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COPYRIGHT 2005 Southern Illinois University
The foundresses of Britain, as constructed by that country's post-Conquest inhabitants, are becoming better known than they used to be. The most important secular story for the Angevins and Plantagenets and their successors has long been acknowledged to be the eponymous foundation of Britain by Brutus. Variant versions of the Brutus story are extant in verse and prose in hundreds of manuscripts. The Brut's position as the framing narrative of post-Conquest Britain is well-illustrated in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where Arthurian narrative is re-set within the Brutus story of Britain (to which Arthurian narratives in any case ultimately owe their own popularity). Recent scholarship, however, has begun elucidating a scandalous female prequel to Brutus in the story of Albina, first occupant of a country she names Albion after herself. This story first appears in Anglo-Norman before 1330 and becomes rapidly attached as a prelude to many of the French, Latin, and English versions of the Brut (Johnson 1995; Marvin 2001).
Alongside intensified recognition of the post-colonial Brutus and of Albina have come intensified perceptions of the importance of post-Conquest monastic lives and foundations. As Jane Zatta writes,
It could be said that Anglo-Norman lives of English saints trojanized Anglo-Saxon Christianity by portraying the Norman succession to the government of English religious houses as a kind of translatio ecclesiae in much the same way as the royal historians had portrayed the Norman Conquest of England as an ongoing project of political perfection progressing from pagan Troy to transitional Rome to Christian Europe. Norman lives of Anglo-Saxon saints highlight their role as the...
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