Gaimar's Estoire Des Engleis

Geffrei Gaimar's <i>Estoire des Engleis</i> is its author's sole surviving work. His translation and adaptation of the <i>Anglo-Saxon Chronicle</i> expanded with a number of lengthy interpolations which appear to draw upon oral traditions and other unknown written sources is all that remains of an ambitious history which once reached back as far as Jason and the Golden Fleece. However the extent of Gaimar's achievement - as poet historian and translator - has been obscured by a tendency among scholars to dismiss him as a writer of romance masquerading as history his work riddled with guesswork errors and outright fabrications.<br/>This volume aims to challenge such views of Gaimar by providing the first holistic study of his <i>Estoire</i>'s incisive commentary upon kingship: its virtues vices and conflicting models as applied to rulers such as Edgar the Peaceable Cnut and the ill-fated William Rufus. One good king for Gaimar is much like another. A bad king by contrast is vividly characterised as ineffectual tyrannical or both. Gaimar a product of that extraordinary period in medieval English culture often termed the twelfth-century Renaissance' blends history with literary tropes to yield a sophisticated account of the invasions betrayals and familial conflicts that shaped his England's history.