Focusing on works by some of the major literary figures of the period, Faletra argues that the legendary history of Britain that flourished in medieval chronicles and Arthurian romances traces its origins to twelfth-century Anglo-Norman colonial interest in Wales and the Welsh.

Challenging the standard view that England emerged as a dominant power and Wales faded into obscurity after Edward I's conquest in 1282, this book considers how Welsh (and British) history became an enduringly potent instrument of political power in the late Middle Ages. Brought into the broader stream of political consciousness by major baronial families from the March (the borderlands between England and Wales), this inventive history generated a new brand of literature interested in succession, land rights, and the origins of imperial power, as imagined by Geoffrey of Monmouth. These marcher families leveraged their ancestral, political, and ideological ties to Wales in order to strengthen their political power, both regionally and nationally, through the patronage of historical and genealogical texts that reimagined the Welsh past on their terms. In doing so, they brought ideas of Welsh history to a wider audience than previously recognized and came to have a profound effect on late medieval thought about empire, monarchy, and succession.

The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.

The Black Middle Ages examines the influence of medieval studies on African-American thought. Matthew X. Vernon focuses on nineteenth century uses of medieval texts to structure racial identity, but also considers the flexibility of medieval narratives more broadly in the medieval period, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book engages disparate discourses to reassess African-American positionalities in time and space. Utilizing a transhistorical framework, Vernon reflects on medieval studies as a discipline built upon a contended set of ideologies and acts of imaginative appropriation visible within source texts and their later mobilizations.

Fantastic Histories explores the political and cultural contexts of the entry of fairies to the historical record in twelfth century England, and the subsequent uses of fairy narratives in both insular and continental history and romance. It traces the uses of the fairy as a contested marker of historicity and fictionality in the histories of Gerald of Wales and Walter Map, the continental mirabilia of Gervase of Tilbury, and the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French Mélusine romances and their early English reception. Working across insular and continental source material, Fantastic Histories explores the practices of history-writing, fiction-making, and the culturally determined boundaries of wonder that defined the limits of medieval history.

• This book is the first multi-authored work on Gerald of Wales • It has a cross-disciplinary approach bringing together a variety of voices and perspectives • Includes rare focus on his lesser-studied works • This broader view provides a fuller context for Gerald’s more popular/better-studied works

This book is a comprehensive single-volume history of literature in the two major languages of Wales from post-Roman to post-devolution Britain.