The Prose Brut and the Reception of England’s Tenth-Century Past

Description

The prose Brut was among the most widely disseminated historical texts of late medieval England, surviving in over 250 copies, mostly in Middle English, but also in Latin and Anglo-Norman French. The text presents a Galfridian history for its first 2,000 lines before passing into more historically grounded royal history with King Æthelberht of Kent (d. 616). The original Anglo-Norman text probably ended in 1272, the earliest Middle English texts in 1333, while various redactions contain continuations that stretch to as late as 1431. This late material has been subject to significant attention, both due to its relative contemporaneity and that the distinctive nature of the continuations allow the identification of subgroups with the surviving manuscripts. Likewise, the Galfridian material has been extensively studied within scholarly discourse on the reception and transmission of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De gestis Britonum. The centuries that fall between these two extreme ends of the prose Brut narrative have, however, have largely been neglected.

This paper will present research from a wider project on the transmission of the Anglo-Saxon past into later medieval historiography, offering an analysis of how the prose Brut engages with this history. Using various figures of the tenth century as its case studies – Æthelstan, Edgar, Æthelred II – it will explore the sources of their biographies, examine variations between manuscripts, and suggest how the prose Brut’s author(s) envisaged Anglo-Saxon kingship to fit within the Brut tradition.

Period	7 Jul 2025
Event title	International Medieval Congress: Worlds of Learning
Event type	Conference
Location	Leeds, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International