Talk:Brut Chronicle/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Llywrch (talk · contribs) 00:34, 5 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Preparing to review this article. -- llywrch (talk) 00:34, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay in writing this review, but other things intervened & I didn't have a chance until now to perform the necessary research to provide a proper & constructive critique. Because the coverage of the subject in this article is not comprehensive enough at this point to be a Good Article. A fact I noticed right away.
 * Review by llywrch

First, there is no mention of other works with a similar title: Wace's Roman de Brut, Layamon's Brut, or the Welsh Brut y Tywysogion. This important because these three works all share commonalities with the Brut Chronicle: they draw either on Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, or its source. As a result, there are differences between them about the material or the details of the material. And the Welsh Brut likewise is a chronicle that extends the legendary history of Monmouth/Wace/Layamon, but with Welsh historical events instead of English ones.

Second, at one point the article states "There are no fewer than 184 versions of the English translation of the work in 181 medieval and post-medieval manuscripts", citing Matheson. (Since a copy of his work was online, I used him as a standard to compare this article against.) Now this is an amazing trick to have more versions than items; logic would dictate there would be more items than versions. Further, different authorities provide different numbers of manuscripts. And checking Matheson, I find there are in addition 49 Anglo-Norman copies (the language of the original text all of these are derived from) & 19 Latin ones. So the information here is incomplete.

Third, the article states simply "it was itself based on Geoffrey of Monmouth's text from the previous century". Although this assertion has a reliable source, a quick comparison of the table of contents of the Middle English version with my copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's text showed a number of differences. For example, the original version of the Brut Chronicle omitted mention of the Welsh king Cadwallader, which was later added to many copies from a non-Galfridian source. (The article does explain the presence of the 33 daughters of king Diocletian of Syria in the Brut Chronicle, but there are many more points of difference between Geoffrey of Monmouth & the Chronicle.) In fact, at another point Matheson (p. 30) states that the Brut Chronicle was based on Wace's Roman de Brut. Obviously there is a disagreement over which source the original author took the legendary material, which needs more development.

"Incomplete" & "more development" are themes I keep encountering with this article. According to Matheson & other online sources I looked at, the textual evolution is very complex: the three language translations each have their own families of sub-versions, based on how the original (written between 1272 & 1300) was both brought up to date, or had the legendary portion augmented. This article barely even acknowledges this complexity.

And while the sections on the audience(s) of the Brut Chronicle are good, they could be better. Although it is stated that the Chronicle was popular in the Middle Ages, there is no mention about how it fell out of popularity. (Increasing skepticism about Brutus, Lear & King Arthur.) Or about its possible influence, beyond a single mention of Shakespeare. (English Antiquarianism was heavily influenced by the Brut Chronicle.)

As a note, there is a copy online of Brie's edition of the Middle English text at archive.org. And at least two other manuscripts of the Brut Chronicle have webpages: one at University of Michigan, the other at Dartmouth. The British Library blog has a couple of articles on the manuscripts of this work in their collection. I'd expect links to all of these in the article for it to qualify as a GA. (And all of them offer better information about the Brut Chronicle than this article has.)

As I wrote above, the coverage of this article isn't close to G.A. requirements. I'd put it closer to "C" class, or maybe a very strong "Start". Too much material is presented in too brief of fashion, only a sentence or two to cover what would otherwise need a paragraph. (Note: I found all of the missing material I discussed after a fairly simple Google search.) I'll leave this nomination open for a couple weeks in case you are serious about improving this article, but if you aren't I'll need to close it as a fail. -- llywrch (talk) 19:43, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
 * :) &mdash; fortuna  velut luna  20:43, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

Due to a lack of an understandable response, marking this as Failed. -- llywrch (talk) 06:11, 13 August 2017 (UTC)