An Echo of Seneca’s Epistulae in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae

Abstract

This note will examine how a hitherto-unrecognized quotation from Seneca’s Epistulae can shed new light on the prologue to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (henceforth HRB). The HRB’s prologue has received a great deal of scholarly attention, thanks to Geoffrey’s now infamous claim that Walter, archdeacon of Oxford, had given him ‘quondam Britannici sermonis librum uetustissimum’ [a very old book in the British tongue] (Prol.2). ¹ Debates over the meaning of this claim continue to animate scholarship on the HRB, and they have also shaped how scholars interpret Geoffrey’s rationale for ‘translating’ this book, which appears in the following sentence. There, Geoffrey writes: