Fantasies of Wales: Some paleographic evidence for the mediating role of Gerald of Wales

The late medieval period saw an urgent rise in British history-writing. My project asks, how did the twelfth-century writer Gerald of Wales intervene in that nationalist project? Aside from the Rolls Series editions, two monographs, and one edited collection, little has been written on this important figure. I argue through analysis of the manuscripts that Gerald’s works made the Welsh country accessible by incorporating vernacular Welsh folklore and hagiography into a Latin description of the land. Gerald’s two works Itinerarium Kambriae and Descriptio Kambriae impacted later descriptions of Wales in both romances and chronicle histories, fundamentally altering the history of British historiography. At the advent of the early modern world when Europeans began to discover and colonize the Americas, British nationalists sought a rediscovery of their own land. I demonstrate how Gerald’s spatial organization of Wales lends a natural fluency to similarly space-based works of such writers as Humphrey Llwyd, William Camden, and Robert Vaughan. This project has three significant sections that together build a unified narrative of Gerald’s intervention in literary history. First, I use deep map theory to demonstrate Gerald’s extensive use of vernacular Welsh tradition within the schema of travel narrative and ecocritical descriptions of the landscape of Wales. Then I examine the manuscript history of these texts with a particular focus on methods of transmission, including translation, excerpting, summary versions, and annotation. This codicological survey connects known late medieval and early modern writers to these texts. Third, I use ecocritical and geographical readings of early modern antiquarian texts to theorize the development of Welsh nationalism as a direct literary product of the deep maps in Gerald’s two texts. The manuscripts containing Gerald’s works about Wales are valuable sources of evidence for late medieval and early modern perceptions of Welsh folklore, hagiography, and ethnography. By studying the transmission of these manuscripts, my project evades largely artificial divisions separating the medieval from the early modern. Instead, I develop the longer perspective as a continuum of development with Gerald’s manuscripts at the center. Since Wales is the principal landscape of Arthurian Middle English romances as well as chronicle histories, my project demonstrates the interventions that led to the fictional construction of this space. James F. Dimock writes in the “Preface” to his Rolls Series edition of the Itinerarium Kambriae and Descriptio Kambriae that “A large number of the manuscripts, moreover, are late, and some of these very worthless.” (ix) While this judgement should be attributed to the specific needs of his project, it has largely governed the field’s approach to study of Gerald’s manuscripts. My project addresses this lacuna, arguing that all of the manuscripts, regardless of completeness and condition, are valuable to our understanding of Gerald’s contributions to late medieval and early modern development of the imagined place of Wales both geographically and in the scheme of historiography.

Embargo status: Restricted until 06/2029. To request the author grant access, click on the PDF link to the left.