Textual Criticism and the Recensions of Historia Brittonum

Historia Brittonum remains a fundamental text for our understanding of early medieval Britain and Ireland. It is the earliest surviving source for almost everything that it says. For us, this makes it the first point of departure for a host of significant subjects: medieval Welsh literature, the Arthurian legend, and the British ‘heroic age’ prominent among them. Yet basic questions about the text remain unanswered. The best recent treatments of the content tend to assume that we know what the text said when it was composed in 829/30. The typical premise is that the well-known Harleian recension is the original text; by contrast, the other Latin and Irish recensions of Historia Brittonum are perceived to be derivative in some sense: interesting, but not relevant for understanding the original composition. This approach is not critically sound. Although there is much to support the view that the Harleian recension is the best surviving approximation to the original text, it does not follow that any particular aspect of it need reproduce the original text. In truth, the only methodologically rigorous way to build up a picture of the original text is to compare all the surviving evidence together on the basis of an established framework for understanding the textual relationships. But no such framework has ever been securely established.