De gestis Giraldi: On the Deeds of Gerald

‘Gerald of Wales, De gestis Giraldi: On the Deeds of Gerald’, a new book edited and translated by Dr Jacob Currie, a former Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, with Professor Thomas Charles-Edwards, Emeritus Fellow and former Professor of Celtic at Jesus, and Paul Russell, Professor of Celtic at the University of Cambridge, is the first critical edition of its kind which elucidates the deeds of Gerald of Wales.

De gestis Giraldi is a narrative of the deeds of Gerald, written in the third person but actually by Gerald himself, and framed as the biography of a bishop (although Gerald never became a bishop). The scholars’ new volume, prepared from a critical study of the extant manuscript, features an accompanying English translation, and gives an insight into one of the principal writers of the second half of the twelfth century.

Gerald was born in south-west Wales of mixed Norman and Welsh descent, and educated at Gloucester and in Paris. He worked for Henry II and Richard I, by whom he was valued as an intermediary between the king and Gerald’s relations, who included the leading Welsh king, Rhys ap Gruffudd, and many of the first English settlers in Ireland. When elected bishop of St Davids, Gerald was sent by his fellow-canons to Rome to secure his own consecration and metropolitan status for St Davids; ultimately, both cases failed, defeated by the combined power and resources of the English state and church. His eventful career spanned Wales, Ireland, and England, Paris and Rome, and De gestis Giraldi offers a vivid and personal view of them all.

The book is published by Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2024) and is available here.

AUTHOR INFORMATION

Edited and translated by Jacob Currie, Assistant Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Latin, University of Cambridge, With Thomas Charles-Edwards, Emeritus Jesus Professor of Celtic, University of Oxford, and Paul Russell, Professor of Celtic, Dept of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, University of Cambridge

Jacob Currie studied Latin and medieval history at Toronto and Cambridge. He worked at Oxford on the ‘Medieval Libraries of Great Britain’ project, and on Latin palaeography at the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes in Paris. He returned to Oxford in 2020 to work on Gerald of Wales as a post-doctoral researcher and Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College. Since 2022, he has taught medieval Latin at Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Girton College.

Thomas Charles-Edwards has been a member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford from 1962, as undergraduate, graduate student, Junior Research Fellow, Fellow and Tutor in History, and now Emeritus Fellow. From 1967 to 1969, he was a scholar of the School of Celtic Studies in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. From 1997 until 2011 he was Jesus Professor of Celtic in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Jesus College. He has worked mainly on Ireland and Wales in the early medieval period, focusing principally on their laws but also writing more general books on the two countries.

Paul Russell is Professor of Celtic in the Department of Anglo Saxon, Norse, and Celtic in the University of Cambridge. His research interests include learned texts in Celtic languages (especially early Irish glossaries), Celtic philology and linguistics, early Welsh orthography, Middle Welsh translation texts, grammatical texts, medieval Welsh law, hagiography, and Latin texts from medieval Wales.