The long lost, original Latin text for Vita Griffini Filii Conani is shown with an English translation in this critical edition. The main focus of this volume is on the Welsh and Latin version of Peniarth MS, 434E, which has been heavily annotated and corrected to show that what had been thought to be the only dependable source had not in fact been an accurate translation. This discovery not only impacts medieval Welsh historians but also those involved in the translation of medieval works.
Challenging the standard view that England emerged as a dominant power and Wales faded into obscurity after Edward I's conquest in 1282, this book considers how Welsh (and British) history became an enduringly potent instrument of political power in the late Middle Ages. Brought into the broader stream of political consciousness by major baronial families from the March (the borderlands between England and Wales), this inventive history generated a new brand of literature interested in succession, land rights, and the origins of imperial power, as imagined by Geoffrey of Monmouth. These marcher families leveraged their ancestral, political, and ideological ties to Wales in order to strengthen their political power, both regionally and nationally, through the patronage of historical and genealogical texts that reimagined the Welsh past on their terms. In doing so, they brought ideas of Welsh history to a wider audience than previously recognized and came to have a profound effect on late medieval thought about empire, monarchy, and succession.
This volume contains work by scholars actively publishing on origin legends across early medieval western Europe, from the fall of Rome to the high Middle Ages. Its thematic structure creates dialogue between texts and regions traditionally studied in isolation.
This is the first book on one of Wales’s greatest leaders, arguably ‘first prince of Wales’, Bleddyn ap Cynfyn. Bleddyn was at the heart of the tumultuous events that forged Britain in the cauldron of Norman aggression, and his reign offers an important new perspective on the events of 1066 and beyond. He was a leader who used alliances on the wider British scale as he strove to recreate the fledgling kingdom of Wales that had been built and ruled by his brother, though outside pressures and internal intrigues meant his successors would compete ultimately for a principality.
The first book to explore how the history of Wales and the Welsh has been written over the past fifteen hundred years, 'Writing Welsh History' analyses and contextualizes historical writing, from Gildas in the sixth century to recent global approaches, to open new perspectives both on the history of Wales and on understandings of Wales and the Welsh.
Crucial texts from ninth- and tenth-century Wales analysed to show their key role in identify formation. WINNER OF THE FRANCIS JONES PRIZE 2022 Early medieval writers viewed the world as divided into gentes ("peoples"). These were groups that could be differentiated from each other according to certain characteristics - by the language they spoke or the territory they inhabited, for example. The same writers played a key role in deciding which characteristics were important and using these to construct ethnic identities. This book explores this process of identity construction in texts from early medieval Wales, focusing primarily on the early ninth-century Latin history of the Britons (Historia Brittonum), the biography of Alfred the Great composed by the Welsh scholar Asser in 893, and the tenth-century vernacular poem Armes Prydein Vawr ("The Great Prophecy of Britain"). It examines how these writers set about distinguishing between the Welsh and the other gentes inhabiting the island of Britain through the use of names, attention to linguistic difference, and the writing of history and origin legends. Crucially important was the identity of the Welsh as Britons, the rightful inhabitants of the entirety of Britain; its significance and durability are investigated, alongside its interaction with the emergence of an identity focused on the geographical unit of Wales.
