The Writings of Gerald of Wales
In December 2019 Professor Richard Sharpe was awarded a 5 year Leverhulme Research Project to begin in April 2020 on Gerald of Wales with the aim of publishing authoritative editions of most of his works, following the example of Robert Bartlett's recent edition of De principis instructione.
Gerald of Wales (1146–1223) was a man with a busy career in church and court, whose prolific writings provide a vivid window on entangled Anglo-French, Anglo-Welsh, and Anglo-Irish interactions. Yet his works are currently mainly only accessible in the nineteenth-century Rolls Series without translations, which are of variable reliability, or in poor modern translations. This project will produce nine volumes of authoritative new editions with translation and commentary. These will be of huge value to historians, Celticists, and students of medieval Latin literature, and change how we think about Gerald and the world of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, as it will bring the person and his works into clearer focus and emphasise the importance of medieval Latin as a cross-disciplinary field.
An illustration from 'Topographia Hiberniae' depicting the story of a traveling priest who meets and communes a pair of good werewolves from the kingdom of Ossory.