Preface

This book has been through many shapes since, during the first months of graduate school, I laughed at the news that the Excalibur Hotel would soon open in Las Vegas. I have redrawn its boundaries innumerable times as I struggled (vainly, it seemed) to manage a seemingly amorphous group of materials united by a single word. The present shape of this book owes much to the cumulative impact of many disparate encounters. For their generosity and occasionally strategic interventions, I am grateful to Rebecca Biron, Frank Brandsma, Brigitte Cazelles, Richard Dienst, David Dumville, SunHee Kim Gertz, Sepp Gumbrecht, Kathleen Hobbs, Patricia Clare Ingham, Lesley Johnson, Seth Lerer, Reg McGinnis, Stephen Nichols, Hugh Thomas, and David Van Meter. I owe special thanks to Tom Goodman, Gabrielle Spiegel, Robert Stein, and Paul Strohm for offering invaluable advice on drafts of the manuscript.

My research has been supported by several grants from the University of Miami. In addition to travel and material expenses, these awards supported a succession of undergraduate research assistants who managed my often cumbersome relations with the library and the copy machine; I am especially grateful to Angelique Ruhi and Maytee Valenzuela for their cheerfulness and resourcefulness. Finally, I could not have completed this book without the good services of the interlibrary loan departments at both the University of Miami and Bennington College.

One of the great challenges of writing about translation and adaptation is to avoid tedious repetition. I hope readers will indulge the iterative spirit of medieval historiography wherever I have failed the expectations of the modern genre. One of the other challenges has been the languages of history, themselves innovative at every turn. Much of what is new in this book derives from labors of language, and I have personally translated all citations while profiting from the insights of those more experienced: Lewis Thorpe for Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae; Frederick Madden, Rosamund Allen, and W. R. J. Barron and S. C. Weinberg for Laʒamon’s Brut; and Neil Wright for the Gesta regum Britanniae (whose lively translations I have amended only slightly). For readers’ ease, I have regularized the spelling of proper names and tried to render readable English prose versions of the concepts and turns of phrase that first captured my attention. Almost certainly I have made mistakes and some questionable choices along the way; if readers find that these matter, I will count myself lucky.