The Subversive Power of St. David's: Gerald of Wales and the Dominion of Canterbury

The Subversive Power of St. David's: Gerald of Wales and the Dominion of Canterbury

The twelfth century writer Gerald of Wales was product of unique hybridity in terms of not only sociopolitical culture, but also ecclesiastical spaces. Gerald often walked a line between the colonizer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the colonized, the Welsh Church. The ways in which he navigated his career between the two emphasize not only Gerald's goals of an independent Welsh Church and a bishopric at St. David's, but also the ways in which Gerald orientalized himself. Through a postcolonial reading of Gerald's Irish and Welsh texts, this study will examine the ways in which his travels led Gerald to characterize the Irish and Welsh native peoples and their religions in the folklore he collected in order to identify his ultimately futile argument for an independent Welsh church. This study will additionally reveal how Gerald inadvertently further identified himself as Welsh in the eyes of his Anglo-Norman readers.