Abstract
The Matters of Britain that emerged after the publication of the Historia Regum Britanniae had, by the late twelfth century, thoroughly infiltrated the English historical consciousness and had become an almost universal touchstone for thinking through a host of contemporary colonial issues, not least among them the exploration of ethnic identity. In this light, we turn, then, to Gerald of Wales (1146–1223).1 Despite Gerald’s occasional disparagement of the Historia, the Galfridian past provides the primary lens through which Gerald thought about the relations between England and Wales, about the current state of Wales and its people, and about his own vexed ethnic identity and allegiances. The many works of the prolific Gerald thus provide an optimal locus for examining how the visions of the past set forth by Geoffrey of Monmouth and his imitators were able to infiltrate individual subjectivities. This chapter focuses on Gerald’s more strictly “historical” works—the Topographia Hibernica (The Topography of Ireland), the Itinerarium Kambriae (The Journey Through Wales), and the Descriptio Kambriae (The Description of Wales), and we see in these and in other works by Gerald a series of attempts to think through his own ethnic hybridity and to provide an account of the past that could render his own actions consistent and meaningful. Thus Gerald of Wales proves an excellent test case for gauging the pervasive power of the Matters of Britain.
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Notes
When referring to this writer, a scholar is faced with a dizzying array of appellations. From birth, he was probably known by his (Francophone) family name, Gerald de Barri. Modern scholars have tended to call him either Giraldus Cambrensis, Gerald of Wales, or (in Wales) Gerallt Gymro (“Gerald the Welshman”). He published all of his works under the name Giraldus Cambrensis, which translates either as “Gerald of Wales” or “Gerald the Welshman.” It shall be my practice here to call him Gerald of Wales in deference to the standard scholarly practice in America. For further discussion, see Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales: A Voice of the Middle Ages (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2006), pp. 16–29.
David Walker, The Normans in Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 59 and p. 63.
Gerald of Wales, De Invectionibus, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, Vol. III, ed. J. S. Brewer (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1863), p. 24.
The translation is by H. E. Butler, ed. and trans., The Autobiography of Gerald of Wales, rev. ed. (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005), p. 180.
Cf. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: The Bodies of Gerald of Wales,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. J. J. Cohen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 87: “Some medieval hybrids could feel quite at home in the high theory of scholars like Homi Bhabha, who identifies in English India phenomena that have immediate analogs in the European Middle Ages.”
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 111–112.
Thomas Richards, “Archive and Utopia,” Representations 37 (1992): 107–108.
David Rollo, Glamorous Sorcery: Magic and Literacy in the High Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 124–125.
Michael Richter, Giraldus Cambrensis: The Growth of the Welsh Nation, 2nd ed. (Aberystwyth: The National Library of Wales, 1976), p. 3.
John Miles, Gerald of Wales: Giraldus Cambrensis (Llandysul, Wales: Gomer Press, 1974), p. 26. Miles’s reliance on Gerald’s involvement in ecclesiastical matters is obvious throughout, and leads him in the end to the unsubstantiated claim that Gerald should be seen as the first in a long line of Welsh reformers whose efforts would culminate with the establishment and strength of the Nonconformist Churches in Wales during the early modern period.
David Rollo, Historical Fabrication, Ethnic Fable and French Romance in Twelfth-Century England (Lexington, KY: French Forum Publications, 1998), p. 289.
Henry Owen, Gerald the Welshman, rev. ed. (London: David Nutt, 1904), p. 166.
Top. Hib., Opera, Vol. V, p. 109; trans. John J. O’Meara, The History and Topography of Ireland (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 74.
Carolyn Walker Bynum, “Metamorphosis, or Gerald and the Werewolf,” Speculum 73 (1998): 987–1013, esp. pp. 1011–1012.
Manuscript R of the Topographia Hibernica affords us an illumination of the man-calf, part of a project of illustration almost certainly directed by Gerald himself. See Michelle P. Brown, “Marvels of the West: Gerald of Wales and the Role of the Author in the Development of Marginal Illustration,” English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 10 (2002): 34–59.
Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi, ed. Ifor Williams (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1951), p. 83; trans. Sioned Davies, The Mabinogion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 58.
In fact, Thomas Jones, Gerallt Gymro: Gerald the Welshman (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1947), esp. pp. 18–23, clearly considers the Itinerarium the most fascinating work Gerald produced in his long career.
Desc. Kamb., Opera Vol. VI, pp. 167–168; trans. Lewis Thorpe, The Journey through Wales and the Description of Wales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 223, though I have modified Thorpe slightly to accommodate the discussion below.
Liber Rubeus de Scaccario: The Red Book of the Exchequer, ed. Hubert Hall, Rolls Series 99 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1896), pp. 3–4.
Many Welsh genealogies—doubtless contained in old manuscripts—existed in the twelfth century; for an example, see, A Medieval Prince of Wales, pp. 23–24, which, like the genealogies Gerald refers to, traces the line of Rhodri Mawr all the way to Adam. See also P. C. Bartrum, ed. Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1966).
Catherine Margaret Rooney, The Manuscripts of the Works of Gerald of Wales (University of Cambridge: doctoral diss., 2005), pp. 158–159.
Rhonda Knight, “Procreative Sodomy: Textuality and the Construction of Ethnicities in Gerald of Wales’s Descriptio Kambriae,” Exemplaria 14.1 (2002): p. 51.
Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland, ed. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978), pp. 156–157.
Ibid. On the tarnishing of Eleanor’s reputation, see Peggy McCracken, “Scandalizing Desire: Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Chroniclers,” in Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and John C. Parsons (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 247–264.
Gerald of Wales, Speculum Duorum or A Mirror of Two Men, ed. Yves Lefèvre and R. B. C. Huygens (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1974), pp. 38–40.
Monika Otter, Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 134.
Brut y Tywysogyon, or Chronicle of the Princes: Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. and trans. Thomas Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1955), p. 77.
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Genealogy: Form and Function in Medieval Historical Narrative,” History and Theory 22 (1983): 43–53.
See, for example, Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, Vol. 1 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 246.
Lewis Thorpe, “Walter Map and Gerald of Wales,” Medium Aevum 47 (1978): 17.
Julia C. Crick, “The British Past and the Welsh Future: Gerald of Wales, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Arthur of Britain,” Celtica 23 (1999): p. 75.
Ad Putter provides a useful overview of some of the other uses that Gerald makes of Geoffrey in “Latin Historiography after Geoffrey of Monmouth,” in The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature, ed. Siân Echard (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), pp. 88–91.
For a full discussion of Gerald’s long-term obsession with Merlin, see Ad Putter, “Gerald of Wales and the Prophet Merlin,” Anglo-Norman Studies 31 (2009): 90–103.
Stephen G. Nichols, “Fission and Fusion: Mediations of Power in Medieval History and Literature,” Yale French Studies 70 (1986): 34; and see Itin. Kamb., trans. Thorpe, p. 184.
Huw Pryce, “Gerald’s Journey through Wales,” The Journal of Welsh Ecclesiastical History 6 (1989): 30–31.
Thomas Jones, “Gerald the Welshman’s Itinerary Through Wales and Description of Wales: An Appreciation and Analysis,” The National Library of Wales Journal 6 (1949–50): 197.
Welsh folklore is abundant with stories of fairies, Gerald’s often cited as being the earliest. See T. Gwynn Jones, Welsh Folklore and Folk-Custom (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1979), pp. 51–76.
Pwyll Pendeuic Dyfed in the Mabinogion, for instance, relates the story of how the hero Pwyll spends a year in Annwfn, the Celtic Otherworld. See Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi, p. 3. The story is prominent elsewhere in Welsh folklore, on which see Patrick K. Ford, “Prolegomena to a Reading of the Mabinogi: ‘Pwyll’ and ‘Manawydan,’” in The Mabinogi: A Book of Essays, ed. C. W. Sullivan (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 197–216.
Cornelia C. Coulter and F. P. Magoun, “Gerald of Wales on Indo-Germanic Philology,” Speculum 1 (1926): 104–109;
and Stefan Zimmer, “A Medieval Linguist: Gerald de Barri,” Études celtiques 35 (2003): 340–342.
See Michael D. Reeve, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge, Sussex: The Boydell Press, 2007), pp. 8–20.
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© 2014 Michael A. Faletra
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Faletra, M.A. (2014). Crooked Greeks: Hybridity, History, and Gerald of Wales. In: Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137391032_5
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