Arabic astronomy and Christian-Muslim contact: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s prophetic dragon and its reception in medieval Arthurian literature

Mouzam, Humma (2025). Arabic astronomy and Christian-Muslim contact: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s prophetic dragon and its reception in medieval Arthurian literature. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the complex relationship between the development of the dragon as a political prophetic symbol in late-medieval English history and romance, and the English reception, and understanding, of Arabic astral materials contemporary with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1138), Prophetiae Merlini (c. 1135), and Vita Merlini (c. 1150). It argues that Geoffrey’s engagements with the dragon of Arabic astronomy and astrology (alongside classical, and his better noted Welsh, influences) marks the beginning of a long history of the English inclusion, and disavowal, of Arabic influences, which this thesis also traces through the subsequent uses of the dragon allusions found in Geoffrey’s Historia in the earliest English Arthurian prose romance, the Prose Merlin (c. 1450), translated from the first component text of the Vulgate Cycle – by which point the prophetic dragon has lost the Arabic astral signifiers visible in its twelfth-century form. The gradual invisibility of the astronomical Galfridian dragon is, I argue, superseded by the growing visibility and development of the dragon as a crusading cipher in medieval Arthurian literature, a concept which also finds a point of origin in Geoffrey.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):