Day 9 – Gerald of Wales

We spent a lot of time talking about //postmedieval// Ecomaterialism, where nearly everyone read Trigg and Cohen on fire, and many read Mentz on air, and also Siewers on Earth. I can say more here when I have time, but if people want to get more into this and summarize some of their key ideas, do, please!

We talked about vacuums, about what counts as a “material” (fire, maybe, glaciers, maybe not), about the earth as both existence itself and something distinct, in an analog to nature itself (both the thing that constitutes something and the thing outside). When I talked about Steve Mentz, “‘Making the green one red’: Dynamic Ecologies in Macbeth, Edward Barlow’s Journal, and Robinson Crusoe.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 13.3 (2013): 66-83, which I had read on the train to class, and about the sea being thought of as green in early modern thought, we got hung up, finally, on what classical Greek words for ‘blue’ might be, and the old debate about Homer’s Wine Dark Sea (for example).

For Gerald, I pointed out some other sources on the Irish and wonders well worth examining. Apart from Bishop Patrick of Dublin, there’s also material mentioned in the notes to the O’Meara translation, namely, the Irish translation of Nennius’s British history, 192-219, and the Irish wonder material in the Old Norse Kongs Skuggsjo, aka, the Speculum Regale (Meyer, Kuno. “The Irish Mirabilia in the Norse “Speculum Regale”.” Folklore 5.4 (1894): 299-316). The Meyer article argues from linguistic and orthographical evidence that the wonders can’t be from a written source, which suggests that the stories Gerald tells were circulating in Ireland more generally. That said, since the Kongs Skuggsjo postdates Gerald’s Topographia, it’s possible that Gerald may have been the ultimate source for these stories. You will want to read it for a number of reasons, chiefly, the werewolf lore, which differs quite a bit from Gerald’s story (and whose story of a vengeful saint recalls the origin story of the English tail), and for the men who go mad and flee into the woods (as in Merlin in the Vita Merliniand other, earlier sources) and there grow feathers (!! will need to check Meyer’s translation) and run along the trees as fast as squirrels (!).
I also pointed out two key manuscripts of Gerald’s Topographia, both of which are online, Dublin, National Library, MS 700 , and British Library,Royal MS 13.b.VIII, whose patterns of illustrations are basically the same, suggesting to some scholars that Gerald may be ultimately responsible in some way for the illustrations. We used Asa Mittman’s excellent early article on Gerald to observe how the Royal MS 13.b.VIII is particularly well-handled at the section about the woman who loved the goat (see above)

Our presentation of Gerald focused on Jeffrey Cohen’s work in his //Postcolonial Middle Ages// and his Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles. We heard about Gerald’s own attitudes towards his “marcher” identity, and his efforts to resolve his shared loyalties to Wales and the Angevin lords by demonizing the Irish and otherwise encouraging an invasion. We heard about how Gerald’s portrayal of Irish bestiality and Irish human/animal hybrids not only helps present the Irish as subhuman, but also helps Gerald think through his own conflicted Welsh/Norman loyalties. We developed some of Cohen’s points further: we wondered about the body as a spectacle for the public performance of truth, and how animals — nonlinguistic, sublinguistic, or otherly linguistic — function particularly well for this, both in Gerald and indeed in the fable tradition. We also wondered at the contradictions of the animal insult: though Gerald insults the Irish repeatedly through animal comparisons, he also tends to praise animals in general: so is being more natural, or more animal, a good thing or a bad thing?

I encouraged students to concentrate on Book I as much as possible. While the postcolonial readings of Gerald have been highly profitable (in the work of Cohen, Rhonda Knights, James Cain, and to a lesser degree Asa Mittman, for example), and while attention to Gerald’s wonders has, unsurprisingly, been especially popular, Book I has received very little critical love. An ecomaterialist approach, though, can correct that critical neglect. We were encouraged to look at how the presence of the land and climate already determines us to a large extent; we are always vulnerable, and existing at all, because of what is already there before us.

So, we read a few passages closely. We clarified that Gerald’s “East” is not “Eastern Ireland” but rather the “East,” as in Jerusalem and thereabouts. In this, he’s both discouraging Henry II from doing a crusade (notable, as our presenter observed, given that he would then go on a fundraising tour of Wales to raise money for a crusade, as recounted extensively in hisJourney through Wales and his Autobiogaphy), and also responding to the old traditions of writing about the Wonders of the East (as evidenced here) for example). You’ll also note that this map from Dublin, National Library, MS 700, 48r doesn’t go any further east than Sicily and Calabria (in the upper right-hand corner) and Theodosia (?) — Greece, anyway — in the upper left-hand corner. Gerald is, incidentally, part of an explosion of writing about the “Wonders of the West” that we see in the twelfth century: Gervase of Tilbury is but one of the several other writers who do this kind of thing.

We looked especially at the goat woman. We remarked on the assessment of the goat’s hair and horns, tam pilositate prelonga quam cornuum elatione suo in genere conspicuum in the text of the first recension. Is this an assessment of livestock? Is it admiration of a wonder? Is it aesthetic? Is it erotic? Of course one wants a goat with long hair and high horns, but why? This says something about the kind of desire Gerald’s trying to stir up in Henry II for Ireland, but it also says something about the non-innocence of admiration. We also looked at the “abuse” passages: in O’Meara’s translation, “The wretched woman…even submitted herself to his abuse” and “He was…created not for abuse but for proper use” (“Cui miserrima…ab abusum supponebat” and “licet tamen non ad abusum sed ad usum creata”). That difference between use and abuse is hard to maintain, of course, especially given what Gerald’s trying to stir up in Ireland. I tried and failed to connect this to usufruct in some way.

We looked at the badger and beaver of Book I: Gerald wonders at their having a kind of “peasant” class, where one animal is obligated to be loaded with materials and dragged about by others. Though Gerald says this is “wonderful,” of course, his own, human society would have been mostly peasants of some sort. What gives? Well, typically human thinking about animals homogenizes individual species: lions are noble, boars angry, sheep mild, foxes crafty, and so forth. This is what allows both bestiaries and fables to work as genres. But what happens when a species has class, when it has a culture, inequality, and so on? This is a wonder, perhaps. It certainly does something to how we think of animals.

Finally, we thought about the problem of life, first during Gerald’s discussion of the poisons of the east. O’Meara’s translation of the first recension, I.29, ends with “or, rather, among so many deaths, what life can there be?,” in Latin, “Vel potius, inter tot mortes, que vita,” which is the same text as in the 2nd recension. This led us first into a strange story from the 2nd recension (which has, apparently, been translated! a surprise to all of us), about an English pilgrim in Jerusalem, bitten by a snake, whose body at once, with its flesh and bones, was resolved into a formless mass like pitch (“statimque totum corpus eius, cum carnibus et ossibus, in massam quandam informen et quasi piceam est resolutum“), a figure of horror that at once suggests the shapeless stuff of the Real (in Zizek’s sense) and also the horrific element of Bennett’s “vibrant matter.”

We concluded by looking at “hibernating” birds I.16 and their similarity to von Uexküll’s famous tick. You’ll recall that Gerald, since he doesn’t know about migration, assumes that birds hibernate, and “in the interval, neither dead nor alive, they seem to continue living in their vital spirit and at the same time to be seized up into a long ecstasy and some middle state between life and death,” and so on. It’s likely that Gerald develops this idea from ursine hibernation, which in turn suggests the way that a bear cub, in its shapelessness at birth, is kind of indeterminately alive. We will need to do more with this question of life!