SOURCE: “Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae: Great Men on a Great Wheel,” in The Vision of History in Early Britain, Columbia University Press, 1966, pp. 121-72.

In the following essay, Hanning discusses the impact of the Normans on the more secular attitude toward historical study in the twelfth century. He focuses on how Geoffrey demonstrated this new approach through his accounts of outstanding individuals and the cyclical nature of history.

The secular interpretation of British history brought to birth by at least one of the authors of the Historia Brittonum can be said only to have reached a promising youth in that work. Its potential remained unrealized for over three hundred years, until Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, appearing suddenly in twelfth-century England, offered to its first, amazed readers a comprehensive and spectacular vision of the British past largely free of Christian assumptions.¹ The work's remarkable reception...