Gerald of Wales
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Gerald of Wales

New Perspectives on a Medieval Writer and Critic

A. Joseph McMullen, Georgia Henley

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Gerald of Wales

New Perspectives on a Medieval Writer and Critic

A. Joseph McMullen, Georgia Henley

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Gerald of Wales (c.1146–c.1223), widely recognized for his innovative ethnographic studies of Ireland and Wales, was in fact the author of some twenty-three works which touch upon many aspects of twelfth-century life. Despite their valuable insights, these works have been vastly understudied. This collection of essays reassesses Gerald's importance as a medieval Latin writer and rhetorician by focusing on his lesser-known works and providing a fuller context for his more popular writings. This broader view of his corpus brings to light new evidence for his rhetorical strategies, political positioning and usage of source material, and attests to the breadth and depth of his collected works.

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Gerald of Wales: Interpretation and Innovation in Medieval Britain
Georgia Henley and A. Joseph McMullen
Stanford University and Centenary University
THE APPEAL OF GERALD OF WALES (c.1146–c.1223) as a writer and critic lies in his unique perspective and unrelentingly self- expressive voice. Committed to describing the present day as he saw it, he left behind a collection of works valued not only for its range, enthusiasm and inquisitiveness, but also (and most often) for its unique observations on Irish and Welsh culture. Best known for his innovative works on Ireland and Wales and for his ill-fated struggle to become the archbishop of the Welsh diocese of St Davids, Gerald has been utilised by historians, Celticists and linguists alike as a valuable source of information about the twelfth-century Insular world, including Angevin court life, ecclesiastical reform and clerical conduct, the Norman conquest of Ireland, southern Welsh politics, English saints’ lives, natural history, and a host of other topics discussed in his characteristically energetic voice. Gerald also imparted a great deal more biographical information and self-reflection than most of the contemporaries to whom he is compared (Walter Map, Geoffrey of Monmouth and, less often, John of Salisbury), providing us with a rich impression of his evolving personality and career goals across a long life, which spanned the turbulent decades from King Stephen’s reign to the early years of Henry III and touched upon many of the major figures of twelfth-century Britain.
The present volume takes a new approach to his life and works. While much of the scholarship concerning Gerald to date has (with a few important exceptions) focused on his popular works on Ireland and Wales, the essays in this volume bring attention to some of his lesser-known works, including the Gemma ecclesiastica, Vita Sancti Hugonis, Vita Ethelberti and the Speculum Ecclesiae, as well as The History of Llanthony Priory, newly ascribed to him. Some of these essays offer new perspectives on his works on Ireland and Wales, detailing his use of Welsh genealogies and other sources, as well as his intellectual influences, while others examine instances of his reception in Wales and Ireland. Overall, the volume articulates a defence of Gerald’s rhetorical skill, purpose and narrative style, and, in doing so, comes closer to understanding his intentions and goals.
Throughout his life, Gerald was surrounded by a variety of influences and was able to operate in several political spheres. He was born c.1146 at Manor-bier Castle in Pembrokeshire into an aristocratic Marcher family of mixed Norman and Welsh ancestry. His father was William de Barri, son of Gerald of Windsor, who had served as the constable of Pembroke Castle under leading Norman magnate Arnulf de Montgomery.1 His mother was Angharad; his grandmother was the Welsh princess Nest, the only legitimate daughter of Rhys ap Tewdwr, who was widely regarded at the time of his death in 1093 as the last king of Deheubarth (a kingdom in southern Wales).2 The youngest of four brothers, Gerald was ushered into an ecclesiastical career under the tutelage of his maternal uncle, David fitz Gerald, bishop of St Davids (1148–76).3 Educated in his early years at the Benedictine abbey of St Peter’s, Gloucester, he travelled to Paris for additional learning (c.1165–74), where he came into contact with some of the great scholastic teachers of the twelfth century and received the best education available in his day.4 Equipped with this advanced training, he returned to Britain, where his uncle David rewarded him for collecting tithes throughout the diocese of St Davids with the arch-deaconry of Brecon.5 Shrugging off a thwarted attempt to succeed his uncle into the bishopric in 1176, he returned to Paris to study and teach canon law and theology from c.1176–9.6 Once back in England, he spent five more years studying theology, possibly at Lincoln.7 He then found employment as a clerk for Henry II and his young son John, and spent ten years in royal service, including one year in Ireland (1185).8 It was during these years that he penned his popular early works, the Topographia and Expugnatio Hibernica, and the Itinerarium and Descriptio Kambriae, which he revised and lengthened in subsequent years. Following an abrupt retirement from court life c.1194, he seems to have travelled to Lincoln; by 1199, his earnest fight to become the bishop of St Davids brings his life back into critical focus.9 His election by the St Davids chapter was refused by King John, probably because his ties to the southern Welsh nobility made his elevation too dangerous for the Crown to consider, bruised as it was by the FitzGeralds’ activities in Ireland.10 Following four unsuccessful appeals to the pope, Gerald resigned his archdeaconry in 1203 and retired to Lincoln in defeat, where he wrote detailed accounts of his failed elections.11 His late works are tinged by bitterness, frustrated ambition and a tendency to see betrayal in everything; he seems to have focused much of his ire on a wayward nephew under his supervision.12 Gerald died c.1223, leaving behind a legacy that is broadly acknowledged by scholars of medieval Britain and Ireland alike.
Despite his contributions to our understanding of late twelfth-century history, society and Latinity in Britain and Ireland, Gerald remains somewhat of an enigma to modern scholars. By comparison to other twelfth-century Latin writers from Britain, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon and Geoffrey of Monmouth, his life and works have received very little individual attention, with Bartlett’s groundbreaking 1982 monograph representing the only book-length assessment of him to date. His journey from young and promising royal clerk, befit for high-level ecclesiastical appointment, to embittered old man, retiring to Lincoln with thwarted ambitions, is a compelling one, yet never fully explained in his own words. He does not account for his retirement from royal service c.1194, his evolving loyalties to the Welsh people, nor his exact reasons for seeking the independent status of the diocese of St Davids. For an author who wrote so much about himself, much about him remains ambiguous.
Exacerbating the difficulty of understanding the influences, motivations and goals that underpin his diverse writings and tumultuous life is a longstanding tendency among scholars to focus primarily on his Welsh and Irish works, the Topographia Hibernica (‘Topography of Ireland’, first issued c.1187), the Expugnatio Hibernica (‘Conquest of Ireland’, c.1189), the Itinerarium Kambriae (‘Journey Through Wales’, 1191) and the Descriptio Kambriae (‘Description of Wales’, 1194) – understandably so, as their blending of ethnography, history, miracle and marvel represents Gerald’s most innovative and captivating achievement.13 These strikingly original compositions provide a detailed view of societies on the margins of the Anglo-Norman empire from the point of view of an informed outsider, exemplifying many of the assumptions about barbarity, civility and ecclesiastical reform that broadly characterise the Anglo-Norman relationship with its Celtic neighbours in this period. These important works have had lasting effects on our understanding of British cultural relations in the medieval period, informing both medieval and modern historiographical narratives. Yet, as this volume demonstrates, a broader and more extensive view of his collected works has the ability to contextualise this achievement within a more complex, nuanced frame.
To date, scholarly attention to Gerald has been broad, and several trends are observable. From the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, Gerald’s observations on Welsh society and culture were an important source for historical interpretations of medieval Wales. His Welsh works were claimed as native histories written by a champion of Welsh independence.14 Recent studies have been more tempered, viewing Gerald within his own historical context and as a complex product of Marcher society, exhibiting conflicted views about his identity.15 Bartlett’s Gerald of Wales, 1146–1223 (Oxford, 1982) represented a great leap forward in the study of Gerald’s life, works and influences, viewing his output within its historical and political context, and demonstrating how intellectual trends of historiography, naturalism and humanism run throughout his work. By comparison to his positive reception by Welsh historians, in Ireland his works have historically and in the modern period received considerable vitriol, probably because his prejudiced portrayal of the Irish played a role in the propaganda used during the Tudor conquest of Ireland and left lasting damage.16 The stark contrast between Gerald’s reception in Ireland and his reception in Wales attest to his complexities and highlight the importance of understanding him as a writer and rhetorician.17
Recent critical attention to Gerald’s works has been devoted to untangling his perceptions of and experiences with his hybrid ethnic identity.18 Born into a Pembrokeshire Marcher family intermarried with south Welsh royalty, he does not fit into the easy binaries of ‘Welsh’ and ‘English’, and critics who grapple with his ethnicity must confront his seemingly contradictory views on the Welsh and his ill-defined place in Welsh and Anglo- Norman society. While his privileged position as a Marcher aristocrat with Welsh familial connections gave him an independent view into several cultures, as well as the ability to explain native Welsh society in detail to outsiders, it also made him an unsettling threat to royal authority in Wales, and seems to explain why he never received the ecclesiastical preferment he so desired in the late 1190s. Yet he was never quite Welsh either, preferring to distance himself from the society and customs of pura Wallia. It may be this tense insider/outsider status that has made him such a compelling figure for modern critics, as it seems to have heightened both his observational skills and his ambitions, granting us a unique view into aspects of medieval British and Irish society and culture.
While details from his works are frequently cherry-picked for inclusion in broader studies of medieval Ireland and Britain, little attention tends to be devoted to Gerald himself. Despite his influence on our understanding of a number of topics, a substantial part of his corpus – his religious, political, hagiographical, autobiographical and polemical writings – remains almost untouched by scholars. Yet his extant works on these topics add up to nineteen in total, vastly outweighing his Irish and Welsh compositions in both length and breadth.19 His extant corpus include the Gemma ecclesiastica (‘The Jewel of the Church’), an instructive manual on clerical reforms; the Speculum duorum (‘A Mirror of Two Men’), in which Gerald charges his nephew, Giraldus fitz Philip, and his nephew’s tutor, William Capella, with misusing the income from the archdeaconry of Brecon; and De principis instructione (‘Instruction for a Ruler’), a critique of the Angevin kings John and Henry II, the first book of which is in the ‘mirror for princes’ genre, instructing a prince on proper moral qualities, while the second and third books criticise Henry II for his poor judgement.20 Gerald’s corpus also includes detailed narratives of his struggle for election to the bishopric of St Davids and the issue of its metropolitan status (De iure et statu Menevensis ecclesiae, ‘On the Rights and Status of the Church of St Davids’; De invectionibus, ‘On Shameful Attacks’; and a portion of his autobiography, De rebus a se gestis, ‘On the Things He Has Achieved’).21 His letters, poems, prefaces and other writings are collected in Symbolum electorum, ‘A Collection of Choice Works’. He also leaves behind Retractationes (‘Retractions’), a brief admission that his criticisms of Hubert Walter, one of his main opponents in the St Davids issue, were exaggerated, as well as four saints’ lives: the Lives of Remigius, Hugh of Avalon, Geoffrey Plantagenet and St David (a purported Life of Caradog is now lost). Because of the strength of their invective and political riskiness, several of these texts were circulated anonymously, including the Vita Galfridi and the De iure, and portions of De principis instructione were delayed until after King John had died.22 Gerald was aware that he was a controversial figure in his own time.
These assembled works constitute a remarkable amount of extant writing and an unusual amount of autobiographical content and opinion. They touch upon many aspects of twelfth-century Anglo-Norman life, including secular and ecclesiastical politics, society and cultural mores. They also display a range of influences and sources that provide evidence for the availability of classical Latin works in twelfth-century Britain. Yet this portion of Gerald’s corpus, with the exception of the materials relating to the St Davids case, has received so little critical attention that it represents almost a no man’s land in Giraldian scholarship.23 This lack of attention is most likely due to the inherent difficulty of interpreting these works: they are not narrative-driven in the same way as his Welsh and Irish works are; they deal with less popular, sometimes personal topics, and they do not impart the kind of historical information that has been favoured by scholars in the past. The narrative structure of this part of his corpus comprises a blend of personal opinion, anecdote and jeremiad overlaid by quotations that can come across as bewildering to all but the most expert medievalist readers. These lesser-known works are, simply put, less accessible than his compositions on Ireland and Wales.24
It is the intention of the present volume, therefore, to bring to prominence some of these lesser-known, lesser-studied works and discuss them in concert with his more familiar works. Close attention to these works, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, brings to light new and important evidence for Gerald’s rhetorical strategies, political interests, use of source material and far-flung influences. A fuller understanding of these interests and influences qualifies those details from his better-studied works which have become such an important part of the historical record.
In addition to focusing the attentions of a group of researchers, for the first time, on Gerald’s lesser-known works, this volume also reassesses his status as a writer. Drawing inspiration from previous studies by Bartlett and Pryce, the essays in this volume, in reading Gerald on his own terms, find that he is a thoroughly self-conscious and careful crafter of argument, deliberate in his use of sources and intended impact. Collectively, the essays in this volume suggest that Gerald’s narrative style was not disordered, careless or mercurial, as has been previously suggested, but rather meticulous and thorough. This more nuanced understanding of his rhetorical methods, motivations and influences helps us evaluate the details in his works, as his...

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