LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER 2

      Subjective Beginnings

       Autoethnography and the Partial Gazes of Gerald of Wales

      The earliest ethnography of Europe emerged from its borders, particularly as they underwent expansion in the twelfth century. Representative texts of such “border ethnography” include Adam of Bremen’s account of Baltic peoples, and his continuator Helmold’s description of Slavic customs, as well as a proliferation of texts about Britain’s natives, the Irish, Welsh, and Scots, viewed by Anglo-Normans coming into contact with them along Britain’s Celtic periphery. Gerald of Wales stands as the most important of these ethnographic border writers of the Celtic periphery, and among the most important ethnographers of the medieval period.

      Gerald wrote his four Celtic works in the span of less than a decade, from the Topographia Hibernica (The topography of Ireland) and the Expugnatio Hibernica (The conquest of Ireland) in 1188 to the Itinerarium Kambriae (The journey through Wales) in 1191, to the Descriptio Kambriae (The description of Wales) in 1194. While Gerald called these his “minor works,” and felt the need to defend his choice to expend “the flowers of my rhetoric” on “those rugged countries, Ireland, Wales and Britain,”¹ his Celtic works have in fact attracted more scholarly attention than any of his other writings. The Journey through Wales and the Topography of Ireland, in particular, have been the subject of numerous recent scholarly treatments, many of them interested in Gerald’s construction of medieval Welsh and Irish identity and ethnicity at a time of pressing Anglo-Norman colonial incursion into the Celtic periphery.

      But it is with the Descriptio Kambriae that Gerald managed the striking feat of reviving the classical genre of ethnography, a work devoted centrally in theme to the description of the life and customs of a single people, for the medieval period. Gerald begins his Description of Wales much as he did his earlier Celtic treatise, the Topographia Hibernica, with a physical description of the contours of the land, a move traceable within British historiographical tradition as far back as Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum and, of course, earlier still within Gerald’s classical sources like Caesar’s Gallic War. What comes next is far more innovative: in chapter 8 of book 1 of the Descriptio, Gerald turns his attention to the “natura, moribus, et cultu”—or nature, manners, and customs—of the Welsh people, and sustains that focus on Welsh manners and customs for the remainder of his treatise.² Writing without direct access to the major works of classical ethnography and anthropology such as Herodotus’s Histories, Tacitus’s Germania (also known as On the Origin, Location, Customs and Peoples of the Germans) (c. a.d. 98) or Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, Gerald nevertheless manages to reproduce in the Descriptio a form of writing not seen in the West for over a thousand years, the ethnographic monograph.³

      We can tell Gerald thought that he was doing something new from his strain, also visible in the report of William of Rubruck, for adequate words to describe his task. In attempting to define his relation to his project and to the Welsh, Gerald works by way of metaphor. In the introduction to book 2 of the Descriptio, he likens himself to a historian, noting that he writes the Descriptio “more historico” (in the manner of a historian), a key methodological passage to which I will turn at the end of the chapter. And in the “First Preface” as well as again in the introduction to book 2, Gerald likens himself to a master pictor or painter, turning to the visual arts to capture the relation between himself and his object. In titling his work a “descriptio,” Gerald is, of course, already invoking the visual arts. Indeed, the Descriptio Kambriae forms part of the rise in visual empiricism generally in the twelfth century. Evidence for such a “visual turn” has been found particularly in the cultural production of twelfth-century Anglo-Normans, including the Normans’ use of visual evidence as “witness” to hereditary claims to land; the writing of social and natural histories supported by eyewitnessing claims; the proliferation of new genres of observation such as topographies of castles, towns, and cities, and descriptions of social customs of local inhabitants; a heightened use of character sketches, anecdotes, and trivial detail in history writing; and a rise in naturalist illustrations and illuminations of plants, animals, and birds.⁴

      If Gerald himself was at the forefront of a general visual turn in twelfth-century cultural production,⁵ there is no contemporary analogue for the extent and scope of his ethnographic achievement in the Descriptio Kambriae. His Topographia Hibernica, which prepared the way for the Descriptio, mixed history and myth with ethnographic description.⁶ Other ethnographic endeavors of the twelfth century appeared as short excurses within long historical chronicles, as was the case with Otto of Freising’s contemporary description of the Magyars in the Gesta Frederici and the ethnographic excurses on Celtic life and customs in works by William of Malmesbury, William of Newburgh, and the author of the Gesta Stephani. What, then, explains the way in which the Descriptio Kambriae emerged seemingly ex nihilo as a full-blown ethnographic monograph?

      Historical examination and contextualization rarely support the emergence of novelty ex nihilo, and the case of Gerald’s literary production is no exception. In this chapter, I turn to the context in which Gerald wrote in order to argue that the Descriptio Kambriae was an improvised, textual response to the perceived threat of cultural loss of traditional Welsh byways, a work designed to salvage a contemporary snapshot of “Kambriae nostrae,” his “own Wales.”⁷ In writing the Descriptio, Gerald was enacting an early form of “salvage anthropology,” the salvaging of native materials against the losses born of colonial incursion.⁸ The Descriptio stands, as such, as an example of the improvised novelty of cultural production in “contact zones,” spaces of dynamic, uneasy, and often asymmetrical colonial encounters that allow for new, dialogically derived cultural understandings and subjectivities.⁹ Gerald’s own hybrid identity is, of course, itself a product of the contact zone of the Celtic periphery, namely South Wales, which underwent steady Norman infringement throughout the twelfth century. The grandson of the Welsh princess Nest and the Norman Gerald of Windsor, Gerald is at once Norman and Welsh, a Cambro-Norman by-product of the Norman colonial project in Wales and especially its marcher borderlands in the South.

      But Gerald’s ethnography is as hybrid as his person, and as such is irreducible to a

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