LaƷamon depicts the Britons as culturally inflexible and the English as culturally flexible throughout the Brut , suggesting that the English conquer Britain because they negotiate the relationship between culture and conquest more effectively. LaƷamon presents the Brut as both a model and a reflection of such constructive cultural interaction.
This chapter discusses the motives for literary forgery in the thirteenth-century pseudo-Ovidian poem De vetula. It reads the poem as an allegory of forgery, with each character representing a different kind of text: an original classical text, a later medieval copy of that classical text, and eventually, the forgery that pretends to be the genuine work of a classical author. At the literal level, De vetula’s characters participate in a standard fabliau plot. When read allegorically, however, their emotions and actions symbolize medieval audiences’ longing for unmediated access to classical literature, and the lengths to which some writers were willing to go in order to satisfy that desire. Through these characters, the unknown author of De vetula acknowledges forgery’s inherently transgressive nature, while also explaining why an author who recognizes the unethical quality of forgery might nevertheless choose to commit forgery. In this way, this chapter uses the medieval De vetula to reflect more broadly on the reasons for creating forgeries of classical literature.
Whether we can speak of colonialism in the Middle Ages has been a long-standing matter of debate. 2 While the question "Was there colonialism in the Middle Ages?" has produced much useful scholarship by medievalists and non-medievalists alike, I would also suggest that the yes or no framing of this question has at times placed counterproductive limits on scholarly analysis. After all, we do not require a country to meet the definition of "textbook" democracy before we use it to advance the study of democracy. Should we require the medieval period to exhibit "textbook" colonialism before we use it to advance our understanding of colonialism?This article investigates what, if anything, we can learn from exploring the almost-but-not-quite-colonial aspects of the Middle Ages. More specifically, it examines the interplay of colonialist rhetoric and medieval historiographical conventions in one historian's account of the second bubonic plague pandemic, now commonly known as the Black Death. This pandemic first spread across Europe in 1347-1353, and eventually resulted in the deaths of at least fifty million people globally, with different regions across the world losing anywhere from thirty to sixty percent of their population. 3 Local and regional outbreaks recurred roughly once every decade until c. 1500, with further outbreaks persisting through the early modern period. 4 I analyze the English chronicler Thomas Walsingham's (c. 1340-c. 1420) reaction to one such outbreak, which occurred on the Anglo-Scottish Border in 1379. 5 Walsingham's historical position makes him a particularly useful object of study for scholars working in our modern, postcolonial-yet-still-colonialist world. As I will discuss in greater detail below, Walsingham wrote his account of this outbreak during a contraction of English colonial ambitions in Scotland. Nevertheless, he used classical tropes about civilization and barbarity to provide readers with a pro-English interpretation of this outbreak. His work therefore underscores how colonialist rhetoric
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