The twelfth-century littérateur, courtier, and cleric Gerald of Wales (d. 1223) is an invaluable, if controversial, source for historians of Wales, Ireland, and the Plantagenet monarchy. Because Gerald was descended from both the Cambro-Norman castellans and the native Welsh princes of his half-conquered homeland, his voluminous writings – especially the Itinerarium Kambriae and Descriptio Kambriae – have been scoured by scholars interested in issues of identity and ethnicity. Literary scholars, particularly Monika Otter and David Rollo, have detected in his early works a dense, intra-referential text supportive of multiple, even subversive, interpretations.
Less studied has been the De Rebus a se Gestis (c. 1208-1216); this most “autobiographical” of the three accounts Gerald wrote detailing his struggle to obtain metropolitan status for the see of St. David’s (1199-1203) survives in only one, incomplete, copy. The De Rebus a se Gestis has been under-valued and misunderstood; it is not, as one historian has described it, a mere “chronological” account of the St. David’s controversy. A close study of the text, especially when contrasted with other Geraldine sources such as the Symbolum Electorum, reveals an audacious revisionist project undertaken by Gerald to create for himself a useable past. In the De Rebus a se Gestis, Gerald downplayed his decade as a Plantagenet courtier and reinvented himself as a Welsh firebrand.
The key to this project of self-reinvention is Gerald’s pious-sounding account of his visit to Wechelen, the anchorite of Llowes. At one level, which I have termed “exoteric,” the “Wechelen story” valorizes Gerald’s ignominious departure from the Plantagenet court (c. 1194) by subsuming his failure beneath a conventional narrative of religious resignation. At another level, which I have termed “esoteric,” Wechelen’s strange tale of a plot undertaken by “the Devil” and a “woman disguised as a nun,” a plot intended both to defame the anchorite and destroy Welsh souls, itself serves to conceal Gerald’s vehement refutation of a rumor that he had, in 1198, encouraged a sanguinary English attack on Welsh rebels besieging Painscastle.
The De Rebus a se Gestis lacks a dedicatory preface. Nowhere in the secondary literature has anyone suggested an intended readership for the work. However, textual evidence suggests that Gerald composed it for a native Welsh reader. Furthermore, during the years he is thought to have written the work, 1208-1216, Gerald’s personal circumstances had become straitened; he needed a literary patron, but his usual sources of patronage among the Plantagenet elite had become unavailable. These difficult personal circumstances, considered in the context of both the internal evidence of the work and the surviving record of Gerald’s political activities in Wales years earlier, during the St. David’s controversy, suggest that Gerald composed the De Rebus a se Gestis to win for himself the patronage of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth of Gwynedd (1173-1240), the pre-eminent prince of the native Welsh.