Imagining history: medieval texts, contexts and communities in 'the English Brut Tradition'
"The 'Imagining History' project is the first large-scale collaborative investigation of the manuscripts of the Middle English Prose Brut chronicle, arguably the most prolificly disseminated secular text of the English Middle Ages. The project explores the cultural capital of the Prose Brut within the larger context of the ubiquitous 'English Brut tradition', which finds its origins in Norman historiography - specifically in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Brittanniae - and shapes much of the late medieval and early modern historical imagination in Britain" (from project web site; please see for more details).
Project
Academic field
Affiliation
Project link
arts-humanities.net
Principal investigator
Professor John Thompson
Principal project staff
Professor John Thompson
Start date
Tuesday, January 1, 2002
Completion date
Thursday, December 1, 2005
Era
Source material
"The "English Brut tradition" has been almost universally neglected by modern scholars working on topics relating to late medieval and early modern textual cultures. It is our argument that 'imagining history' through this tradition should be central to our conceptualization of medieval and early modern popular historiography in these islands. The reasons for this are self-evident: with the striking exception of the extant copies of the English Wycliffite Bible translations, the texts of the Brut tradition survive in more medieval and post-medieval manuscripts and early printed editions than any other English vernacular work produced as either verse or prose". (see project web site for more details).