Roman de Brut

’Whoever wishes to hear about, and to know about, kings and heirs, about who first ruled England and which kings it had, Master Wace, who is telling the truth about this, has translated this.’

Wace’s Roman de Brut (1155) can be seen as the gateway to the history of the Britons for both French and English speakers of the time, and thus to Arthurian history, as the first complete Old French adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain (late 1130s), in which Arthur appears for the first time as king of the Britons. The Roman de Brut was a foundational work, an inspiration for a series of anonymous verse Bruts of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries and for the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut -- the most widely read French vernacular text on this material in medieval England -- as well as a forerunner of the Middle English Brut tradition, including Layamon’s Brut (c. 1200). Wace’s poem thus inaugurates and shapes Brut traditions, including Arthurian tales, in verse and in prose, in historiography and in literature, including Wace’s innovation of King Arthur’s Round Table.

This volume contains an English prose translation of Wace’s Roman de Brut, accompanied by an introduction and notes, a select bibliography, a summary of the text, a list of manuscripts, and indexes of personal and geographical names.

Wace

Glyn S. Burgess is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Liverpool. He has translated the three twelfth-century romances of antiquity and the Roman de Rou of Wace (2002). In 1990 he was made a Chevalier des Palmes Académiques and he is an honorary President of the International Courtly Literature Society. His most recent books are Twenty-Four Lays from the French Middle Ages (2016; with Leslie C. Brook), The Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure (2017; with Douglas Kelly), and The Roman de Thèbes and the Roman d’Eneas (2021; with Douglas Kelly).

Jean Blacker is Emeritus Professor of French, Kenyon College. Her more recent publications include Wace, The Hagiographical Works: The Conception Nostre Dame and the Lives of St Margaret and St Nicholas (2013), with Glyn S. Burgess, and Amy V. Ogden, Court and Cloister: Essays in the Short Narrative in Honor of Glyn S. Burgess (2018), with Jane H. M. Taylor. Her work focuses on the protean uses of King Arthur in Anglo-Norman, Continental French, and Latin historiography of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, focusing on the interconnections between foundation myths, competing claims of identity, and cultural imperialism in the legendary history of Britain.