Re-imagining history through the English prose Brut tradition

The Middle English Prose Brut survives in many fifteenth-century manuscripts and early prints. This paper will offer an overview of the problems of providing a comprehensive account of the production and reception of this important work with a view to understanding the kinds of afterlife that the Middle English Prose Brut enjoyed in the period immediately before, during and after the English Reformations. Starting with the question of what constitutes the text we call the Prose Brut, the paper will illustrate how our understanding of this work’s characteristics has been skewed by the assumptions underlying its edition, long seen as offering the standard modern text.