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Nativism and Orientalism in the Literature of Wales, 1300-1600

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Nativism and Orientalism in the Literature of Wales, 1300-1600 Looking towards India: Nativism and Orientalism in the Literature of Wales, 1300-1600 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Conley, Kassandra Leighann. 2014. Looking towards India: Nativism and Orientalism in the Literature of Wales, 1300-1600. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12274114 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Looking towards India: Nativism and Orientalism in the Literature of Wales, 1300-1600 A dissertation presented by Kassandra Leighann Conley to The Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Celtic Languages and Literatures Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April, 2014 © 2014 Kassandra L. Conley All rights reserved. Professor Catherine McKenna Kassandra Leighann Conley Looking towards India: Nativism and Orientalism in the Literature of Wales, 1300-1600 Abstract After the conquest of 1282, Wales increasingly fell under the dominion of England and in 1535, the first Laws in Wales Act officially annexed the country. During this period of political and legal instability, Welsh men and women fought to regain independence, a struggle that led to the development of a nascent national identity. For many authors, this identity was fundamentally rooted in the topography of Wales and the mythical histories concerning the cultivation of its land. This interest in native mirabilia corresponded with a period of increased availability of English and continental geographical treatises and travelogues that provided Welsh authors with a new vocabulary for discussing wonder. Medieval and early modern Welsh authors incorporated these exotic geographies into their accounts of native landscapes in order to differentiate Wales from England and argue for a sense of Welsh cultural exceptionalism based in its alterity. The strange and marvelous played an invaluable role in Welsh writing and English writing about Wales from late Middle Ages onward. While English authors employed orientalized and racialized rhetoric to justify the annexation of Wales under an English throne, Welsh authors availed themselves of the same imagery to establish Welsh political and cultural autonomy. In this dissertation, I trace the development of this phenomenon in the romance literature of the Middle Ages and analyze its influence on a wide variety of early modern genres, including historiography, drama, and poetry. I demonstrate the ways in which Tudor Welsh and English authors portrayed Wales as the source of historical, linguistic, and cultural marvel. By doing so, these authors argue for a Wales whose marvelous, and at times threatening, landscape separates it from England and, thus, protects it from English hegemony. iii Page left intentionally blank iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 I. Building a Welsh Vocabulary of Wonder: The Role of Mirabilia in Medieval Welsh Prose 15 Wales as Barbarous Other in the Insular Imagination 22 Once in Caer Se: Naturalizing the Wonders of Wales 37 The Medieval Welsh Orientalist Impulse 55 Conclusion 93 II. Olion Cewri: Galfridian History and Early Modern Welsh Identity 95 Wales and the Tudor Political Milieu 101 Polydore Vergil and the Galfridian Debates 109 Tudor Welsh Chroniclers and the Matter of Britain 121 English Neo-Classical Myths of Albion 132 The History of Siôn Dafydd Rhys 142 Conclusion 154 III. The Relics of British Wonder in the Tudor Landscape 157 “Barelegged and Unshod”: The Welsh as British Noble Savage 163 “The Welshmen Use the British Tongue”: Language as Relic 181 Conclusion 200 IV. The Relics of British Wonder in the New World 202 “He Went to Distant Lands in the West”: Madoc and the Welsh Americas 205 “Of This Madoc There Be Many Fables” 218 “A Mirror in which to See Oneself”: The Patagonia of Siôn Dafydd Rhys 224 Conclusion 237 V. The Anxiety of Travel in Sixteenth Century Wales: The Cases of John Mandeville and Alexander the Great 240 The Medieval Welsh Alexander 244 The Medieval Welsh Mandeville 256 Sixteenth-Century Revisions of Medieval Traditions 266 Conclusion 283 Epilogue 286 Bibliography 290 v Er cof am fy nhad vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work would have been impossible without the kind words and critical eyes of the many friends and colleagues who have offered me support since I began this project. I wish to extend my deepest gratitude to my dissertation committee. Catherine McKenna, Jerry Hunter, and Simon Innes have so generously offered me their invaluable time and expertise. I thank Professor McKenna for her understanding, encouragement, and willingness to support me as I followed the sometimes-winding paths that my research took. My work is immeasurably better thanks to her careful reading and thoughtful suggestions. I am indebted to Professor Hunter for his constant readiness to advise me despite his crowded schedule, and Dr. Innes for his keen eye and keener conversation. Their advice has been indispensable, and it goes without saying that any errors herein are solely my own. Tomás Ó Cathasaigh has demonstrated great kindness over the course of my tenure at Harvard, and I have benefitted from his counsel and company. I am also grateful to Margo Granfors and Steven Duede for helping me navigating Harvard bureaucracy all while offering a warm smile and a cup of tea. I must also thank Elissa Henken who, many years ago, introduced me to the Welsh language and inspired within me a great love of its literature that guided me throughout my doctoral studies. I am fortunate to have received financial support from a variety of sources as I completed my research. I am thankful to Harvard University for the financial support they have provided me in the form of grants and fellowships. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Elizabeth Gray and the Friends of Harvard Celtic Studies. Their support enabled me to take multiple trips to the British Library and the National Library of Wales in order to work closely with manuscripts whose contents would have otherwise been inaccessible to me. Their incredible generosity further allowed me to present the results of my research at conferences throughout the United States and Europe. I also wish to acknowledge the support of the Kappa Kappa Gamma Foundation: their gift of Graduate Scholarship enabled me to spend a semester at Bangor University where I was able to work closely with primary sources and improve my Welsh language abilities. vii I am truly grateful for my colleagues and friends at Harvard’s Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures. I mention in particular Sarah Zeiser and Erin Boon for their friendship, quick wits, and willingness to grab cocktails or engage in movie marathons when necessary; Deborah Furchtgott for long, sanity-preserving chats over hot chocolate and pastries at J.P. Licks; Georgia Henley, Patrick McCoy, and Gregory Darwin for Welsh pub nights; Joey McMullen, Tasha Sumner, and Matt Holmberg for their open ears and honest opinions. I am also thankful for the intellectual support from my colleagues in other departments, especially the School of Welsh at Bangor University, whose faculty invited me to spend a semester as a member of their department. I thank my wonderful mother, Kerri Conley Ratliff, who has always encouraged me in my endeavors no matter how arcane they may appear to her. Her belief in me was a constant source of strength when my project seemed too unwieldy to control. I dedicate this work to the memory of my father, Joseph Conley. His enthusiastic insistence that I read The Hobbit as a child planted the seed for my future medievalist interests, and I am eternally grateful for the love and guidance he provided to me. I am also incredibly fortunate to have had the support of my mother- and father-in-law, Diana and Bill Lehman, who have unconditionally welcomed me into their family. I am continually amazed by the generosity and kindness they have provided me over the last five years. The encouragement of my grandparents, Curtis and Madelyn Meade and Wallace and Betty Conley, and my brothers, Josh Conley and Alex Conley, has been instrumental in the completion of this dissertation. I am also grateful to Hector Lehman for the joyous distractions he provided me while I wrote. Most of all, I am spectacularly blessed to have taken this journey with my husband, Frank Lehman, at my side. We met soon after I began to develop the germs of the ideas that would lead to my dissertation research. After he eagerly listened to my half-formed thoughts about African giants and wanted to know more, I knew I had a keeper. His unwavering faith in my work inspires me to be a better scholar. viii INTRODUCTION In 1604, a pamphlet appeared in the vibrant London book market that detailed the peculiar story of an event said to have occurred a year earlier in Pendine, a small town located in Carmarthenshire in southwestern Wales. The tale, purportedly narrated by a Welshman to his cousin in London, relates the sudden appearance of a mermaid in Carmarthen Bay to a local yeoman. The text also recounts the efforts of royal authorities to verify the wonder.1 The pamphlet’s Welsh author excitedly reports that he could not “omit this opportunitie, to gratifie your London Newes of joy, with a most rare and strange matter here in our confines.” In the introductory paragraph, the author informs his cousin that although prodigious births and other such monsters commonly appear in London pamphlets, Englishmen should not underestimate the marvels that populate the rural western landscape, which he describes as “strange Beastes, taking of Whales and other strange fishes, fierie Dragons, 7 strange sightes in the Ayre, some by nature (others, as tokens of Gods powerfull Maiestie) all great and admyrable for men to wonder at.” He proceeds to tell a story to rival the sensational accounts circulating throughout the London popular press.
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