This is a BIG DEAL.It has a direct impact on history because of where it was written.
If you are serious about Arthur and his court, read the books of Norma Lorre Goodrich, who accomplished research in 4 different languages, and used the incidence of folk tales in certain locations to map the actual areas where King Arthur exercised his reign.She exposes a Celtic Church with both men and women in the priesthood. A fascinating reveal of the Grail Church later banned by Rome.
Many thanks for the link!
Those who experienced the transition found it a brutal and disorderly collapse of civilization. They looked back on Britain's last Roman military leader -- Arthur, by name or battle symbol -- as a golden figure of order and justice with at least some Christian beliefs. When conditions settled centuries later, poets and traveling singers fashioned folk memories and thin written accounts into popular entertainment that appealed to the ideals of the new era.
The result is as if all that we knew in a post-apocalypse America of the Civil War was incomplete copies of Gone with the Wind and scattered chapters and pages of military history. If that were the dominant story in popular entertainment across America, there would be dozens of competing variants and sites described as Tara and Twelve Oaks and as great battlefields, with many local notables claiming descent from and naming their kids for Ashley Wilkes, Scarlett O'Hara, Rhett Butler, and so on, along with others named for Civil War generals and politicians.
As for the story of Arthur and his court, many decades of careful archaeology in Britain have identified places of ancient forts and battles and the residences and burial sites of various chieftains. Often, locals attributed them to the Arthurian romance. Yet artifacts and reliable modern dating methods refute all such claims as implausible -- including backwaters where locals were the most insistent.
What remains now as history is Arthur as likely a Roman type military leader who was, for the era, one of the good guys. Beyond that, the Arthur and Camelot and Holy Grail stories are bunk, much of it imported from across the English Channel.
As for the supposed Celtic Church and women priests, as systematic theology and Church administration developed, local variants of Christianity were reformed or suppressed in order to standardize Christian belief and practice and eliminate heresies.
Were there women priests in a claimed Celtic Church? Not as an approved Christian practice, with little in the way of real evidence for a Celtic Church. In the event, the British and Irish accepted the papacy as legitimate and authoritative -- at least until centuries later, when King Henry VIII wanted a divorce and a new wife for the sake of a male heir.
When claims of women priests and a Celtic Church are stitched together with a bad take on the legend of Arthur, my B.S. meter pegs in the red zone.
Thanks for the link-I’m going to Amazon and check it out. I’m always interested in historical info that sheds light on who the real Arthur might have been...