Interdisciplinary approaches toward the wealth of sources regarding the legends of King Arthur, allow us to appreciate the reasons behind their longevity in a variety of cultural modes, along with their original meanings and influences. Yet, the tradition’s association with (the Matter of) Britain, has long obscured its vast transfers across geographical and chronological boundaries, highlighted in recent studies of Arthurian material in the ‘Iberian World’ (Hook, 2013). To fully examine the manifold mutations of these legends, we must seek to understand their significance not only from their medieval genesis, but within a context of the ‘transformation’ of them, and the cultures they continue to be received by. Reflecting on a diverse sample of contemporary cultural ‘Arthurian’ artifacts produced in Spain and Brazil, (from video games to children’s literature) this paper will suggest the ways in which the memory of the ‘medieval’ within the ‘modern’, suggests a blend of harmony and division within national, political, and religious identities, in the framework of an increasingly global culture- which possibly even began with the Iberian explorations of the 1490s. It will explore why the cultural and linguistic translation of ‘Arthur’ might suggest the persistence of ‘colonized’ & ‘colonizer’ identities specifically focusing on the ‘Iberian’ experience; and thus how disciplines ought to intersect in their concern for this phenomenon. It will consider how this ‘transforming’ process interacts with the collective memory of Iberia as a medieval ‘frontier’ zone, with profound implications for the popular perception of history and heroism. It will then analyse the related diffusion of ‘Arthurian’ material from the ‘Anglosphere’ to Hispanophone/Lusophone spheres, partially as a commercial simplification of a ‘European’ heritage, that often reaffirms, rather than challenges cultures of increasing globalization and individualism, whilst bringing into the question the assignation of ‘value’ to the ongoing adaptation of (literary) traditions.
About the presenterGeorgia Leigha Leatherdale-Gilholy
Georgia Leigha Leatherdale-Gilholy is a History finalist at King’s College London. She is particularly interested in the religious and literary history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe, and is currently preparing her dissertation on the eschatology of Girolamo Savonarola.