King Arthur’s Charter: A Thirteenth-Century French Satire Against Bretons

The lecture will center on a faux charter (written c. 1250) purporting to have been issued by Arthur, king of the Briton, in the hundredth year of his immortality (c. 642). The Arthurian portion of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, the genesis of the myth of King Arthur’s return, and the medieval history of negative ethnic stereotyping of the Brittonic Celts all factor into Berard’s contextualization of the act.Christopher Berard (Ph.D. 2015 in Medieval Studies, University of Toronto) is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Providence College and has recently publishedArthurianism in Early Plantagenet England: From Henry II to Edward I(Boydell Press, 2019). He is a specialist in Arthurian literature and medieval chronicles, and in his monograph he investigates how post-Conquest kings of England emulated and otherwise used the legendary King Arthur of Britain for political gain, as well as how this activity in turn impacted depictions of Arthur in literature. Professor Berard’s writing shows how “medievalism” was already being practiced in the twelfth century by Anglo-Normans interested in the ancient (to them) past of the sixth-century Briton, King Arthur