Why yes, I do hold copyright on my dissertation and its abstract.