Publications

The Albina Project:
Britain's Founding Mothers

...coment le isle del graunt Bretaigne jadys Albeon tere de geaunz ore Engletere fust primerment enhabite et de quel gent et de lour naissaunce...

...how the island of Great Britain, formerly Albion, land of giants, now England, was first inhabited, and by what people, and of their birth...

--Scalacronica, Sir Thomas Gray of Heaton, c. 1360

The eponymous foundation of Britain by Brutus in the European diaspora from the siege of Troy constitutes one of the great medieval 'matters': a huge congeries of historiography, fable, and epic out of which the Arthurian narrative corpus emerged in the twelfth century and which, in insular culture, is extant in texts in Latin, Anglo-Norman, Welsh, and Middle English. In recent years, it has been increasingly recognised that the Brutus foundation story is accompanied, and in narrative chronology, preceded by, the story of Albina and her sisters. Set adrift by their father (the king of Greece or Syria in variant versions) for the attempted murder of their husbands, the sisters become the first settlers of the land later to be known as England. It is named Albion after the leading sister. The sisters (noted in some versions as unusually tall women) hunt and fish to survive, eventually mate with succubi, and propagate the giant race of Albion which is conquered by Brutus in his re-foundation of the land.

Much remains to be discovered about the Albina materials, their complex and multilingual interrelations with the many versions of the Brutus story, and their wider cultural influence. A good succinct account of many of the issues can be found in a 1993 study by Lesley Johnson, while Julia Marvin's 2001 study of fourteenth century Albina materials in relation to Scotland gives an idea of the rich potential for studies of particular aspects of the materials. The monumental text and manuscript work of Ruth Dean, assisted by Maureen Boulton (1999), for the Anglo-Norman materials and of Lister Matheson (1998) for the Middle English versions valuably map much of the terrain still to be explored. A good example of an edited text drawing on these materials is the Scalacronica of Sir Thomas Gray of Heaton, from which the epigraph above is taken. This Latin-titled Anglo-Norman prose history was composed by Gray after 1364, while he was a prisoner of the Scottish wars in Edinburgh castle. Gray's subject matter embraces both Brutus and Albina: he says in his prologue that the Sybil told him to consult Geoffrey of Monmouth and a ‘Brut en engles' (Dean, no. 74; Matheson, p. 18, n.37).

But there are also many unedited texts still to be investigated. There are for instance, at least 5 versions of the Albina story (most commonly titled Des grantz geanz in its manuscript incipits) in Anglo-Norman (Dean, nos 36-41). The most widely represented of these (21 manuscripts) is an abridged version of a text composed before 1333-4 in octosyllabics (Dean, no. 37; ed. Brereton, 1937). The abridged version is found as a prelude to the short Anglo-Norman prose Brut in 16 of the 27 Brut manuscripts (Dean, nos 36, 37). The Anglo-Norman alexandrine, prose, short verse and short prose versions of the Albina story (Dean, 38-41) are still unedited. Further work on Albina is in progress in the work of Christopher Baswell (UCLA) on founding mothers and in study by Anke Bernau (University of Cardiff) of the Albina legend.

We append below a bibliography and the draft translation of the octosyllabic Des grantz geanz narrative used in our Anglo-Norman graduate classes. Additions to the bibliography are most welcome and will be posted on this web-site.

The Albina Story: An Initial Bibliography

Manuscripts

Dean, R. J. and Boulton, M. B., Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts, ANTS OPS 3 (London, ANTS, 1999).

Matheson, Lister M., The Prose Brut: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 180 (Tempe: University of Arizona Press, 1998).

Texts

Brereton, Georgine E. (ed.), Des Grantz Geanz: An Anglo-Norman Poem, Medium Aevum Monographs 2 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1937).

Crick, Julia and James P. Carley, ‘Constructing Albion's Past: An Annotated Edition of De origine gigantum', Arthurian Literature 13 (1995), 41-114 (also studies manuscript diffusion of the translation into Latin from the Anglo-Norman; prints text from BL MS Cotton Cleopatra D IX).

Studies

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

Evans, Ruth, ‘Gigantic Origins: An Annotated Translation of De origine gigantum', Arthurian Literature 16 (1998), 197-211.

Johnson, Lesley, ‘Return to Albion', Arthurian Literature 13 (1995), 19-40 (lucid and suggestive study of the Anglo-Norman verse text).

Marvin, Julia, ‘Albine and Isabelle: Regicidal Queens and the Historical Imagination of the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicles [with an Edition and Translation of the Prose Prologue to the Long Version of the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut]', Arthurian Literature 18 (2001), 143-83.