Problems of authorship and attribution pose significant methodological challenges for researchers of Welsh-language women poets before 1800. These issues are contingent on the prevailing oral and manuscript cultures of transmission characteristic of Wales’s bardic culture, from which women were largely excluded. This article explores the unstable Welsh-language canon of poetry by women and highlights examples of problematic authorship and attestation. It also interrogates the diachronic wishful thinking of the Welsh feminist agenda alongside the synchronic reality of early modern women poets: is there a coherent female tradition and was it visible to early modern women poets?
Yn lle Alis, Alias yw’r Gair a ddylae fod. Ni chlywais i fod yr un Brydyddes or Enw.
[Instead of Alis (Alice), the word should be Alias. I have not heard of a Poetess of that Name.]1
This marginal note by the poet and scribe Robert Thomas (1700–74) may not express surprise at the existence of a female poet, but it does foreground the fragility not only of individual authorial reputations, but of women’s engagement with Wales’s bardic tradition pre-1800. Thomas refers to Alis ferch Gruffudd ab Ieuan (fl. 1540–70), a poet whose surviving canon includes about eight strict-metre poems.2 Alis is privileged that her extant poems actually comprise a body of work, since the majority of known women poets before 1800 have only one surviving poem to their name. Privilege is not only part of Alis’s identity as a woman and a poet, but it is also a vital element in the broader narrative of Welsh strict-metre women poets. She was the daughter of a gentleman amateur poet, Gruffudd ab Ieuan (c.1485–1553) of Llewenni Fechan, who, alongside the professional bard Tudur Aled (c.1465–c.1525), was an adjudicator in the 1523 eisteddfod at Caerwys, Flintshire, at which his father-in-law (Alis’s maternal grandfather) was one of three commissioners who licensed the attendant bards. Alis’s family was eminently bardic, and Elsbeth, her second cousin on her father’s side, was also a poet. Alis and her modest extant canon typify the vulnerability of Wales’s female poets in medieval and early modern Wales: her poems were transmitted orally for a generation or more before being committed to manuscript; her corpus includes a collaborative dimension; she is conflated with others, as her poems are attributed in manuscripts to other women poets, including her sisters Catrin and Gwen; and, despite her family’s pre-eminence in Welsh bardic culture, within a few generations her reputation as a poet had been forgotten.
Born of second-wave feminist criticism and riding the third wave, researchers of Wales’s medieval and early modern Welsh-language women poets are concerned with textual recovery, canon formation and the possible (re)construction of a female literary tradition. Research into the field has further underlined the fragility of the female canon by drawing attention to the practical, structural and ideological challenges faced by aspiring women poets in Wales before 1800. In this respect, the structures and expectations of Wales’s native professional bardic guild, from which amateurs (both male and female) were excluded, contributed to the fragmented nature of the extant female canon. The boundaries between amateurism and professionalism could be permeable, and the main (male) canon was not immune to instability either. Questionable attestation, competing claims of authorship, multiple authorship and issues of anonymity are all contingent on the prevailing oral and manuscript cultures of transmission that characterize bardic culture. They pose significant methodological challenges to researchers of both male and female poets during the medieval and early modern periods; however, the work of female poets was particularly vulnerable. In this essay, I will explore the Welsh-language female canon pre-1800 by interrogating the diachronic viewpoint of the Welsh feminist agenda alongside the synchronic reality of early modern women poets.
(Re)constructing a female canon
The year 1986 was decisive for Welsh feminist scholarship. Not only was it the year in which Honno Press, a cooperative Welsh women’s press, was founded by volunteers,3 but it also witnessed the publication of a special feminist issue of the long-running Welsh-language periodical, and bastion of the patriarchal and Nonconformist literary establishment, Y Traethodydd (The Essayist, 1845–). The landmark issue included a subject-defining article about Welsh women’s poetry before 1800.4 Its impact can be measured substantively not only in the development of Welsh women’s writing modules in Wales’s universities, but also in scholarly outputs of both a generalist and specific nature.5 Since 1986, the work of a number of medieval and early modern women poets has been edited and critiqued: Gwenllian ferch Rhirid Flaidd (?fl. 1460s),6 Gwerful Mechain (c.1460–c.1502),7 Alis ferch Gruffudd ab Ieuan,8 Catrin ferch Gruffudd ap Hywel (fl. c.1500–55),9 and Angharad James (1677–1749).10 Poetry by Welsh women has also been anthologized, both in general anthologies and in a discrete anthology of Welsh women’s poetry up to 1800, Beirdd Ceridwen (Ceridwen’s Poets, 2005).11 Feminist scholarship in Wales has thus recovered a considerable canon of poetry by women before 1800, and this has been achieved without having to answer calls to identify female voices in anonymous poems.12 The body of verse anthologized in Beirdd Ceridwen was, at the time, comprehensive and not subject to value judgments about the aesthetic or ideological merits of the poetry it contained. Additional texts have subsequently been uncovered as part of a Leverhulme-funded project, “Women’s Poetry in Ireland, Scotland and Wales 1400–1800”.13
The Welsh female canon before 1800 comprises over 200 individual items by about 80 named individuals, mainly from manuscript sources but also, by the eighteenth century, from print sources. This compares with around 200 items by 25 named individuals who composed in Scottish Gaelic before 1800, around 100 items by 35 individuals who composed in Scots, and around 40 items by 15 named individuals who composed in Gaelic/Irish before that date.14 In terms of content, the Welsh women’s canon before 1800 mirrors the tone of the main Welsh-language canon of the same period, both professional and amateur, and includes poems that are overtly religious and devotional, as well as poems of a more humorous nature. Elegy features prominently, as befits what was, essentially, a praise tradition, and occasional poetry is also well represented. Yet, despite its conformist nature in these respects, the canon is also remarkable for its poems of female interest: it includes several responses to the European-wide querelle des femmes, and a large number of gendered responses to love, marriage, friendship, motherhood, morality, religion and grief. Furthermore, the poets make individualistic use of “traditional” genres and conventions such as love poetry, as well as subliterary genres like the mother’s advice poem.
The geographical distribution of the women poets is also telling. Most known individuals before 1800 belong to the counties of north Wales—to Caernarvonshire, Meirionethshire, Denbighshire and Montgomeryshire, where traditional strict-metre poetry had been preserved by country poets long after the professional poetic guild had ceased to exist, and where, latterly, the eighteenth-century ballad tradition was strongest. Despite suggested identifications of early strict-metre poets—namely, Elor Goch (thirteenth century) and Gwladus Hael (fifteenth century)—female poets in south Wales are few and far between until the latter part of the eighteenth century and, with the exception of the balladeer Florence Jones (fl. 1775–1800),15 mainly comprise religious carollers. Welsh Methodism, which had its genesis in south Wales in the 1740s, opened up a new vein in women’s poetry, ...
