Glyn S. Burgess is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Liverpool. He has translated the three twelfth-century romances of antiquity and the Roman de Rou of Wace (2002). In 1990 he was made a Chevalier des Palmes Académiques and he is an honorary President of the International Courtly Literature Society. His most recent books are Twenty-Four Lays from the French Middle Ages (2016; with Leslie C. Brook), The Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure (2017; with Douglas Kelly), and The Roman de Thèbes and the Roman d'Eneas (2021; with Douglas Kelly).
Jean Blacker is Emeritus Professor of French, Kenyon College. Her more recent publications include Wace, The Hagiographical Works: The Conception Nostre Dame and the Lives of St Margaret and St Nicholas (2013), with Glyn S. Burgess, and Amy V. Ogden, Court and Cloister: Essays in the Short Narrative in Honor of Glyn S. Burgess (2018), with Jane H. M. Taylor. Her work focuses on the protean uses of King Arthur in Anglo-Norman, Continental French, and Latin historiography of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, focusing on the interconnections between foundation myths, competing claims of identity, and cultural imperialism in the legendary history of Britain.
This volume provides an accessible, English prose translation of Wace's Roman de Brut, in which Arthur appears for the first time as king of the Britons.