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<p>Geoffrey of Monmouth’s <i>De gestis Britonum</i> (<i>DgB</i>) has long been credited with secularizing historical writing in the medieval West, in large part because Geoffrey is explicitly interested in connecting English history to a classical rather than a biblical past. But prioritizing the secularity of <i>DgB</i>, I argue, elides a deliberately and consistently, though subtly, encoded erasure of the Israelite past within its classical narrative. By populating ancient Israelite narratives with proto-English characters, <i>DgB</i> replaces the Jews in the historical memory of the English Christian. Moreover, by including in this historical memory a prophetic tradition (i.e., the <i>Prophecies of Merlin</i>) that echoes much of the prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures, <i>DgB</i> extends its colonization of Israelite history to the eschaton. This article proposes that this replacement of a people in a nationalistic historical memory mirrors the kind of forgetting necessary for hegemonies to sustain xenophobic replacement anxieties in modern political discourse.</p>

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Remembering replacement in De gestis Britonum (or how replacement theory works)

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年3月1日

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  • David Pedersen

摘要

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De gestis Britonum (DgB) has long been credited with secularizing historical writing in the medieval West, in large part because Geoffrey is explicitly interested in connecting English history to a classical rather than a biblical past. But prioritizing the secularity of DgB, I argue, elides a deliberately and consistently, though subtly, encoded erasure of the Israelite past within its classical narrative. By populating ancient Israelite narratives with proto-English characters, DgB replaces the Jews in the historical memory of the English Christian. Moreover, by including in this historical memory a prophetic tradition (i.e., the Prophecies of Merlin) that echoes much of the prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures, DgB extends its colonization of Israelite history to the eschaton. This article proposes that this replacement of a people in a nationalistic historical memory mirrors the kind of forgetting necessary for hegemonies to sustain xenophobic replacement anxieties in modern political discourse.