SOURCE: Bartlett, Robert. “Natural Science.” In Gerald of Wales: 1146-1223, pp. 123-53. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.

[In the following excerpt, Bartlett contends that Gerald's Cosmographia and other scientific writings, although not of the Platonic tradition, nevertheless show dedication to detail, observation, and a systematic approach.]

Discussion of the place of marvels and miracles in Gerald's work has shown how, in his view, the texture of the natural world might be disrupted by bubbles of strangely wonderful material or punched through by the sudden fist of divine punishment. It is now time to turn to the natural world itself; to investigate the sources of Gerald's knowledge of it, and the kinds of explanation he brought to bear on it. In so doing his place in the history of natural science should emerge.

The expansion of the Latin west which began in the eleventh century not only widened economic and political horizons, but led also to a fundamental reorientation of Western thought, particularly in the field of science. The Greeks and their Arab commentators had created a large body of scientific works, distinguished by close observation, a systematic approach, and some experimentation. In 1100 virtually none of this work was accessible to Latin scholars,¹ but by 1280 only a few treatises remained to be translated. The entire scientific knowledge of two cultures had become available through the translation movement.

Before the translators began their work or, more important, before the translations were generally received, the science of western Europe presented a rather scrappy picture. Classical scientific knowledge had been transmitted to the men of north-west Europe not by the writings of Aristotle and the other original scientists themselves, but in the form of the diffuse, unsystematic, and undiscriminating encyclopaedias of Pliny, Solinus, and Isidore. They had inherited a rag-bag of observation, fable, and speculation which was without method and offered no pointers to further scientific development. However, the encyclopaedists did at least ensure the availability of a large deposit of facts (and fictions). Also, in so far as they aspired to comprehensiveness, they presented a model of universal knowledge and inquiry.

More concrete scientific developments were under way, however, stimulated largely by practical requirements. Since the time of the Babylonians, at least, exact observations of the stars had been important for calendrical and liturgical purposes, and the Christian Church, with its complex liturgical year and its chief feast dependent on the lunar cycle, required a certain degree of astronomical investigation. Calendrical anomalies and the variant methods of computing the date of Easter provided a stimulus for astronomical thought and writing. Bede had written on these subjects, and the computists of the eleventh and twelfth centuries produced many treatises on them. Even after the reception of Aristotle's thought, calendrical problems remained an important area of scientific activity to which men of such stature as Grosseteste and Roger Bacon devoted time.

Astrological prediction also necessitated good observations of the stars and planets, and stimulated simple mathematics. The practice of astrology received a great impetus from the influence of the Arabs. The introduction of the astrolabe to Europe in the eleventh century, for example, was one of the first major innovations in the field of observational instruments. Astrological study was closely associated with medicine, which itself provided another great practical stimulus to science. Use of herbal drugs required botanical knowledge, and the herbals of the period contain accurate and detailed illustrations of various plants. Some knowledge of minerals and animal secretions was also involved in medicine. From early in the eleventh century Salerno was the centre of medical study.

Apart from the practical concerns of astrology and medicine, however, the main purpose of scientific inquiry up to and after the twelfth century was an ancillary one, as an aid to biblical exegesis or moral homily. Alexander Nequam's De Naturis Rerum (c.1197-1204), which contained much scientific material, including early quotations from Aristotle and the Salernitan masters, took the form of a preface to his commentary on Ecclesiastes and was avowedly written as moral and religious instruction. ‘In this little work’, he wrote,

we invite the reader towards the works of light, so that, putting aside the works of darkness, he may at length enjoy light eternal. I have decided to use my small talents to commend in writing the natures of certain things, in order that the mind of the reader should run back from their known properties to their origin, namely the creator of things, so that, marvelling at him both in himself and in his creatures, the reader should kiss spiritually the two feet of the creator, justice and mercy.²

Nequam called the De Naturis Rerum ‘a moral tract’.³ The animal and plant kingdoms were treated as a great reservoir of sacramental meaning and moral symbol.⁴ Curiosity about nature for its own sake was rare.

This situation changed radically during the twelfth century, encouraged by two crucial developments. One was the growth of logic, which both prompted an extension of the range of rational inquiry and suggested a method of orderly procedure. The dialecticians made their first and controversial impact in the field of theology in the eleventh century. By the later twelfth century the classic systematizing work of Peter Lombard and Gratian had shown what could be achieved in the structuring of large areas of diffuse material. The system lay ready to hand for application to other areas of study.

The other major development of the twelfth century was the transmission of Greco-Arabic science. Sicily and Spain were regions of cultural and linguistic overlap which became important centres of translation work.⁵ Men of different cultural origins, Arabic, Jewish, Latin, and, in Sicily, Greek, could co-operate in this difficult and novel task. It is hard to overstate the very high degree of motivation and enthusiasm that sustained some of the western scholars. Gerard of Cremona, the major figure in the movement, travelled from Italy to Spain in search of a copy of Ptolemy's Almagest.⁶ Daniel of Morley travelled from England to Paris and then on to Spain in search of scientific knowledge.⁷ Adelard of Bath claimed to have journeyed as far afield as Syria and Cilicia.⁸

English scholars played a prominent part in the translation movement. Throughout the twelfth century men like Adelard, Robert of Chester, Daniel of Morley, and Alfred of Sareshel travelled from England to Spain or Sicily. English scholars were already accustomed to having to go abroad to pursue higher studies, since the cathedral schools of England were so inferior to those of France, especially Paris. Hence nearly all the major English theologians of the twelfth century spent their active scholarly lives in France. Gerald himself spent at least ten years in Paris at the schools. Those whose main interests were not theological were prepared to travel even further afield to find the kind of teaching and knowledge they desired.

Daniel of Morley⁹ travelled to Paris at some time around the middle of the twelfth century, but was disappointed at the teaching available. He called the jurists bestiales and infantissimi. He wrote, however, that ‘in those days the teaching of the Arabs, which consisted almost entirely of the quadrivium, had achieved great fame at Toledo so I hastened there with all speed to hear the world's wiser philosophers’. This is a good illustration of the magnetic appeal of Toledo, and Arabic science in general, for those who were dissatisfied with the predominantly legal or theological learning that the schools of north-west Europe offered.

Daniel later returned to England ‘with a valuable load of books’. Here he met John, Bishop of Norwich (1175-1200), whom he had presumably known before his departure overseas. John was very eager to hear about Toledan teaching: ‘At length, as his curiosity led him to inquire about the movements of the heavenly bodies, he turned the conversation to astronomy, among other things those sublunary events which seem to serve the higher bodies by a kind of necessary obedience.’ This is typical: a very practical desire to know the future from the stars was a great impetus to scientific inquiry. Bernard Silvester, whose Cosmographia presented a sophisticated scientific and philosophical cosmology, also wrote treatises on astrology¹⁰ and geomantic divination.¹¹ Daniel's Liber de Naturis Inferiorum et Superiorum, written at the Bishop's request, was a cosmology which mixed traditional Latin viewpoints with some new ideas and vocabulary taken from the Arab astrologers.¹²

The interest of English scholars in scientific questions, Arab science, and the translation of Aristotle was continued in the last quarter of the twelfth century and the first part of the thirteenth by three figures in particular, Alexander Nequam (1157-1217), Alfred of Sareshel, and Roger of Hereford (fl. 1178-95). Alfred's translation of the pseudo-Aristotelian De Vegetabilibus was dedicated to Roger, and his De Motu Cordis to Nequam, so presumably there was some contact between the three of them. Alfred studied in Spain and was one of the first commentators on Aristotle's scientific works. His scholarship represented a new stage in the deeper reception of Arabic and Aristotelian science.¹³

THE COSMOGRAPHIA

Gerald was not a scientific writer in the same sense as his English contemporaries, Daniel of Morley and Alfred of Sareshel. He wrote no works which attempted detailed and systematic description and explanation of some area or aspect of natural science. He was unreceptive to the new Aristotle, and, of the seven liberal arts, rhetoric and grammar (in its wider and more humane sense) were his chosen fields. Neither medicine nor astronomy are prominent in his writings. But it is erroneous to see him as a purely ‘literary’ figure, having no place in the history of medieval science. Gerald's works were not scientific treatises, but any account of them must consider his responses to the natural world and his scientific ideas.

Unfortunately, some of his early, more purely scientific works have been lost. He tells us that, when young, he had written both a Cronographia and a Cosmographia in verse, which ‘in many places reflected the teachings of the philosophers rather than of the theologians’.¹⁴ Some, perhaps all, of the Cosmographia is preserved as the first poem in Part II of the Symbolum Electorum, an anthology of Gerald's works.¹⁵ The index to Part II is headed ‘Tituli in Cosmographia, etc.’ The poem itself, of 260 lines, is entitled ‘De Mundi creatione et contentis ejusdem’. The Cronographia does not survive. It is probable that both the Cosmographia and the Cronographia were written about 1166-76.¹⁶ This would correspond with Gerald's period of study in the arts at Paris (c.1165-72) and the poems would make sense as a student's exercise in both verse composition and cosmology. Another metrical, scientific work, De Philosophicis Flosculis, included explanations of the tides and the influence of the moon. Gerald mentioned this work once only;¹⁷ it may have been a separate work now lost. It was written before the Topographia Hibernica of 1187-8. These early metrical works are thus represented now only by the Cosmographia.

A first glance at Gerald's Cosmographia immediately suggests affinities with an earlier and weightier twelfth-century verse cosmology, that of Bernard Silvester. Bernard wrote his Cosmographia or De Mundi Universitate before 1147, and it was a popular text.¹⁸ Although he quoted the Cosmographia only once, and probably indirectly, there is every possibility that Gerald encountered it as a student in Paris in the 1160s.¹⁹ There are both structural and verbal parallels between the two works. Like Bernard's, Gerald's Cosmographia is a description of the creation of the world and man. There is a basic similarity in the order of the two works. Both have a description of primordial chaos, followed by an account of how the divine generosity created a superior ordering of the world; an account of the separation of the four elements; and descriptions of the stars, seven planets, four winds, and the creatures of the world, culminating in microcosmus homo, with a final eulogy of man's dignity and intellectual power. There are also verbal similarities:

Quinque paralellis medium circumligat orbem:
Hinc extrema rigent, hinc mediata calent.
Temperat ergo duas algoribus extremarum
Et medii solis collaterante via.
Dividit in quadras celum cingente coluro …

(Bernard²⁰)

Quinque parallelis medius distinguitur orbis,
Ultimus hinc illinc extat uterque polus.
Nix tenet extremos, medios calor, inter utrosque
Temperiem reddit hic calor, inde rigor …
In quadras orbem scindunt cinguntque coluri …

(Gerald²¹)

Ut sua sint elementa volo: sibi ferveat ignis,
Sol niteat, tellus germinet, unda fluat.
Terra sibi fruges, pisces sibi nutriat unda,
Et sibi mons pecudes et sibi silva feras.

(Bernard²²)

Perfecto plus quam nihil est perfectius orbe,
Herba viret, tellus germinat, unda fluit,
Mons pecudes et silva feras et sidera coelum,
Aer quod volitat, quod natat unda tenet.

(Gerald²³)

Affinities of this kind suggest the influence of Bernard Silvester on the young Gerald.

In his poem, Bernard gave poetic treatment to those cosmological themes that also interested his (probably slightly older) contemporaries, William of Conches and Thierry of Chartres. They had drawn upon a series of sources, mainly Neoplatonist in inspiration—the Chalcidian Timaeus, Boethius, Macrobius—in order to develop a coherent account of the physical universe. They were interested in the problem of creation. William of Conches glossed the Timaeus²⁴ and Thierry, in his De Sex Dierum Operibus,²⁵ had constructed a plausible physical interpretation of the Genesis story. Bernard used the same sources and much of the same material as these writers.

Despite its parallels with Bernard Silvester, however, Gerald's Cosmographia does not reveal him as a Platonist cosmographer in the same sense as William, Thierry, or Bernard. It is true that there are hints of Platonic terms and ideas in the poem. Gerald described creation, for example, in a way that suggests that the universe was ordered in accordance with pre-existent archetypes in the mind of God:

Naturae genitor generum concepit ydeas
Et sic disposuit singula, sicut habent …
Incultis cultum, formas informis addens,
In varias species particulavit ylen.(26)

At another point Gerald seems to echo Boethius' O qui perpetua, ascribing the creation of the universe to God's bounty, his freedom from envy:

Sed tandem pietas mota est pietate, nec ultra
Res tantas et opes pertulit esse rudes.
Nec sibi thesauros recludere censuit uni,
Sed dare cuncta suis, sed retinere sua.
Cuncta sibi sed cuncta suis livore remoto
In se largiri, gaudia cuncta suis.(27)

Boethius has:

Quem non externae pepulerunt fingere causae
Materiae fluitantis opus, verum insita summi
Forma boni livore carens, tu cuncta superno
Ducis ab exemplo, pulchrum pulcherrimus ipse
Mundum mente gerens similique in imagine formans
Perfectasque iubens perfectum absolvere partes.(28)

The ultimate source of this is the Timaeus.²⁹ The existence of ‘the concepts of species’ in the mind of God is clearly a ‘Platonic’ notion in some sense. Yet it is worth asking whether such a concept had not been assimilated within Christian thought for such a long period that it is, in fact, misleading to describe it as ‘Platonic’ at all. The Christianization of Plato's ‘ideas’, by the insistence that ‘they are contained within the divine intelligence’ had been effected by St. Augustine.³⁰ To characterize the concept of generum ydeas in God's mind as Augustinian makes more sense in a twelfth-century context than to label it ‘Platonic’. In other areas, too, it is difficult to isolate what is essentially Platonic and what is simply part of a common Christian tradition.

There are two places in Gerald's Cosmographia which might be adduced as more direct evidence of a truly Neoplatonic element in the poem. Unfortunately the passages are obscure. The description of the ordering of the universe begins:

Prodiit imprimis coelum, coelique minister
Angelus, hoc ignis, spiritus ille sacer.
Purius hoc auro est, aura subtilior ille,
Stellatum hoc solium, nuncius ille Dei.(31)

This ‘angelic minister’ plays no further part and it would be rash to equate it with Bernard's Nous, ‘a metaphysical intermediary between God and the world’.³² It is the only hint in Gerald's poem of anything like the allegorical figures, Nous, Natura, Physis, and so on, who play an indispensable part in Bernard's Cosmographia. But it is not impossible that this ‘coeli minister angelus … spiritus sacer … nuncius Dei’ echoes either, in general terms, the Neoplatonic emphasis upon the intermediaries through whom God works or, more specifically, the idea of the anima mundi.³³ A more precise identification is not possible, given the briefness and allusiveness of Gerald's description.

An even more fleeting reference is Gerald's description of the primordial universe as the ‘ancient globe’ (vetus globus): ‘Non veteris fuit ulla globi divisio …’³⁴ This can be compared to Bernard's ‘… cum silva teneret / Sub veteri confusa globo primordia rerum.³⁵ The existence of ‘the chaotic primal elements of the universe’ in the vetus globus raises the issue of the creation of matter. The teaching of the Timaeus and of Genesis on this subject are contradictory. In Plato's cosmology matter is eternal and the activities of the Deus opifex represent an ‘ordering’ rather than a creation of the universe. Genesis is, of course, the Christian authority for ex nihilo creation. It has been suggested that Bernard Silvester and Thierry were toying with a Platonic interpretation of creation; certainly, there is twelfth-century polemic against such beliefs in the eternity of matter.³⁶ If Gerald's use of the phrase vetus globus is significant, then it may indicate sympathy with the concept. It is more likely, however, that his presentation of a pre-existent material chaos is a poetical topos. Ovid's influence is strong throughout Gerald's poem,³⁷ and the first book of the Metamorphoses presents a picture of the primordial ‘aspect of nature’ (vultus naturae):

Ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum
Unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe,
Quem dixere chaos: rudis indigestaque moles
Nec quicquam nisi pondus iners congestaque eodem
Non bene iunctarum discordia semina rerum.(38)

Other features in Gerald's poem also reflect contemporary commonplaces rather than Platonic influence. The correlation between the seasons, ages of man, elements, and humours, went back to Bede.³⁹ The characterization of the seven planets is similarly traditional.

Gerald was not, therefore, ‘Platonist’ in the sense that Bernard Silvester was. Moreover, Bernard, William of Conches, and Thierry of Chartres were ‘Platonists’ only in the sense that they used Plato as a tool. Their primary intention was to create a novel synthesis of natural philosophy and the traditional biblical and religious studies and, in doing so, to erect a structured scientific world-picture. All these major twelfth-century masters died around the middle of the century; none lived long enough to benefit from the new Aristotle.⁴⁰ Those translations which they did possess, for example Constantine the African's, or, in Bernard's case, Hermann of Carinthia's translation of Abu Ma'shar,⁴¹ they used eagerly. It was not a peculiar sympathy for Platonism that they shared—an investigation of their different responses to and developments of Plato will bear this out—but an interest in building a naturalistic picture of the universe which led them inevitably to the only available model for such an ambition.

Thus Gerald's Cosmographia is not so much in a tradition of platonizing authors but in that of a school of writers who were attempting a scientific synthesis on the basis of the meagre available resources. However, even if the poem cannot be characterized as Platonic, it does give us a glimpse of Gerald's interests when an arts student at Paris. Like the early twelfth-century masters, he was interested in cosmology and creation. Like them, he relied for his main outlines on traditional sources. Like Bernard Silvester, he was concerned to give his material attractive and elegant literary form. His education at Paris in the 1160s reflected the continuing influence of the teaching of these masters.

These affinities, however, remained undeveloped. Gerald was to write detailed accounts of the natural world, but of a very different kind from this youthful poetic cosmology. After completing his studies in the arts, Gerald returned to South Wales and received ecclesiastical preferment. In the late 1170s he spent a further three years at Paris, studying civil and canon law, before returning to an active ecclesiastical life in the diocese of St. David's. It was after this that he entered royal service, and the period of ten years he spent as a royal clerk (c. 1184-94) saw the production of his most famous works, the two on Ireland and the two on Wales.

NATURALIS HISTORIAE DILIGENS PERSCRUTATOR

These works, distinguished by Gerald's detailed personal acquaintance with his subject, are a curious mixture of geography, topography, and ethnography, of history and natural history, of anecdote, fable, and moralization. It is clear that there had been much development in his approach to the natural world since the Cosmographia. The grand overview of nature, as much poetic as scientific, had been replaced by a detailed, individualized observation, alive to the natural world as a motley multitude of particulars rather than a cosmic pattern.

Even when giving systematic sketches, Gerald filled out the features with scientific detail. The passage, for example, in which he surveyed ‘the ladder of being’,⁴² although rivalling the Cosmographia in scope, showed quite a different approach. Gerald distinguished rocks, stones, and inanimate matter, which have no intrinsic motion and ‘tend towards the centre’; trees and plants which possess a ‘quasi-vital force’ and ‘vegetable life’, enabling them to move and grow, although without sensation; and animals, which can move from place to place, possess sensation, and, by a ‘certain imaginative power’ (vi quadam imaginaria), recognize their regular haunts and remember past events. Finally (on an earthly level), there is microcosmus homo, who excels them all, possessing reason, speech, and upright stance. It was not original to distinguish these levels and qualities, but it is interesting to see how Gerald's ‘cosmological sense’, his awareness of the hierarchy of nature, had been articulated by an increasingly scientific precision. His analysis depended on motion and psychological capacities, which are empirical categories.

This tendency is even more apparent in the actual observations and descriptions in the Irish and Welsh works. Gerald's genius was not truly theoretical, and he tended to be interested in the particular, vivid, and immediate. His unusual qualities as an observer of the natural world have been generally recognized. He was interested in birds, fish, and animals, the movements of the tides, climatic phenomena, and the structure of the land. He tried his hand at cartography, and drew a map of Wales showing ‘the tough mountains, bristling forests, lakes, rivers and high-raised castles; also the cathedral churches and many monasteries’.⁴³ His Irish and Welsh works show an alert and curious mind at work.

The accuracy of Gerald's observations is often very high. He has been called ‘a realistic observer’,⁴⁴ and a scholar who has studied Gerald's natural history concluded, ‘The information on Irish fauna alone contained in the Topographia Hibernica is indicative of his superior talents as an observer … he shows exeptional curiosity and fondness for observation … equal to Albert the Great at his best.’⁴⁵ Gerald earned the title naturalis historiae diligens perscrutator which he gave himself.⁴⁶

In discussing the wetness of Ireland, he gave a clear if simple description of the processes of evaporation: ‘The mildness of the place means that the water collected and massed in clouds is neither consumed by the heat of the etherial fire, nor bound in the grip of aerial cold and solidified in the form of ice and snow, but is more easily resolved into rain.’ Hilly places, he added, are more rainy because they are cold; fogs, clouds, rain, and snow are all the same thing called by different names.⁴⁷ This may seem very uncontroversial and, perhaps, uninteresting. But these kinds of atmospheric phenomena were being discussed at the time, different explanations being advanced with a curiosity about the origins of everyday phenomena which is fundamental to science. Gervase of Tilbury, a contemporary of Gerald, describing the nourishment of the trees of Paradise, wrote: ‘They say the dew descends from a vaporous mist, “the waters above the heavens”, as appears in summer. There are also those who say that the summer dew rises up from a lower vaporization of the earth, which they prove by the fact that a cloth spread on the grass will be wet underneath but quite dry above.’⁴⁸

The tides and lunar influence, too, are described in the Topographia Hibernica.⁴⁹ Gerald noted spring and neap tides and the different times of high tide at different places, as also the powers of the moon: ‘Phoebe is the fount and stimulus of all liquids, so that not only the waves of the sea but also the bone marrow of living creatures, brains in the head, and the sap of trees and plants are directed and influenced according to her waxing and waning.’ In suggesting reasons why the tides in the Atlantic are greater than those in the Mediterranean, Gerald revealed how he saw Ireland as the very edge of the World. The land mass of Europe, Asia, and Africa was viewed as a whole, around which the ocean circled:

From the four opposite and most remote parts of the ocean there is a certain violent dragging, gulping, and bubbling (attractio, absorptio vicissim et ebullitio) of the sea … the ocean has a freer and less impeded course of ebb and flow around the extremities; within land masses, however, it is restricted on every side and, rather like a lake, is forced by these obstacles to be placid. Hence it cannot wander freely.

Gerald's sense of the vastness and wildness of the ocean beyond the edge of the world is expressed, vividly and poetically, in his second preface to the Topographia Hibernica: ‘Beyond the bounds of these regions no land exists, nor is there any dwelling-place for man or beast; but across every horizon, going on for ever, the ocean alone circles and wanders in unreachable and hidden paths.’⁵⁰ Yet, coupled with this imaginative response, Gerald always displayed a searching after causes. His purpose was ‘mundi causas … mente percurrere’.⁵¹ He had been reading philosophers who argued that tides and winds were caused by four great whirlpools at the four ends of the earth.⁵² This kind of large-scale question, approached naturalistically and causally, is a typical interest of Gerald's.

Another example is the way he dealt with the problem of the origin of islands.⁵³ He believed that islands must have been created not violently and suddenly but gradually, by inundation. The evidence he brought to support this argument was that, since many distant islands had poisonous snakes and other harmful animals, these must have been cut off on these islands since the time of the Flood, for ‘no one in his right mind would have brought them over voluntarily’. Since at the time of the Flood all animals were shut up inside the Ark, they must have diffused from one point since that time. The interest of this argument lies in the way it attempted to connect the distribution of species with the history of the earth's land-forms. Gerald here used empirical data, psychological generalization, and biblical evidence to produce a complex explanation of a problem in natural science.

Gerald brought his observation to bear intelligently, and sometimes used it to decide the issue between alternative explanations of natural phenomena. For example, while describing the different kinds of hawk in Ireland, he mentioned that individual sparrowhawks had different coloured markings. ‘Therefore’, he wrote, ‘many people conjecture that these variations arise from the natures of the trees in which they were born. But, since you will often see this diversity in offspring from the same tree and in the same nest, a surer opinion holds that this discoloration comes rather from the parents naturally.’⁵⁴ Here direct observation, critically applied, had proved adequate to the task of distinguishing two hypotheses. However, there are other accounts in the Topographia Hibernica which suggest the limitations of simple observation. The most famous, perhaps, is the story of the barnacle goose. This is a particularly telling example, since it was put to the test in a more rigorous way only a few decades after Gerald's death, and thus serves to highlight the contrast between his simple or passive observation and more controlled and exacting forms of observation which could be attempted.

Gerald described the birds in the following way:

There are many birds here called barnacles (bernacae). Nature produces them in a marvellous way … For they are born at first in gum-like form from fir-wood adrift in the sea. Then they cling by their beaks, like seaweed sticking to wood, enclosed in shell-fish shells for freer development. Thus, in the process of time, dressed in a firm clothing of feathers, they either fall into the waters or fly off into the freedom of the air. They receive both food and increase from a woody and watery juice … On many occasions I have seen with my own eyes more than a thousand of these birds' tiny little bodies, hanging from one piece of wood on the sea shore, enclosed in their shells and already formed. Eggs are not produced from the copulation of these birds, as is usual; no bird ever incubates an egg for their procreation; in no corner of the earth have they been seen to give themselves up to lust or to build nests.⁵⁵

The confusion about this bird was understandable. The goose in question nests only in very remote spots, the cliffs of the Arctic. The first nest was not seen, in fact, until 1907. Hence they had never been seen to breed or nest by medieval observers. In addition to this, the shellfish called the barnacle, which attaches itself to ships' timbers, etc., has many cirri, long feathery extensions for taking in food. These were mistaken for the birds' feathers. Indeed, one variety of barnacle has a long extension for suspending itself from rock or wood, which could be mistaken for the goose's neck.⁵⁶ Although Gerald is the earliest written source for the story, he was probably not its originator. He interpreted the evidence of his own eyes according to his expectations. Observation is obviously never mere perception.

In many ways the connection between the bird and the shellfish was not implausible. There in the sea were feathery shellfish; in the same waters were geese who appeared never to nest or lay eggs. Spontaneous generation was universally accepted as a rare, but possible, form of procreation. The explanation was, in some ways, elegant and economical. It posited ‘a marvellous mode’ of procreation, but the marvellous is not the impossible.

Gerald's account of the barnacle has a wonderful counterpoint in the passage on the bird written by Frederick II in his De Arte Venandi cum Avibus of the 1240s.⁵⁷ Frederick had heard the story and, in order to test its truth, sent out messengers who brought back floating timbers from the northern seas. ‘In them’, he wrote,

we saw a kind of shellfish clinging to the wood. In none of their parts did these shellfish exhibit any form of a bird and, because of this, we do not believe this opinion [i.e. the development of the bird from shellfish] unless we have a more convincing demonstration of it. It seems to us that this opinion arose because barnacle geese are born in such remote places that men are ignorant of where they nest …

Frederick was presumably unimpressed by feathery cirri.

The crucial difference between Gerald's and Frederick's response to the barnacle story is that while Gerald heard the story and then interpreted his perceptions in the light of his expectations, Frederick regarded it as a problem to be tested—he checked the story, sent men out, pursued the truth. Clearly he was helped by his superior resources. Few scientists apart from the Emperor could have men scouring the northern oceans for their specimens. But, more important, Frederick had a rigorous, sceptical, and aggressive attitude to evidence. We cannot say he performed experiments to check the truth of the barnacle story; but he did set up the conditions for controlled observation. Gerald's observation was acute but passive. It took him a long way, but sometimes led him astray. When it did so, he had no method to act as a corrective.

The story of the barnacle goose not only throws light on the limits of twelfth-century observational natural history; it also exemplifies how we can deduce the norms and premisses of Gerald's picture of nature from the natural marvels he described. When he wrote that ‘nature produces them in a marvellous way, contrary to nature’, he implied that sexual generation was the norm and spontaneous generation an extraordinary exception.

A similar example is provided by his stories of what would now be called the inheritance of acquired characteristics. ‘We saw in Anglesey’, he wrote, ‘a dog which was lacking a tail, not by nature but by accident alone; its offspring suffered a similar lack naturally. It is amazing that the parent's accident alone could cause the offspring to be similar, as if by nature.’⁵⁸ Gerald's surprise indicated that his norm of generation did not involve transmission of acquired characteristics. In fact, in further anecdotes of this kind he referred to such transmission as ‘a miracle of nature’.⁵⁹ While twelfth- and thirteenth-century thinkers accepted the hereditary transmission of some diseases, they specifically denied that mutilation or damage to a limb could be passed on in this way.⁶⁰ Gerald shared this assumption, although he accepted that there might be exceptions to it. As in the case of the barnacle goose, it is not that his premisses were strange or incomprehensible, rather that his assumptions about the way the natural world behaved did not take the form of rigid laws.

More systematic and rigorous ideas of the natural world were available in the twelfth century. John of Salisbury, in his Entheticus, used the phrase ‘law of nature’ to refer to the causal chains of the physical universe,⁶¹ very much as a nineteenth-century physicist might have used it. Some writers attempted explanations of the sensible world solely on the basis of the four elements.⁶² Thierry had written his account of the creation secundum physicam, using only the viewpoint of natural science. Gerald's enterprise was not so rigorous, nor did it show such materialist tendencies. He did not undertake to explain the world by a systematic theory based on natural principles. Yet, even so, there were occasions when he advanced explicitly naturalistic explanations, even in opposition to the miraculous explanations of hagiography. A classic example is his discussion of the absence of venomous reptiles from Ireland:

Some people, by an agreeable enough fiction, conjecture that St. Patrick and the other saints of the land cleansed the island of all poisonous creatures. But a more likely account asserts that, from earliest times and long before the establishment of the faith, the island has been devoid of these creatures, just as it has been of certain other things, by a kind of natural lack.⁶³

The lack was a natural lack; and this was rendered all the more likely by the fact that other creatures were lacking in Ireland too. ‘It does not seem marvellous to me’, he wrote, ‘that there is a natural lack of these reptiles in the land, just as there is of certain fish, birds and beasts.’ Gerald ascribed a physical cause to this ‘natural lack’: ‘It is certain, therefore, that thanks to the Bountiful Mercy, no poisonous animal can survive here, on account of a novel and unknown hidden power, which is hostile to poisons, and is either in the air or the land itself.’⁶⁴ This ‘novel and unknown hidden power’ is hardly precise. But the point here is the kind of explanation being advanced, not the precision with which it was expressed. In this instance, Gerald preferred an explanation based on the physical, although unknown, properties of air or land to one based on miraculous power.

Gerald did not distrust the St. Patrick story on the grounds of its intrinsic improbability. He included in the Topographia Hibernica two stories of how Irish saints expelled pests: St. Nannan had cleansed a village in Connaught of fleas and St. Yvor had driven rats from Fernegenal, near Wexford.⁶⁵ Both places had remained free of these pests. Gerald did not, therefore, disbelieve the ability of Irish saints to expel harmful creatures. Nor was he particularly hostile to St. Patrick.⁶⁶

There seem to be two reasons why Gerald preferred a naturalistic explanation in this instance but accepted hagiographic traditions in other cases. The first is the unauthoritative nature of the hagiographic tradition. The story of St. Patrick's expulsion of the snakes from Ireland did not receive written form until Jocelyn of Furness wrote his Life in the late twelfth century.⁶⁷ It is probable that Gerald had not encountered the story in writing before he wrote the Topographia Hibernica. He called it a vulgaris opinio.⁶⁸ He may even have had some knowledge of the earlier lives of St. Patrick which did not mention the story. Thus his rejection of the legend reflects his suspicion of purely oral traditions and respect for written authority. Gerald was not greedy for hagiographic material. Although quite prepared to believe and record ‘the ancient writings of the saints of the land’, he did not credit every passing tale that came his way.

Another reason for Gerald's position on this subject is his strong sense of the plausibility of naturalistic explanation. In the absence of an authoritative tradition, he had a predisposition to attribute Ireland's freedom from snakes to an ancient, natural quality of the country. This conviction would be strengthened by Gerald's reading of Bede, who regarded this characteristic of Ireland in much the same way.⁶⁹ Gerald was in no sense an aggressive rationalist, eager to contradict or explain away hagiographic tradition, but he was prepared to complement or supplement such traditions with naturalistic explanation.

Gerald also prepared to entertain both naturalistic and miraculous explanations in the same breath. He attributed the unusual healthiness of Bardsey Island, for example, to ‘either the healthiness of the air, which comes from the region of Ireland, or rather to some miracle and the merits of the saints’.⁷⁰ On other occasions he did attempt precise physical explanations of phenomena which had been described to him as miracles. The strange groaning of a frozen lake near Brecon was called ‘miraculous’ by the local inhabitants. ‘But perhaps’, Gerald commented, ‘this is caused by the sudden and violent eruption of the air, trapped by the icy shell above, which gradually exhales through hidden openings.’⁷¹ It is explanations like this which form the backbone of much twelfth-century scientific speculation. They represent a stage in the demystification of nature. But, while Gerald did attempt to puzzle out strange phenomena in terms of physical qualities, he did not do so systematically. His nature remained a ‘playful nature’ (natura ludens).

Gerald's alert observational powers occasionally led him into criticism of his traditional authorities in natural history, the Latin encyclopaedists. In his account of Ireland he wrote that Solinus and Isidore were wrong to say that there were no bees in Ireland, while Bede was mistaken when he claimed that vines grew there.⁷² Yet, while refusing to deny the evidence of his own eyes in deference to these authorities, Gerald was eager to preserve their credibility. ‘It is highly likely’, he wrote, ‘that perhaps there were some vines in the island in Bede's time and that bees were introduced into Ireland by St. Dominic of Ossory, as they say, long after Solinus' day.’⁷³ Thus Gerald's historical sense saved both the phenomena and the reputation of his authorities. Gerald here observed the maxim: ‘Let the times be differentiated and the writings will agree.’⁷⁴

Yet he was also prepared flatly to contradict these writers when it seemed necessary. The story that the soil of Ireland, scattered amongst beehives in other countries, would cause the bees to desert their hives, seemed ‘inexcusable’. On this point Isidore and Solinus were simply wrong.⁷⁵ Yet even here Gerald was not unappreciative of the difficulties Isidore and others had faced.

But it is not amazing that they occasionally wandered from the path of truth, since they did not acquire their knowledge through the evidence of their own eyes, but from informants and at a distance. For the surest guide to truth is an eyewitness record. They are, therefore, not unworthy of proper praise for investigation of very distant facts. Since nothing human is altogether perfect and to have knowledge of all things and to make mistakes in nothing is divine rather than human, their errors, if they have by chance crept in anywhere, are to be forgiven on account of both our imperfect condition and the very distance of the places involved.⁷⁶

One example which illustrates the problems inherent in mingling information based upon observation and that drawn from books is the long account of the beaver in the Itinerarium Kambriae.⁷⁷

After mentioning that the river Teivi, in Cardiganshire, was the only river in England or Wales to have beavers, Gerald went on to give a detailed description of the beavers' behaviour and how they were hunted. Much of this is highly accurate and reflects Gerald's lively interest and observation. He described their method of transporting logs; the sturdy construction of the beavers' lodges from interwoven willow twigs; the many internal chambers with interconnecting passages, above the water line to avoid flooding; the burrows they excavated in river-banks near the lodge; and their tails, broad, not very long, as thick as a man's palm, flat, and completely hairless.

He was not always so accurate. He believed, for example, that beavers, like toads, breathed under water and were able to stay under as long as they liked. This is not observational laziness on Gerald's part, but marks rather the division that always exists between the plausible guesses of an interested observer and the meticulous, relentless inquiries of a professional scientist or experimenter. Gerald had no stop-watch and, even if he had, would probably not have cared to sit patiently for hours on the banks of the Teivi observing the movements of the beaver. He was clearly intrigued by the animals, but was not undertaking ‘pure research’ into natural history in the way that Frederick II or Albertus Magnus did in the next century. Beavers can stay under water for up to fifteen minutes, and it therefore seemed plausible to Gerald that they could breathe there. He had neither the intellectual outlook nor the scientific equipment which would have enabled him to achieve rigorous proof or disproof of this theory. Again, when he wrote that beavers have only four, broad, sharp teeth, two above and two below, he was noting obvious appearances, although he was not in fact accurate. The beaver's four front teeth are easily the most prominent and Gerald does not seem to have sought a closer inspection of, for example, a dead beaver. He was an interested observer, but not a specimen hunter.

One part of Gerald's account of the beaver was clearly not based on observation. In eastern countries, he wrote, they were hunted for the medicinal properties of their testicles. When cornered, they castrated themselves and flung their testicles in front of the hunter. If, later, they were hunted again, they went up on to a hill and, lifting up their legs, ‘showed the hunter that the part he was seeking had been cut off’.

Perhaps the chief point which strikes a modern reader about this story is its extreme improbability. This sense of improbability is based on our strong, although debatable, idea of what is and what is not appropriate to animal behaviour. We cannot credit beavers, not so much with purposive activity per se, but with such awareness of why men are hunting them. It argues a kind of reasoning power which we are anxious to reserve to man. Gerald's concept of animal behaviour, too, was unable to accommodate such a story with ease. He made several uncomfortable reservations. The beaver's protective self-castration was inspired, he wrote, ‘by a marvellous—I won't say intelligence—but a certain innate power which is quasi-discriminating (mirabili, ne dicam ingenio, vi quadam ingenita et quasi discretiva)’.⁷⁸ He did not dismiss the story as ‘a ridiculous opinion of the vulgar’, as did his contemporary Alexander Nequam,⁷⁹ but was concerned to qualify his statements about what actually inspired the beaver's action; it was a capacity that was ‘innate’ and only ‘quasi-discriminatory’. One feels that the location of these self-castrating beavers ‘in eastern countries’ also eased his sense of the plausible.⁸⁰

The story of such beavers is an ancient one. It had found its way into Pliny's Natural History⁸¹ and into the Physiologus.⁸² It was a standard feature of twelfth-century bestiaries, where it was illustrated vividly and suitably moralized: ‘All who wish to follow God's commandments and live cleanly should cut away from themselves all vices and shameful acts and throw them in the face of the devil. Then he will see that they have nothing of his and will retire in confusion’.⁸³

Gerald had read bestiaries,⁸⁴ but also had access to more learned materials. When reworking the Itinerarium Kambriae, for example, he added quotations about the beaver from Cicero and Juvenal: ‘They ransom themselves with that part of the body for which they are greatly sought.’⁸⁵ ‘They make themselves eunuchs, eager to escape with the loss of / A testicle.’⁸⁶ Gerald's source for these two quotations was Isidore, and he had clearly been browsing through the Etymologies,⁸⁷ alert for quotations to adorn his works. The addition of quotations from authorities was a regular feature in Gerald's later recensions of his work.⁸⁸ Isidore himself had derived the quotations from the fourth-century grammarian Servius, who had included them in his commentary on the Georgics. Servius was responsible, too, for the plausible etymology, ‘Castores [i.e. beavers] … a castrando dicti sunt’.⁸⁹

This very typical literary transmission involved phrases from Roman rhetors and poets being picked up by a late antique grammarian, who added his own etymology, and passed on through the encyclopaedia of a seventh-century Spanish bishop to the authors of the twelfth century. This tradition was very important for Gerald, but within its framework he was remarkably creative. He incorporated almost the whole of it—the etymology, the quotations, the fabulous story—but added to it observation and criticism which marked a wholly different approach to the natural world.

THE RETREAT FROM NATURALISM

After the completion of his Irish and Welsh works, however, Gerald drew away from this new naturalism. His earlier interest in cosmology, the moon and tides, geography and natural history, was not developed. After his retirement from court (c.1195) his works were of a completely different kind. His literary output from the later 1190s consisted entirely of hagiography, religious works such as the Gemma Ecclesiastica, a blend of sacramental doctrine and pastoral advice, and polemics. After his dispute over St. David's (1199-1203) he produced mainly invectives, either of a kind directly connected with the dispute (e.g. De Invectionibus, De Jure et Statu Menevensis Ecclesiae) or of a more general nature (e.g. De Principis Instructione, Speculum Ecclesiae). The scientific and naturalistic interests of his earlier works disappeared completely.

Moreover, as he reworked his earlier writings, their naturalistic qualities were diluted. The first edition of the Topographia Hibernica, for example, had been relatively free of symbolic interpretation of the birds and beasts it described, in comparison, say, with a work like Alexander Nequam's De Naturis Rerum. There are occasional allegorizations: the eagle's ability to look straight into the sun was compared to the contemplative's direct intuition of the divine nature;⁹⁰ the bodies of kingfishers remained uncorrupted after death, like those of saintly men.⁹¹ But the larger part of Book I of the Topographia Hibernica is a record of which creatures are found in Ireland, with an account of their appearance and habits. By the time Gerald completed the fourth edition, however, the work was twice its original length and additional material of an allegorical kind had swamped the natural history. This transformation represents the drift of Gerald's thinking in the 1190s and early thirteenth century. His interests had undergone a change of emphasis.

This very striking shift from topography and history to hagiography and polemic requires some explanation, however tentative. Some of the reasons must be sought in Gerald's wounded vanity. He felt strongly that his ten years in royal service had been rewarded in a very miserly way. This disappointment was exacerbated to the point of obsession by the wearying litigation of the St. David's case. His exceptional talents were redirected to the protection of his exceptional self-esteem. The embarrassingly strident tone of some of these later works reached a sad apogee in the defensiveness of the Speculum Duorum.

But these personal considerations were not decisive. Gerald's shift in the late 1190s from natural history to traditional religious writing was prompted, at least in part, by the pressures and expectations of those around him. A good example is provided by the way Archbiship Baldwin responded to the Topographia Hibernica. It was ‘the theological moralizations and allegories’ which earned most praise from him. He asked if Gerald had borrowed any of these from the commentators and, when told that he had not, remarked, ‘The same spirit certainly inspired both you and the commentators!’⁹² A response such as this must have encouraged Gerald in his perpetual expansion of the allegorical elements in the Topographia Hibernica.

Besides positive encouragement to develop his talents as a religious allegorist, Gerald encountered much hostile criticism of his secular literary activities. The ecclesiastical norm of the time saw training in the arts, including the sciences, as a ladder to the study of theology. ‘The liberal arts should only be saluted in passing’, as Alanus ab Insulis and other late twelfth-century theologians put it.⁹³ Dallying too long with the natural world was suspect.

Some ecclesiastics were suspicious of secular literature as such. Gerald was under pressure to employ his talents in theology, not in describing the birds and beasts of Ireland. ‘Some people’, he wrote, ‘say that grace conferred from above should not be expended on humble things … what flows from above should be applied to things above and everything should be turned to the glory of him from whose plenitude we receive it.’⁹⁴ William de Montibus, a friend of Gerald's from his student days at Paris and his master at Lincoln, criticized the Irish works and thought that Gerald should be writing theology.⁹⁵

Gerald reacted to these criticisms in different ways. Sometimes he was positive, almost defiant, about the independent value of his secular writings. Replying to William de Montibus, he wrote:

Historians do not hold the lowest rank among authors and writers … Neither Origen … nor our Jerome, nor Augustine, nor Hilary would have been such strong pillars of the church with their theological books … if they had not had such a sound basis and firm grounding in literature and the arts … It is also our desire that you should know that the above works of ours … in time to come … will survive for a very long time. For there is already a superabundance of theological works … in fact these modern booklets are not truly genuine, for they are patched together from the earlier original works of others … We on the other hand took pains in our youth to distill the histories of Ireland and Wales, our own home grounds, from hitherto untouched material, and managed to extract the hidden pearls from the hardest shells …⁹⁶

Here not only did Gerald extol the novelty of his Welsh and Irish works, but counter-attacked by criticizing the redundancy and plagiarism of many contemporary theological writers.⁹⁷ Yet he vacillated. In the same letter he also sought to meet criticism by claiming that his works did have moral and spiritual applications: ‘In our volume on Ireland the diligent reader will be able to find both theological morals and allegories.’ He pointed also to the religious nature of his Gemma Ecclesiastica and Vita Sancti Remigii.⁹⁸ He felt defensive, or at least sensitive, when attacked for putting his talents to non-religious uses.

This is even more clearly revealed in his comments on the relative position of theology and the arts. Writing of his Irish and Welsh works in about 1194, he said, ‘We have tasted these things first, as prefaces or preludes to the glorious treasures of the science of sciences, which alone knows how to know, how to give men knowledge, how to rule and instruct man; the other branches of study are like attendants following far behind the queen and worshipping her footsteps.’⁹⁹ This description of theology is quite traditional.¹⁰⁰ These are youthful works, Gerald was saying; he had reserved his later life for theological study. It was clearly not easy to persist in the study of the natural world. The assumptions and values of Gerald's ecclesiastical milieu led naturally to a high evaluation of theology and a low evaluation of secular writings.

Gerald adopted and internalized these values to such an extent that we find him writing to Walter Map, criticizing Map for his flippancy and urging him to engage in theological studies and adopt a more serious tone. Gerald described literature as purely instrumental to theology: ‘You have placed a solid and unshakeable foundation of letters. With great labour you have made an ivory ladder … by which you may scale the high tower of divine scripture … But what use is a foundation, however excellent, unless you construct the building? What use is a ladder, even if raised aloft, unless you climb it?’¹⁰¹ He urged, ‘Make your mouth, which has been witty and eloquent in order to charm human ears, full and fruitful with divine praises. For the rest of your time let your voice delight the divine ears; your mouth was once unrestrained in a host of idle things, for human applause; now open it continually in holy celebration as a saving remedy, for God alone.’¹⁰² ‘The books of the pagans’, ‘the sayings of the poets and philosophers’, and ‘metres and poems’ should be left behind or used only as adornments to religious writing.¹⁰³ This letter to Map thus shows Gerald himself advancing the same arguments in favour of going on from secular writing to theology that others had advanced against him.

It is ironical, in the light of the considerable pressure that Gerald felt to move away from history, natural history, and topography, that his Irish and Welsh works were by far the most popular and successful of all his writings. Most of his religious and polemical works survive in only one manuscript; a few are extant in two. In contrast, there are dozens of medieval manuscripts of the Irish and Welsh works. Thus, although the progression to theology was recognized, both by Gerald and his ecclesiastical contemporaries, as the ideal, it seems clear that, in the judgement of medieval as well as modern readers, Gerald was moving away from his true field.

It can be argued that Gerald's shift away from natural history is also a reflection of his divergence from the path which European science was treading at the time. Considered as a naturalist, Gerald fell chronologically between two groups of writers. The first consisted of those earlier twelfth-century thinkers interested in science and cosmology who attempted systematic accounts of the physical world. Adelard of Bath, William of Conches, and Thierry of Chartres are the famous names. The second group, working in the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, was composed of those who either sought out Arabic or Aristotelian science by travelling abroad or who readily absorbed it when it became available. Gerald cannot be placed happily in either group.

Adelard, William, and Thierry were distinguished by their emphasis on secondary causes, their search after explanation in terms of the physical elements.¹⁰⁴ They believed that this world of secondary causes was intrinsically comprehensible, that it exhibited ratio and was graspable through ratio. Their enterprise was to seek out ‘the causes of things’ and, in Adelard's words, ‘the causes of things square with reason’.¹⁰⁵ ‘Reason is to be sought in all things’, echoed William of Conches.¹⁰⁶ As their primary interest was in the rational courses of the physical universe, they tended to play down God's arbitrary interventions. They did not deny his omnipotence—indeed, they argued that his power was all the greater for working through nature¹⁰⁷—but concentrated on the regular and natural. While claiming not ‘to derogate from God’,¹⁰⁸ they asserted that it was feeble and stupid simply to attribute things to God's will. God's will was not arbitrary; ratio could always be found.¹⁰⁹

Such a position prompted fierce attacks from more traditional ecclesiastics. Adelard found himself called ‘insane’;¹¹⁰ William of Conches wrote of ‘those who are ignorant of the forces of nature … they want us to believe like peasants and not to seek reasons … if they know that someone is making investigations, they shout out that he is a heretic’.¹¹¹ Writers like William of St. Thierry and Walter of St. Victor criticized William of Conches and others for their tendency towards materialism. ‘He describes the creation of the first man philosophically or, rather, physically’, wrote William of St. Thierry of William of Conches, ‘saying that his body was not made by God but by nature … in this he seems to follow the opinion of certain stupid philosophers who say that nothing exists except bodies and corporeal entities and that God is none other in the world than the concourse of elements and the proportion of nature.’¹¹² Walter of St. Victor attacked William of Conches for his reliance on the Timaeus and for his atomic theory: ‘We condemn and anathematize their atoms and rules of philosophy, their “something”, “anything”, and other nonsense of this kind.’¹¹³

Gerald was not attacked on such grounds, although he himself, in later life, regarded his Cosmographia as an example of philosophical rather than theological doctrine.¹¹⁴ His picture of the natural world was not as systematic as that of these earlier twelfth-century scientists; nor did he possess their strong preference for physical explanation. As we have seen,¹¹⁵ he was willing to advance both naturalistic and religious explanations, and the nature he investigated was full of marvels and miraculous interventions.

Nor can Gerald be placed comfortably in the context of contemporary Aristotelianism. During the period of the composition of his Welsh and Irish works and in the immediately subsequent decades many English naturalists became acquainted with Arabic and Aristotelian science. Astronomical and medical material from these sources can be found in the works of Daniel of Morley and Alexander Nequam. The Avicennan De Anima was used by Nequam and John Blund. Blund and John of London were lecturing on the Aristotelian libri naturales in the early years of the thirteenth century. Alfred of Sareshel translated the pseudo-Aristotelian De Vegetabilibus (before 1195) and was familiar with the libri naturales.¹¹⁶

Despite the interest in natural history which Gerald had shown, he seems to have had no interest in assimilating this new material. A comparison between his descriptions of animals and those to be found in the Aristotelian encyclopaedists of the thirteenth century, Bartolomaeus Anglicus for example, reveals an enormous difference. Bartolomaeus Anglicus was not an original thinker, but he had an orderly system, based on an Aristotelian natural teleology and employing the theory of the elements and humours in a consistent way.¹¹⁷ Gerald, in contrast, was discursive and unsystematic. His achievements in natural history resulted not from a consistently applied system but from the enlivening effect that a new emphasis on observation had upon the conservative Latin encyclopaedist tradition. He showed, in a sense, what the twelfth century could achieve without Aristotle.

In fact, Gerald saw some aspects of Aristotelianism as dangerous, and, in the preface to his Speculum Ecclesiae (c.1220), he praised the recent condemnations of Aristotle at Paris and hoped that, because of them, many people, ‘abandoning their vain and erroneous teaching, might, through God's inspiration, turn to saner, solider, and healthier doctrines’. The danger of the Aristotelian teaching seemed to him to rest in its ‘subtle discussions and philosophical enquiries into the nature of things’.¹¹⁸ It was the extension of scientific or philosophical method into areas which he regarded as the preserve of religion that really angered Gerald. On the model of Aristotle's De Anima, Christian writers had begun to discuss the soul in an analytical manner.¹¹⁹ But psychology received no warmer a welcome around 1200 than it did, in new garb, around 1900. Just as Freudian psychoanalysis was seen as an assault on the freedom of man, so in the thirteenth century it was suspected that the attempt to describe and explain the senses and responses of human beings was an intrusion into the mystery of God. Gerald quoted with disapproval the Toledan translator's preface to Avicenna's De Anima: ‘It is unworthy that man does not know the very thing by which he knows and cannot grasp by reason that by which he is reasonable.’¹²⁰ He counter-attacked with a battery of biblical quotation. ‘It was in order to deter him from studies of this kind’, he wrote, ‘which are more subtle than they are useful and tend to lead to error, that Solomon said to his son, “Seek not the things that are too high for you and search not out things above your strength, but think always on what God has commanded and do not be curious concerning many of his works.”’¹²¹

This caution, this retreat from the boundaries of knowledge and fear of man's presumptuous curiosity were not merely a result of temper or age. The tension between the confident assertion of the value of natural curiosity and a fear of probing too far had always been present in Gerald. His Cosmographia had given a confident and idyllic picture of man's powers but, even as early as 1188-9, in the midst of his attempt ‘mundi causas mente percurrere’, we find a warning note. Gerald's chapter on the eagle in the Topographia Hibernica, which was greatly enlarged in the recension of 1189, moralized upon the high flight of the bird:

Commonly they strive with such lofty flight that their wings are burned by the sun's hot fires. So too those who attempt to investigate the high and hidden secrets of heaven in the Bible beyond the set limits, which ought not to be and cannot be exceeded, are forced to return to themselves and halt, since the wings of presumptuous intelligence, which carry them, are burnt.¹²²

This adaptation prompted Gerald into a long passage, replete with biblical quotations, in which he thundered home God's incomprehensibility and the deficiencies of man's reason: ‘Say then, you fragile pot, how dare you to give reasons for all things on earth and in heaven, even those which are above all reason, presuming against reason and faith. For what is more irrational than to attempt by reason to go beyond reason itself?’¹²³ He attacked pride in reason in the same way as a moralist would attack pride of any other form. This was the ‘rashness of presumptuous inquiry’ (temeritas presumptuose inquisitionis) which drew Nequam's criticism.¹²⁴

Conversely, humility was commended. Gerald approvingly quoted the passage from Ecclesiasticus he was to use again in the Speculum Ecclesiae: ‘Seek not the things that are too high for you …’¹²⁵ Man's reason was partial and limited: ‘We have been granted partial knowledge but not fullness of understanding or inquiry.’ Gerald told the story, from Augustine, of the man who asked what God had been doing before he made the world. ‘He prepared Hell for foolish questioners’, came the reply.¹²⁶

The tone of this passage seems quite out of keeping with Gerald's vast natural inquisitiveness and pride in pursuing the secreta naturae. But he made a strong distinction in his own mind between ‘things natural’ and ‘things divine’, and was reticent on the deeper mysteries of the faith. When discussing what actually happened during transubstantiation, for example, he decided,

It is safer not to split hairs on this completely miraculous subject, but to leave it to the Holy Spirit. We know for certain from our authorities that the substance of bread and wine is turned into the substance of the Lord's body and blood, so let us not be ashamed of being ignorant of the exact method of the change. As Augustine says, ‘Ignorance which believes is better than audacious knowledge.’¹²⁷

Gerald refused to extend his curiosity into the central regions of the Christian faith. He did glory in his own ability to seek out natural causes, but this was absolutely distinct from any ultimate confidence in human reason. This compromise, a strict demarcation of faith and reason, served him well enough, but when there was an attempt to extend reason into the realm of faith, as seen, for example, in the works of some Aristotelians, he entrenched himself in traditional, defensive rhetoric. His shift from secular to scholarly life, pressure from ecclesiastical colleagues, his hostility to the new learning, and his growing sense of the limitations of human understanding led him a long way from his youthful Cosmographia with its eulogy of ‘rational man, who sees the secrets of nature and ponders the conditions of things and their causes’.¹²⁸

Gerald is not a major figure in the history of the development of science. That development was to be secured by the growth of a systematic approach, experimental method and, eventually, the application of mathematics to the natural world. Gerald contributed nothing in these fields. Yet his contributions to natural observation and explanation remains interesting. He was most vivid when dealing with material particulars, rather than theory, although he also had a strong tendency to attempt an explanation of those particulars. He would have made, perhaps, a good zoologist but a bad physicist. He gives us an important glimpse of what could be achieved in the field of natural observation before the swamping effect of Aristotle's libri naturales was felt. The curiosity and intelligent imagination he showed at his best were the product of twelfth-century developments, as yet unaffected by Greek and Arabic science. The tensions Gerald felt between naturalistic and theological explanation, between the incomprehensibility of the divine and the strivings of human intellect, between faith and reason, are symptomatic of the most productive hiatus in western culture, felt at this time more acutely than ever before.

Notes

1. With certain exceptions, e.g. Constantine the African's translation of Haly Abbas and Isaac Judaeus.

2. De Naturis Rerum, pp. 2-3.

3. Ibid.

4. This theme is discussed by Chenu, ‘The Symbolist Mentality’, chapter 3 of Nature, Man and Society, esp. pp. 27-38.

5. There is a large literature on the translation movement. C. H. Haskins, Studies in the History of Medieval Science (2nd edn., Cambridge, Mass., 1927) is a standard work. Translations of Aristotle's works are listed in G. Lacombe, Aristoteles Latinus (Rome, 1939-61) and are being printed in Aristoteles Latinus (Union Académique Internationale. Corpus philosophorum medii aevi, Rome, 1951-). L. Minio-Paluello's studies on the subject are collected in Opuscula: the Latin Aristotle (Amsterdam, 1972). There are good studies of the influence of individual authors, notably Richard LeMay, Abu Ma'shar and Latin Aristotelianism in the Twelfth Century (Beirut, 1962).

6. Haskins, Studies, pp. 14-15.

7. See below, p. 126.

8. Haskins, Studies, ch. 2. For the significance of ‘claimed’, see B. Lawn, The Salernitan Questions (Oxford, 1963), pp. 20-30.

9. For the following, see the preface to Daniel's Philosophia or Liber de Naturis Inferiorum et Superiorum, ed. K. Sudhoff (Archiv für die Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, viii, 1918); the preface alone is in Oxford Historical Society, Collectanea, ii (1890), 171-3.

10. Mathematicus, PL, clxxi, cols. 1365-80, there attributed to Hildebert of Le Mans.

11. Experimentarius, ed. M. B. Savorelli in Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, xiv (1959).

12. T. Silverstein, ‘Daniel of Morley, English Cosmologist and Student of Arabic Science’, Mediaeval Studies, x (1948).

13. For these scholars see R. W. Hunt, ‘English Learning in the Late Twelfth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., xix (1936), reprinted in Essays in Medieval History, ed. R. W. Southern (London, 1968); D. A. Callus, ‘The Introduction of Aristotelian Learning to Oxford’, Proceedings of the British Academy, xxix (1943); on Alfred, J. K. Otte, ‘The Life and Writings of Alfredus Anglicus’, Viator, iii (1972).

14. Op., i. 414, 421; De Jure, p. 372.

15. Symb. El., pp. 341-9.

16. Gerald ascribed the Cronographia and Cosmographia to his own annis adolescentiae (Op., i. 421) and, elsewhere, to anno aetatis nostrae quasi vicesimo. Since he regarded himself as having written the Irish works (published 1188-9, but material collected from 1185 or 1183) in anno quasi tricesimo and the Welsh works (1191-4) in anno quasi quadragesimo, it is likely that anno quasi vicesimo means ‘in my twenties’ (De Jure, pp. 372-3).

17. Top., p. 79.

18. Ed. P. Dronke, tr. W. Wetherbee (New York, 1973). There are studies by B. Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: a Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, 1972), and in W. Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century (Princeton, 1972).

19. He quoted Bernard explicitly only once (Itin., p. 117, repeated in Descr., p. 175, from the Cosmographia, I. iii, ll. 229-30); moreover, this was an addition of the period 1197-1214 and could well have come via Nequam (De Naturis Rerum, pp. 76, 81). Hence there is no evidence in Gerald's later works of direct familiarity with Bernard's Cosmographia. Dronke's claim that Gerald's work is ‘little more than a plagiarism’ of Bernard's (Cosmographia, p. 12) is extreme and indefensible.

20. I. iii, ll. 61-5.

21. p. 345, ll. 3-6, 9.

22. II. x, ll. 45-8.

23. p. 346, ll. 15-18. There are other examples, e.g. Bernard I. iii, 265-6, and p. 346, ll. 19-20; I. iii, 321-2 and p. 346, ll. 28-9.

24. Glosae super Platonem, ed. E. Jeanuneau (Paris, 1965).

25. Commentaries on Boethius by Thierry of Chartres and His School, ed. N. M. Häring (Toronto, 1971).

26. p. 341, ll. 11-12; p. 342, ll. 7-8.

27. p. 341, ll. 21-2; p. 342, ll. 1-4.

28. The Consolation of Philosophy, III, metre ix, ll. 4-9, ed. S. J. Tester (Loeb Classical Library, 1973), pp. 270-1.

29. ‘Optimus erat, ab optimo porro invidia longe relegate est’, Timaeus 29E (Calcidius, Timaeus Calcidius, ed. J. H. Waszink (Corpus Platonicum Medii Aevi, iv, London and Leiden, 1962), p. 22).

30. De Diversibus Quaestiones LXXXIII, q. 46, ‘De Ideis’ (ed. A. Mutzenbecher (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, xliv A, 1975), p. 71).

31. p. 342, ll. 19-22.

32. Stock, Myth and Science, p. 94.

33. This conception is thoroughly discussed in Gregory, Anima Mundi.

34. p. 341, l. 17.

35. I. i, ll. 1-2. Silva is the principle of raw matter.

36. The question is discussed by T. Silverstein, ‘The Fabulous Cosmogony of Bernard Silvestris’, Modern Philology, xlvi (1948-9), 100-3. Peter Comestor wrote, ‘Plato dixit tria fuisse ab aeterno, scilicet Deum, ideas, ile, et in principio temporis, de ile mundum factum fuisse … Moyses vero solum Deum aeternum prophetavit et sine praejecenti materia mundum creatum’, Historia Scholastica, Gen. I (PL, cxcviii, cols. 1055-6).

37. S. Viarre, La Survie d'Ovide dans la littérature scientifique des XII^e et XIII^e siècles (Poitiers, 1966), pp. 49, 92-3, 94.

38. Metamorphoses I, ll. 5-9.

39. p. 347, ll. 21-31; Bedae Opera de Temporibus, ed. C. W. Jones (Medieval Academy of America, Publication xli, 1943), pp. 246-7.

40. It seems probable that Thierry, William, and Bernard all died some time during the 1150s. The dates of Bernard's active life depend upon the interpretation of the Experimentarius; cf. Wetherbee's introduction to his translation of the Cosmographia.

41. Le May, Abu Ma'shar, pp. 258-84; Stock, Myth and Science, p. 27.

42. Top., pp. 40-1.

43. Op., i. 414-15, 422; see below [Gerald of Wales: 1146-1223, 1982], p. 194, n. 83

44. A. Gransden, ‘Realistic Observation in Twelfth Century England’, Speculum, xlvii (1972), 42-4, 48-50.

45. U. T. Holmes, ‘Gerald the Naturalist’, Speculum, xi (1936), 111, 120.

46. Exp., p. 381.

47. Top., pp. 27-8.

48. Otia Imperialia I, xii (ed. G. G. Leibnitz, Scriptores Rerum Brunsvicensium (Hanover, 1707-11), i. 893); cf. John of Garland, De Triumphis Ecclesiae, ed. T. Wright (Roxburghe Club lxxii, 1856), pp. 53-4, six lines beginning ‘Aere surgentes tenues …’

49. Top., pp. 77-80. J. K. Wright, Geographical Lore at the Time of the Crusades (New York, 1925), praises the acuteness of Gerald's observations on the tides (pp. 194-6).

50. ‘Quos ultra fines nec terra subsistit, nec hominum vel ferarum habitatio est ulla: sed trans omnem horizontem in infinitum per investigabiles et occultas vias solus oceanus circumfertur et evagatur’, Top., p. 20.

51. Ibid., p. 7.

52. Ibid., p. 97. Paul the Deacon referred to two whirlpools, one in the ocean west of Scandinavia, the other between Britain and France, to which he attributed the tides, Historia Langobardorum, I. vi (MGH, Scriptores Rerum Langobardorum, pp. 50-1). On medieval tidal theories, see Wright, Geographical Lore, pp. 26-7, 84-5, 190-6.

53. Top., p. 98.

54. Ibid., p. 37.

55. Ibid., pp. 47-8.

56. This information is derived from E. Heron-Allen, Barnacles in Nature and in Myth (London, 1928).

57. De Arte Venandi cum Avibus, ed. C. A. Willemsen (Leipzig, 1942), i. 55. Also quoted in Haskins, Studies, p. 321.

58. Itin., p. 131.

59. Ibid., p. 132.

60. William of Conches, Philosophia Mundi, IV, viii (PL clxxii, col. 88); Albertus Magnus, De Animalibus, XV, ii. 3 (Opera Omnia, xii (1891), 106); Aquinas, Scriptum Super Libros Sententiarum, II, dist. xxx, q. 2, art. 2 (ed. P. Mandonnet and M. F. Moos (Paris, 1929-47), ii. 772); Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Naturale XXXI, xi (Speculum Maius (Venice, 1591), i, f. 394^r). These references are from C. Zirkle, ‘The Early History of the Idea of the Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics and of Pangenesis’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, xxxv (1946).

61. Entheticus, ll. 603-10.

62. e.g. the various treatises De Elementis; see the introduction to Marius, On the Elements.

63. Top., p. 62.

64. Ibid., pp. 62-3.

65. Ibid., pp. 119-20. Nannan has not been identified; Yvor is probably St. Ibar, who had his monastery near Wexford (AASS, April, iii. 173-4).

66. See his account of Patrick's life (Top., p. 161) and of his translation (ibid., pp. 163-4).

67. AASS, March, ii. 540-80. The story of Patrick's expulsion of poisonous beasts is at p. 574 C-D. The prologue to the Life states that it was written at the request of Thomas, Archbishop of Armagh (1180-1201), Malachy, Bishop of Down (c.1176-1202), and John de Courcy (d. 1219). It was, therefore, written in the last two decades of the twelfth century. J. A. Watt dates it more precisely, to 1185-6 (The Church and the Two Nations, p. 111).

68. Top., p. 180.

69. Historia Ecclesiastica I, i (ed. C. Plummer (Oxford 1896), i. 12-13).

70. Itin., p. 124.

71. Ibid., pp. 35-6.

72. Top., p. 28; Solinus, Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium 22, 2 (ed. T. Mommsen (Berlin, 1895), p. 100); Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XIV, vi, 6 (ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911), no pagination); Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica I, i (ed. Plummer, i. 13).

73. Top., pp. 28-9. St. Dominic of Ossory is identical with Modomnoc, St. David's disciple and bee-keeper. The story of how his bees followed him to Ireland, where there had been none before, is told in Rhigyfarch, Life of St. David, ed. J. W. James (Cardiff, 1967), pp. 18-19 (cf. Vita Dav., pp. 396-7).

74. ‘Distinguantur … tempora, et concordabit scriptura’, Descr., p. 209. The phrase appears to have been a standard maxim. It even recurs in the 17th century: ‘Distinguenda sunt tempora et concordabunt leges’, wrote Sir Edward Coke, Reports, Part 9, ed. Geroge Wilson (London, 1776-7), v. 16. When discussing how to harmonize apparent contradictions in the Fathers, Abelard advised, ‘Distinguenda … tempora sunt’ (prologue to Sic et Non, ed. Blanche Boyer and Richard McKeon (Chicago, 1976-7), p. 96).

75. Top, p. 29. Isidore and Solinus references as above, n. 72. Rhigyfarch includes this story in his Life of St. David, p. 19, but Gerald omits it from his version.

76. Top., p. 29.

77. Itin., pp. 114-18; cf. Top., pp. 58-9; Descr., pp. 173-5.

78. The exact connotations of ingenium are discussed by Silverstein; ‘Fabulous Cosmology’, p. 98, n. 34, and Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry, p. 94.

79. De Naturis Rerum, p. 220.

80. Beavers were traditionally associated with the Black Sea, e.g. ‘virosaque Pontus / castorea’ (Virgil, Georgics, I, ll. 58-9.)

81. Naturalis Historia, VIII. 109; XXXXII. 26 (ed. H. Rackham, W. H. S. Jones, and D. E. Eichholz, Loeb Classical Library, 1938-63), iii. 78; viii. 480).

82. Physiologus, ed. F. Sbordone (Milan, 1936), pp. 82-5; D. Offermans (ed.), Der Physiologus nach den Handschriften G und M ((Beiträge zur Klassischen Philologie, xxii, 1966) 86. On the early history of the story see F. Sbordone, Ricerche sulle Fonti et sulla Composizione del Physiologus Greco (Naples, 1936), pp. 54-5.

83. Physiologus Latinus, ed. F. J. Carmody (Paris, 1939), pp. 32-3. There is a facsimile edition of a typical twelfth-century English bestiary, The Bestiary, ed. M. R. James (Roxburghe Club, 1928); the beaver is on f. 8^v.

84. The list of eastern animals that Gerald inserted into the second edition of his Topographia Hibernica is clearly based on bestiaries (Top., p. 69). He had some influence on the bestiary tradition. Two thirteenth-century bestiaries (MS Bodley 764 and its counterpart, British Library MS Harleian 4751) borrowed 4 chapters on the barnacle, osprey, kingfisher, and badger (Top., pp. 47-51, 58 is the same as Bodley 764, ff. 30, 36-8, and Harleian 4751, ff. 50^v, 58^v-60. They are based on the 1st edition of the Top.). Gerald's importance for the transmission of the barnacle story is mentioned by F. McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chapel Hill, N. Carolina, 1960), pp. 36, n. 42, 199.

85. This is from the Pro Scauro, which survives only in fragments and was unknown in the twelfth century.

86. Satire, XII, l. 34.

87. Etymologies, XII, ii. 21.

88. The working text of the Speculum Duorum has survived to show this process frozen in midstream, while one of Gerald's letters of c.1218 (Op. i. 409) refers to a continuing emendation and expansion of his works (including the Topographia Hibernica). His account of beavers underwent this process of expansion. A short passage in the Topographia Hibernica was greatly expanded in the first edition of the Itinerarium Kambriae. This was copied into the Descriptio Kambriae, with additions which were, in turn, incorporated into later versions of the Itinerarium Kambriae. Material was also reapplied. The phrase ‘mirabili, ne dicam ingenio, vi quadam ingenita et quasi discretiva’ was originally applied to the weasel in the Topographia Hibernica (Top., p. 60). A description in the Topographia Hibernica of how badgers use each other as carts was reapplied, in the Itinerarium Kambriae, to beavers (Top., p. 58; Itin., p. 115).

89. Commentary on Virgil's Georgics, I, ll. 58-9, in Servii Grammatici qui Feruntur in Vergilii Carmina Commentarii, ed. G. Thilo and H. Hagen (Leipzig, 1878-1902), III, i, pp. 147-8.

90. Top., p. 39.

91. Ibid., p. 51.

92. Spec. Duorum, pp. 170-72; De Jure, pp. 334-5; Op. i. 410.

93. The phrase is Seneca's (Ad Lucilium, Ep. 49) and is used by Alanus in his Sermo de Clericis ad Theologiam non Accedentibus, by Stephen of Tournai and an anonymous porretanus (Alain de Lille, Textes Inédits, ed. M.-T. d'Alverny, Etudes de Philosophie Médiévale, lii (1965), 146 n. 67, 274-8).

94. Descr., p. 156.

95. Spec. Duorum, p. 168.

96. Ibid., pp. 170-2.

97. It would seem, from the description of his works, that William would be very vulnerable to these criticisms; see H. MacKinnon, ‘William de Montibus: A Medieval Teacher’, Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson, ed. T. A. Sandquist and M. R. Powicke (Toronto, 1969). Some of Gerald's works, of course, especially the Gemma Ecclesiastica, could be criticized in just the same way.

98. Spec. Duorum, pp. 170-2.

99. Descr., pp. 157-8.

100. Part of it comes from Gregory of Nazianzus, Oratio Apologetica 16 (PG, xxxv, cols. 425-6). The phrase ‘ars est artium regimen animarum’ was borrowed by Gregory the Great, Regula Pastoralis, I, i (PL, lxxvii, col. 14), but Gerald's quotation seems to have been direct. There was a translation by Rufinus, Orationum Gregorii Nazianzeni Novem Interpretatio, ed. A. Engelbrecht (CSEL, xlvi, 1910), p. 18. Gerald gave a fuller quotation in Symb. El., p. 272.

101. Ibid.

102. Ibid., p. 284.

103. Ibid., pp. 285, 287, 288. Peter of Blois wrote a remarkably similar letter (Ep. 76, PL, ccvii, cols. 231-7).

104. T. Stiefel, ‘The Heresy of Science: A Twelfth Century Conceptual Revolution’, Isis, lxviii (1977); T. Gregory, ‘La nouvelle idée de nature et de savoir scientifique au XII^e siècle’, in The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, ed. J. E. Murdoch and E. D. Sylla (Dordrecht and Boston, 1975).

105. Quaestiones Naturales, c. 32, ed. M. Müller, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, xxxi (1934-5), 37.

106. Philosophia Mundi, I. 23 (PL, clxxi, col. 56).

107. Ibid.

108. Adelard, Quaestiones Naturales, c. 4 (ed. Müller, p. 8); William of Conches, In Boethium, ed. J. M. Parent, in his La Doctrine de la Création dans l'École de Chartres (Paris, 1938), p. 126.

109. William, Dragmaticon, quoted in Gregory, Anima Mundi, p. 243; William, Philosophia Mundi, II. 3 (PL, clxxii, col. 58); Adelard, Quaestiones Naturales, cc. 1, 4 (ed. Müller, pp. 6, 8).

110. Ibid., c. 64 (p. 59).

111. Philosophia Mundi, I. 23 (PL, clxxii, col. 56).

112. De Erroribus Guillelmi de Conchis (PL, clxxx, cols. 339-40).

113. Contra Quatuor Labyrinthos Franciae, ed. P. Glorieux, Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, xix (1952), 273-4, 289.

114. Op. i. 421.

115. Above [Gerald of Wales: 1146-1223, 1982], pp. 139-40.

116. See the articles by Callus and Hunted cited in n. 13.

117. See, for example, the systematic introduction to his book on birds, which derives its order largely from Aristotelian models, De Proptietatibus Rerum (Lyons, 1480), intro. to Book XII.

118. The preface was badly damaged in the Cottonian fire but has been substantially reconstructed from seventeenth-century transcripts; R. W. Hunt, ‘The Preface to the Speculum Ecclesiae of Giraldus Cambrensis’, Viator, viii (1977). This quotation is at p. 209.

119. E.g. John Blund, Tractatus de Anima, ed. D. A. Callus and R. W. Hunt, Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi, ii (London, 1970).

120. Hunt, ‘Preface’, p. 210; Avicenna Latinus, ed. S. Van Riet (Louvain, 1968-72), I. 3.

121. Hunt, ‘Preface’, p. 210; Eccl. 3:22.

122. Top., p. 40.

123. Ibid., p. 43.

124. ‘De Naturis Rerum et Super Ecclesiasten’, 3. 10, quoted in R. W. Hunt, ‘Alexander Nequam’ (Oxford University D. Phil. thesis, 1936), p. 243.

125. Top., p. 42.

126. Ibid., p. 45. The story is from the Confessions, 11. 12, ed. P. Knöll (CSEL, xxxiii, 1896), p. 290. It is repeated in the Speculum Ecclesiae, Hunt, ‘Preface’, p. 210.

127. Gemma, p. 28; Augustine, Sermones, 117 (PL, xxxviii, col. 663).

128. Op, i. 348.

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations have been used for Gerald's works. The figures in parentheses refer to the volume number of the Rolls Series edition.

De Reb.: De Rebus a Se Gestis (i)

Symb. El.: Symbolum Electorum (i)

Gemma: Gemma Ecclesiastica (ii)

De Jure: De Jure et Statu Menevensis Ecclesiae (iii)

Vita Dav.: Vita Sancti Davidis (iii)

Spec. Eccl.: Speculum Ecclesiae (iv)

Vita Galf.: Vita Galfridi Archiepiscopi Eboracensis (iv)

Top.: Topographia Hibernica (v)

Exp.: Expugnatio Hibernica (v)

Itin.: Itinerarium Kambriae (vi)

Descr.: Descriptio Kambriae (vi)

Vita Rem.: Vita Sancti Remigii (vii)

Vita Hug.: Vita Sancti Hugonis (vii)

Prin.: De Principis Instructione (viii)

The following works are referred to in other editions:

Vita Ethel.: Vita Ethelberti, ed. M. R. James, ‘Two Lives of St. Ethelbert, King and Martyr’, English Historical Review, xxxii (1917).

Inv.: Invectiones, ed. W. S. Davies, Y Cymmrodor, xxx (1920).

Spec. Duorum: Speculum Duorum, ed. Y. Lefèvre and R. B. C. Huygens. General editor, Michael Richter (Cardiff, 1974).

Other abbreviations are:

AASS: Acta Sanctorum, ed. J. Bollandus, etc. (Antwerp and Brussels, 1643-).

Becket Materials: Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, ed. J. C. Robertson (7 vols., RS, 1875-85).

CSEL: Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum.

Map: Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, ed. M. R. James (Oxford, 1914).

MGH: Monumenta Germaniae Historica.

PG: Patrologiae Cursus Completus, series graeca, ed. J. P. Migne (162 vols., Paris, 1857-66).

PL: Patrologiae Cursus Completus, series latina, ed. J. P. Migne (221 vols., Paris, 1844-64).

RS: Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores (251 vols., London, 1858-96), ‘Rolls Series’.

Bibliography

A. Manuscripts (Excluding Those Mentioned Only in Appendix I)

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 400.

Trinity College R. 7. 11.

University Library Ff. 1. 27.

London, British Library, MS Cotton, Tiberius B. xiii.

Harleian 4751

Royal 13. B. viii.

Vitellius E.v.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 764.

Laud Misc. 642.

Laud Misc. 720.

Rawlinson B. 188.

B. Printed Primary Sources

Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, ed. B. Schmeidler, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholarum (Hanover, 1917).

———, Gesta … Pontificum, ed., with a German translation, by W. Trillmich in Quellen des 9. und 11. Jahrhunderts zur Geschichte der Hamburgischen Kirche und des Reiches (Berlin, 1961).

Adam of Eynsham, Magna Vita Hugonis, ed. D. L. Douie and Dom Hugh Farmer (2 vols., London, 1961-2).

Adelard of Bath, Quaestiones Naturales, ed. M. Müller, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, xxxi (1934-5).

Alain de Lille, Textes Inédits, ed. M.-T. d'Alverny, Études de Philosophie Médiévale, lii (1965).

Albertus Magnus, Opera Omnia, ed. A. Borgnet (38 vols., Paris, 1890-99).

Alexander Nequam, De Naturis Rerum, ed. T. Wright (RS, 1863).

Ancient Laws and Institutes of Wales, ed. Aneurin Owen (London, 1841).

Aristoteles Latinus (Union Académique Internationale, Corpus Philosophorum Medii Aevi, Rome, 1951-).

Augustine, Civitas Dei (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina xlviii, 1955).

———, Confessions, ed. P. Knöll (CSEL, xxxiii, 1896).

———, Contra Faustum, ed. J. Zycha (CSEL, xxv, 1891).

———, De Diversibus Quaestiones LXXXIII, ed. A. Mutzenbecher (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina xliv A, 1975).

———, De Genesi ad Litteram, ed. J. Zycha (CSEL, xxviii, part I, 1894).

———, Sermones (PL, xxxviii).

Avicenna Latinus, ed. S. Van Riet (2 vols., Louvain, 1968-72).

Bartolomaeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum (Lyons, 1480).

Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, ed. C. Plummer (2 vols., Oxford, 1896).

Bede, Opera de Temporibus, ed. C. W. Jones (Mediaeval Academy of America Publication, xli, 1943).

St. Bernard, Vita Sancti Malachiae, ed. A. Gwynn, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclerq and H. M. Rochais, iii (Rome, 1963).

Bernard Silvester, Cosmographia or De Mundi Universitate, ed. P. Dronke (Leiden, 1978), tr. Winthrop Wetherbee (New York, 1973).

———, Experimentarius, ed. M. B. Savorelli, Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, xiv (1959).

———, Mathematicus (PL, clxxi).

The Bestiary, ed. M. R. James (Roxburghe Club, 1928).

The Black Book of Limerick, ed. J. MacCaffrey (Dublin, 1906).

The Black Book of St. David's, ed. J. W. Willis-Bund (Cymmrodorion Record Series, No. 5, 1902).

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. S. J. Tester (Loeb Classical Library, 1973).

Brut y Tywysogyon or The Chronicle of the Princes. Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. Thomas Jones (Board of Celtic Studies, History and Law Series, no. 16, Cardiff, 1955).

Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, ed. J. Strange (2 vols., Cologne, etc., 1851).

Calcidius, Timaeus Calcidius, ed. J. H. Waszink, Corpus Platonicum Medii Aevi, iv (London, 1962).

Calendar of Documents Relating to Ireland, ed. H. S. Sweetman (5 vols., London, 1875-86).

The Calendar of the Gormanston Register, ed. J. Mills and M. J. McEnery (Dublin, 1916).

Canterbury Professions, ed. Michael Richter (Canterbury and York Society, lxvii, 1973).

Cartularium Prioratus Sancti Johannis Evangelistae de Brecon, ed. R. W. Banks (London, 1884).

Charters of Gilbertine Houses, ed. F. M. Stenton (Lincoln Record Society, xvii, 1922).

Chartularies of St. Mary's Abbey, Dublin, ed. J. T. Gilbert (RS, 1884).

Chronica de Gestis Consulum Andegavorum, ed. P. Marchegay and A. Salmon, Chroniques d'Anjou, i (Paris, 1856).

The Chronicle of Signy, ed. L. Delisle, Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des Chartes, lv (1894).

Clarembald of Arras, Life and Works of Clarembald of Arras, ed. N. M. Häring (Toronto, 1965).

Concilia Magnae Brittaniae et Hiberniae, ed. D. Wilkins (4 vols., London, 1737).

Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, ed. A. W. Haddan and William Stubbs (3 vols., Oxford, 1869-78).

Curia Regis Rolls, xii (HMSO, 1957).

Daniel of Morley, Philosophia or Liber de Naturis Inferiorum et Superiorum, ed. K. Sudhoff (Archiv für die Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, viii, 1918).

Dialogus de Scaccario, ed. C. Johnson (London, 1950).

Early Yorkshire Charters, xi, ed. C. T. Clay (Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 1963).

Episcopal Acts Relating to Welsh Dioceses, 1066-1272, ed. J. Conway Davies (2 vols., Cardiff, 1946-8).

Sextus Pompeius Festus, De Verborum Significatu, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Teubner, 1913).

Frederick II, De Arte Venandi cum Avibus, ed. C. A. Willemsen (2 vols., Leipzig, 1942).

Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, ed. Acton Griscom (London, 1929).

Gerald of Wales, The Autobiography of Giraldus Cambrensis, tr. H. E. Butler (London, 1937).

———, Expugnatio Hibernica, ed. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin, 1978).

———, Invectiones, ed. W. S. Davies, Y Cymmrodor, xxx (1920).

———, The Jewel of the Church, tr. J. J. Hagen (Leiden, 1979).

———, The Journey through Wales/The Description of Wales, tr. L. Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1978).

———, Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock, and G. F. Warner (8 vols., RS, 1861-91).

———, Speculum Duorum, ed. Y. Lefèvre and R. B. C. Huygens. Gen. ed., Michael Richter (Cardiff, 1974).

———, The Topography of Ireland, tr. J. J. O'Meara (Dundalk, 1951).

———, ‘Giraldus Cambrensis in Topographia Hibernie. Text of the First Recension’, ed. J. J. O'Meara, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, lii, sect. c (1948-50).

———, Vita Ethelberti, ed. M. R. James, ‘Two Lives of St. Ethelbert, King and Martyr’, English Historical Review, xxxii (1917).

Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, ed. G. G. Leibnitz, Scriptores Rerum Brunsvicensium (3 vols., Hanover, 1707-11), i.

Die Gesetze der Angel-Sachsen, ed. F. Lieberman (3 vols., Halle, 1898-1916).

Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi Benedicti Abbatis, ed. W. Stubbs (2 vols., RS, 1867).

Gesta Stephani, ed. K. R. Potter, new edn. with intro. and notes by R. H. C. Davis (Oxford, 1976).

Gildas, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, ed. T. Mommsen, MGH, Auctores Antiquissimi, xiii (1898).

‘Glanvill’, Tractatus de Legibus, ed. G. D. Hall (London, 1965).

Gregory the Great, Regula Pastoralis (PL, lxxvii).

Gregory of Nazianzus, Oratio Apologetica (PG, xxxv).

Gunther of Pairis, Ligurinus, ed. C. G. Dümge (Heidelberg, 1812) (PL, ccxii).

Helmold of Bosau, Cronica Slavorum, ed. B. Schmeidler, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholarum (Hanover, 1937).

———, Slawenchronik, ed. with a German translation by H. H. Stoob (Darmstadt, 1963).

Hildebert of Le Mans, Epistolae (PL, clxxi).

L'Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, ed. P. Meyer (3 vols., Société de l'Histoire de France, 1891-1901).

Historical Manuscripts Commission, Reports on Manuscripts in Various Collections, i (1901), 246-50 (late 13th-century account of the Welsh and the Edwardian wars).

Honorius Augustoduniensis, Gemma Animae (PL, clxxii).

Hugh of Fleury, Historia Ecclesiastica (excerpts), in MGH, Scriptores, ix, and PL, clxiii.

The Irish Cartularies of Llanthony Prima and Secunda, ed. E. St. J. Brooks (Irish Manuscripts Commission, Dublin, 1953).

Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, ed. W. M. Lindsay (2 vols., Oxford, 1911).

Itinera et Relationes Fratrum Minorum Saeculi XIII et XIV, ed. P. A. van den Wyngaert, Sinica Franciscana, i (Quaracchi, 1929).

Itinerarium Regis Ricardi, ed. W. Stubbs, Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I (2 vols., RS, 1864-5), i.

Jerome, Epistolae (PL, xxii).

Jocelyn of Furness, Vita Sancti Patricii, in AASS, March, ii. 540-80.

John Blund, Tractatus de Anima, ed. D. A. Callus and R. W. Hunt, Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi, ii (London, 1970).

John of Garland, De Triumphis Ecclesiae, ed. T. Wright (Roxburghe Club lxxii, 1856).

John of Plano Carpini, Ystoria Mongalorum (see Itinera et Relationes …).

John of Salisbury, Entheticus, ed. Ronald E. Pepin, ‘The “Entheticus” of John of Salisbury: A Critical Text’, Traditio, xxxi (1975).

———, Historia Pontificalis, ed. M. Chibnall (London, 1956).

———, The Letters of John of Salisbury, i, The Early Letters (1153-1161), ed. W. J. Millor and H. E. Butler, revised by C. N. L. Brooke (London, 1955).

———, Metalogicon, ed. C. C. J. Webb (Oxford, 1929).

———, Policraticus, ed. C. C. J. Webb (2 vols., Oxford, 1909).

The Latin Texts of the Welsh Laws, ed. Hywel D. Emanuel (Cardiff, 1967).

The Laws of Hywel Dda (the Book of Blegywryd), ed. Melville Richards (Liverpool, 1954).

Letters of Henry III, ed. W. W. Shirley (2 vols., RS, 1862-6).

Llyfr Iorwerth, ed. Aled Rhys Wiliam (Cardiff, 1960).

The Mabinogion, tr. J. Gantz (Harmondsworth, 1976).

Manegold of Lautenbach, Liber contra Wolfelmum, ed. W. Hartmann, MGH (1972).

Marius, On the Elements, ed. Richard C. Dales (Berkeley, 1976).

Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, ed. J. C. Robertson (7 vols., RS, 1875-85).

Moralium Dogma Philosophorum, ed. J. Holmberg (Uppsala, 1929).

Ordericus Vitalis, Ecclesistical History, ed. M. Chibnall (6 vols., Oxford, 1969-).

Origen, Contra Celsum, ed. M. Borret (5 vols., Paris, 1967-76), and PG, xi.

———, In Numeros Homilia, tr. Rufinus, ed. W. A. Baehrens, Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller, xxx (Leipzig, 1921).

Otto of Freising, Ottonis et Rahewini Gesta Friderici I Imperatoris, ed. G. Waitz, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholarum (Hanover, 1912).

———, Die Taten Friedrichs, ed., with a German translation, F.-J. Schmale (Berlin, 1965).

Paul the Deacon, Historia Langobardorum, MGH, Scriptores Rerum Langobardorum.

Peter Abelard, Sic and Non, ed. Blanche Boyer and Richard McKeon (Chicago, 1976-7).

Peter of Blois, Opera (PL, ccvii).

Peter the Chanter, Verbum Abbreviatum (PL, ccv).

———, Summa de Sacramentis, ed. J. A. Dugauquier (Analecta Mediaevalia Namurcensia, iv, vii, xi, xvi, xxi, 1954-67).

Peter Comestor, Historia Scholastica (PL, cxcviii).

Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV Libris Distinctae, i, Spicilegium Bonaventurianum, iv (Grottaferrata, 1971).

Philip, Prior of St. Frideswide's, Historia Miraculorum Sanctae Frideswidae, AASS, Oct., viii.

Physiologus, ed. F. Sbordone (Milan, 1936).

Physiologus Latinus, ed. F. J. Carmody (Paris, 1939).

Pipe Rolls: 31 Henry I (HMSO, 1929), 17 and 18 Henry II (Pipe Roll Society, 1893-4), 3-4 Richard I to 5 John (Pipe Roll Society, 1926-38).

Plato, see Calcidius.

Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, ed. H. Rackham, W. H. S. Jones, and D. E. Eichholz (Loeb Classical Library, 10 vols., London, 1938-63).

Pontificia Hibernica, ed. Maurice P. Sheehy (2 vols., Dublin, 1962).

Ralph of Coggeshall, Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. J. Stevenson (RS, 1875).

Ralph of Diceto, Opera Historica, ed. William Stubbs (2 vols., RS, 1876).

Raoul Glaber, Historiarum Sui Temporis Libri V, ed. M. Prou, Les Cinq Livres de Ses Histoires (Paris, 1886).

Register of the Abbey of St. Thomas, Dublin, ed. J. T. Gilbert (RS, 1889).

Registrum Epistolarum Fratris Johannis Peckham Archiepiscopi Cantuariensis, ed. C. T. Martin (3 vols., RS, 1882-5).

Rhigyfarch, Life of St. David, ed. J. W. James (Cardiff, 1967).

Roger of Howden, Chronica, ed. William Stubbs (4 vols., RS, 1868-71).

Roger of Wendover, Flores Historiarum, ed. H. G. Hewlett (3 vols., RS, 1886-9).

Rotuli Chartarum, ed. T. D. Hardy (London, 1837).

Rufinus, Orationum Gregorii Nazianzeni Novem Interpretatio, ed. A. Engelbrecht (CSEL, xlvi, 1910).

Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, ed. J. D. Mansi (31 vols., Florence and Venice, 1757-98).

Sallust, Bellum Iugurthinum, ed. J. C. Rolfe (Loeb Classical Library, revised edn., 1931).

Servius, Servii Grammatici qui Feruntur in Vergilii Carmina Commentarii, ed. G. Thilo and H. Hagen (3 vols. in 4 parts, Leipzig, 1878-1902).

Solinus, Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium, ed. T. Mommsen (Berlin, 1895).

The Statutes of Wales, ed. Ivor Bowen (London, 1908).

De Successione Episcoporum et Gestis Eorum, Videlicet Bernardi et David Secundi, ed. Michael Richter, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, xxii (1967).

Suger, Vita Ludovici Grossi Regis, ed. H. Waquet, Vie de Louis VI le Gros (Paris, 1929).

Tacitus, Germania, ed. J. G. C. Anderson (Oxford, 1938).

Thierry of Chartres, Commentaries on Boethius by Thierry of Chartres and His School, ed. N. M. Häring (Toronto, 1971).

Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum Super Libros Sententiarum, ed. R. P. Mandonnet and M. F. Moos (4 vols., Paris, 1929-47).

———, Summa Theologica, ed. P. Caramello (4 vols., Rome, 1948).

Translatio Sancti Alexandri (MGH, Scriptores, ii).

Usamah Ibn-Munqidh, An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior … Memoirs of Usamah Ibn-Munqidh, ed. P. K. Hitti (New York, 1929).

Veterum Epistolarum Hibernicarum Sylloge, ed. James Ussher (Dublin, 1632 and 1696), in Ussher's Works, ed. C. R. Elrington, iv (Dublin, 1847).

Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Naturale, in vol. i of Speculum Maius (3 vols., Venice, 1591).

Vita Sancti Patris Basilii Magni, in L. Surius, De Probatis Sanctorum (8 vols., Cologne, 1576-81), i.

Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, ed. M. R. James (Oxford, 1914).

Walter of St. Victor, Contra Quatuor Labyrinthos Franciae, ed. P. Glorieux, Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, xix (1952).

Welsh Medieval Law, ed. A. W. Wade-Evans (Oxford, 1909).

William of Conches, Glosae super Platonem, ed. E. Jeauneau (Paris, 1965).

———, Philosophia Mundi (PL, clxxii).

William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, ed. W. Stubbs (2 vols., RS, 1887-9).

William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, ed. R. Howlett, Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I (4 vols., RS, 1884-9), i-ii.

William of Poitiers, Gesta Willelmi, ed. R. Foreville, Histoire de Guillaume le Conquérant (Paris, 1952).

William of Rubruck, Itinerarium (see Itinera et Relationes …)

William of St. Thierry, De Erroribus Guillelmi de Conchis (PL, clxxx).

William of Tyre, Historia Rerum Transmarinarum (PL, cci).

C. Secondary Works—Published

Alcock, Leslie, ‘Some Reflections on Early Welsh Society and Economy’, Welsh History Review, ii (1964-5).

Appleby, J. T., England without Richard 1189-1199 (London, 1965).

Baldwin, J. W., Masters, Princes and Merchants. The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle (Princeton, 1970).

Bate, A. K., ‘Walter Map and Giraldus Cambrensis’, Latomus, xxxi (1972).

Berges, W., Die Fürstenspiegel des Hohen und Späten Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 1938).

Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina, ed. Socii Bollandiani (2 vols., Brussels, 1898-1901).

Binchy, D. A., ‘The Linguistic and Historical Value of the Irish Law Tracts’, Proceedings of the British Academy, xxix (1943).

Bloch, Marc, Feudal Society, tr. L. A. Manyon (2nd edn., London, 1962).

Borst, Arno, Der Turmbau von Babel (4 vols. in 6 parts, Stuttgart, 1957-63).

Boutemy, A., ‘Giraud de Barri et Pierre le Chantre’, Revue du moyen âge latin, ii (1946).

Brooke, C. N. L., ‘The Archbishops of St. David's, Llandaff and Caerleon-on-Usk’, in Studies in the Early British Church, ed. Nora K. Chadwick, et al. (Cambridge, 1958).

———, ‘Gregorian Reform in Action: Clerical Marriage in England, 1050-1200’, Cambridge Historical Journal, xii (1956), revised in Brooke's Medieval Church and Society (London, 1971).

Brooks, E. St. J., ‘An Unpublished Charter of Raymond le Gros’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 7th ser., ix (1939).

Brown, P., ‘Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change’, Daedalus (Spring 1975).

Brunel, Clovis, ‘David D'Ashby, Auteur Méconnu des Faits des Tartares’, Romania, lxxix (1958).

Callus, D. A., ‘The Introduction of Aristotelian Learning to Oxford’, Proceedings of the British Academy, xxix (1943).

Canny, Nicholas P., ‘The Ideology of Colonisation: from Ireland to America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., xxx (1973).

Cheney, C. R., From Becket to Langton (Manchester, 1956).

Chenu, M.-D., Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century, tr. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago, 1968).

Cole, A. Thomas, Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology (Middletown, Conn., 1967).

Coulter, Cornelia C., and F. P. Magoun, Jnr., ‘Giraldus Cambrensis on Indo-Germanic Philology’, Speculum, i (1926).

Courcelle, P., La Consolation de philosophie dans la tradition littéraire (Paris, 1967).

Davies, J. Conway, ‘Giraldus Cambrensis, 1146-1946’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, xcix (1946-7).

———, ‘The Kambriae Mappa of Giraldus Cambrensis’, Journal of the Historical Society of the Church in Wales, ii (1952).

Davies, Rees, ‘Race Relations in Post Conquest Wales’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1974-5).

Davies, R. R., ‘The Survival of the Blood Feud in Medieval Wales’, History, liv (1969).

De Gaiffier, B., Études critiques d'hagiographie et d'iconologie (Subsidia Hagiographica, xliii, Brussels, 1967).

De Lubac, H., Surnaturel, Études Historiques (Paris, 1946).

De Vooght, P., ‘La Notion philosophique du miracle chez S. Augustin dans le De Trinitate et le De Genesi ad Litteram’, Recherches de Théologie Ancienne et Médiévale, x (1938).

———, ‘La Théologie du miracle selon S. Augustin’, Recherches de Théologie Ancienne et Médiévale, xi (1939).

Douie, Decima L., Archbishop Pecham (Oxford, 1952).

Dronke, Peter, ‘Peter of Blois and Poetry at the Court of Henry II’, Mediaeval Studies, xxxviii (1976).

Duby, Georges, ‘Les “Jeunes” dans la société aristocratique dans la France du Nord-Ouest au XII^e siècle’, Annales (1964); also in Duby's Hommes et structures du moyen âge (Paris, 1973).

———, Medieval Marriage. Two Models from Twelfth-century France, tr. E. Forster (Baltimore, 1978).

———, The Early Growth of the European Economy, tr. H. B. Clarke (London, 1974).

Duckett, George, ‘Evidences of the Barri Family of Manorbier and Olethan’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 5th ser., vii (1891).

Ekwall, E., Etymological Notes on English Place Names (Lund, 1959).

Ellis, T. P., Welsh Tribal Law and Custom in the Middle Ages (2 vols., Oxford, 1926).

Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Nuer (Oxford, 1940).

Eyton, R. W., Court, Household and Itinerary of King Henry II (London, 1878).

Flahiff, G. B., ‘Deus non vult: A Critic of the Third Crusade’, Mediaeval Studies, ix (1947).

Freeman, E. A., History of the Norman Conquest (6 vols., Oxford, 1867-79).

Galbraith, V. H., ‘The Literacy of the Medieval English Kings’, Proceedings of the British Academy, xxi (1937), and in Studies in History, selected by Lucy S. Sutherland (London, 1966).

Glacken, Clarence J., Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley, 1967).

Goddu, A. A. and R. H. Rouse, ‘Gerald of Wales and the Florilegium Angelicum’, Speculum, lii (1977).

Gransden, A., ‘Realistic Observation in Twelfth Century England’, Speculum, xlvii (1972).

Grant, Robert M., Miracle and Natural Law in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Thought (Amsterdam, 1952).

Gregory, T., Anima Mundi. La Filosofia di Guglielmo di Conches e la Scuola di Chartres (Florence, 1955).

———, ‘L'Idea di Natura nella Filosofia Medievale Prima dell'Ingresso della Fisica di Aristotele—Il Secolo XII’, in La Filosofia della Natura nel Medioevo. Atti del Terzo Congresso Internazionale di Filosofia Medioevale, 1964 (Milan, 1966).

———, ‘La Nouvelle Idée de nature et de savoir scientifique au XII^e siècle’, The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, ed. J. E. Murdoch and E. D. Sylla (Dordrecht and Boston, 1975).

———, Platonismo Medioevale. Studi e Ricerche (Rome, 1958).

Gwynn, Aubrey, ‘The First Synod of Cashel’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, lxvii (1946).

———, ‘Lanfranc and the Irish Church’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, lvii (1941) and lviii (1941).

———, ‘St. Anselm and the Irish Church’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, lix (1942).

———, ‘St. Malachy of Armagh’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, lxx (1948).

———, The Twelfth Century Reform, A History of Irish Catholicism, ii (i), (Dublin, 1968).

Handelsman, M., ‘La rôle de la nationalité dans l'histoire du moyen âge’, Bulletin of the International Committee of Historical Studies, ii (1929-30).

Haskins, C. H., ‘Henry II as a Patron of Literature’, in Essays in Medieval History Presented to T. F. Tout, ed. A. G. Little and F. M. Powicke (Manchester, 1925).

———, Studies in the History of Medieval Science (2nd edn., Cambridge, Mass., 1927).

Hays, R. W., ‘Rotoland, Subprior of Aberconway, and the Controversy over the See of Bangor 1199-1204’, Journal of the Historical Society of the Church in Wales, xiii (1963).

Helbling-Gloor, B., Natur und Aberglauben im Policraticus des Johannes von Salisbury (Zurich, 1956).

Heron-Allen, Edward, Barnacles in Nature and in Myth (London, 1928).

Hodgen, Margaret T., Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1964).

Holmes, U. T., ‘Gerald the Naturalist’, Speculum, xi (1936).

Holt, J. C., Magna Carta (Cambridge, 1965).

Howell, Margaret, Regalian Right in Medieval England (London, 1962).

Hughes, K., The Church in Early Irish Society (London, 1966).

Hunt, R. W., ‘English Learning in the Late Twelfth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., xix (1936), reprinted in Essays in Medieval History, ed. R. W. Southern (London, 1968).

———, ‘The Preface to the Speculum Ecclesiae of Giraldus Cambrensis’, Viator, viii (1977).

Jolliffe, J. E. A., Angevin Kingship (2nd edn., London, 1963).

Jones, G. R., ‘The Distribution of Bond Settlements in North-West Wales’, Welsh History Review, ii (1964-5).

———, ‘The Tribal System in Wales’, Welsh History Review, i (1961).

Jones, Thomas, ‘Gerald the Welshman's Itinerary through Wales and Description of Wales’, National Library of Wales Journal, vi (1949-50).

———, Gerallt Gymro/Gerald the Welshman (dual language, Cardiff, 1947).

Jones, W. R., ‘The Image of the Barbarian in Medieval Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, xiii (1971).

Jordan, Winthrop D., White Over Black (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968).

Knowles, David, ‘Some Enemies of Giraldus Cambrensis’, Studia Monastica, i (1959).

Lacombe, George, Aristoteles Latinus (2 parts and supplement, Rome, 1939-61).

Lawn, B., The Salernitan Questions (Oxford, 1963), expanded version I Quesiti Salernitani, tr. A. Spagnuolo (Salerno, 1969).

Le Goff, J. and E. Le Roy Ladurie, ‘Mélusine maternelle et défricheuse’, Annales, xxvi (1971) and (in part) in Le Goff's Pour un autre moyen âge (Paris, 1977).

LeMay, Richard, Abu Ma'shar and Latin Aristotelianism in the Twelfth Century (Beirut, 1962).

Liebeschütz, H., Medieval Humanism in the Life and Writings of John of Salisbury (London, 1950).

Lloyd, J. E., A History of Wales (2 vols., 3rd edn., London, 1939).

Lodge, J., The Peerage of Ireland (London, 1754).

Mackinnon, H., ‘William de Montibus: A Medieval Teacher’, Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson, ed. T. A. Sandquist and M. R. Powicke (Toronto, 1969).

McCullock, F., Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960).

McKechnie, W. S., Magna Carta (2nd edn., Glasgow, 1914).

Markus, R. A., ‘Augustine, God and Nature’, in Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge, 1967).

Minio-Paluello, L., Opuscula: the Latin Aristotle (Amsterdam, 1972).

Morris, Colin, The Discovery of the Individual (London, 1972).

Müller, Klaus E., Geschichte der Antiken Ethnographie und Ethnologischen Theoriebildung, i (Wiesbaden, 1972).

Nelson, Lynn H., The Normans in South Wales, 1070-1171 (Austin, Texas, 1966).

Nicholls, Kenneth, Gaelic and Gaelicised Ireland in the Middle Ages (Dublin, 1972).

O'Doherty, J. F., ‘A Historical Criticism of the Song of Dermot’, Irish Historical Studies, i (1938).

Offermanns, D. (ed.), Der Physiologus nach den Handschriften G und M (Beiträge zur Klassischen Philologie, xxii, 1966).

Otte, James K., ‘The Life and Writings of Alfredus Anglicus’, Viator, iii (1972).

Otway-Ruthven, J., A History of Mediaeval Ireland (London, 1968).

Owen, Henry, Gerald the Welshman (London, 1889, revised edn. 1904).

Pächt, Otto and J. J. G. Alexander, Illuminated Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (3 vols., Oxford, 1966-73).

Palmer, A. N., ‘The Portionary Churches of Mediaeval North Wales’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 5th series, iii (1886).

Parent, J. M., La Doctrine de la Creation dans l'École de Chartres (Paris, 1938).

Pierce, T. Jones, Medieval Welsh Society (Cardiff, 1972).

———, ‘Einion ap Ynyr (Anian II), Bishop of St. Asaph’, Flintshire Historical Society Publications, xvii (1957).

Powicke, F. M., ‘Gerald of Wales’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, xii (1928); reprinted in his The Christian Life in the Middle Ages and Other Essays (Oxford, 1935).

Rees, W., An Historical Atlas of Wales (London, 1951).

Richter, Michael, ‘Canterbury's Primacy in Wales and the First Stage of Bishop Bernard's Opposition’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xxii (1971).

———, ‘Gerald of Wales: a Reassessment on the 750th Anniversary of His Death’, Traditio, xxix (1973).

———, Giraldus Cambrensis: the Growth of the Welsh Nation (2nd edn., Aberystwyth, 1976).

———, ‘The Life of St. David by Giraldus Cambrensis’, Welsh History Review, iv (1968-9).

———, ‘A New Edition of the So-Called Vita Davidis Secundi’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, xxii (1967), 245-9.

———, ‘Professions of Obedience and the Metropolitan Claim of St. David's’, National Library of Wales Journal, xv (1967-8).

Roderick, A. J., ‘Marriage and Politics in Wales, 1066-1282’, Welsh History Review, iv (1968-9).

Round, J. H., Feudal England (London, 1895, repr. 1964).

Rouse, R. H. and M. A., ‘The Florilegium Angelicum: Its Origin, Content and Influence’, in Medieval Learning and Literature. Essays Presented to R. W. Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford, 1976).

Rowe, J. H., ‘Ethnography and Ethnology in the Sixteenth Century’, (Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, xxx, 1964).

Russell, J. C., ‘The Canonization of Opposition to the King in Angevin England’, in Anniversary Essays in Mediaeval History by Students of C. H. Haskins, ed. C. H. Taylor and John L. LaMonte (Boston, 1929).

Sanford, E. M., ‘Giraldus Cambrensis' Debt to Petrus Cantor’, Medievalia et Humanistica, iii (1945).

Sbordone, F., Richerche sulle Fonti et sulla Composizione del Physiologus Greco (Naples, 1936).

Schnith, K., ‘Betrachtungen zum Spätwerk des Giraldus Cambrensis: De Principis Instructione’, in Festiva Lanx (Munich, 1966).

Sikes, E. E., The Anthropology of the Greeks (London, 1914).

Silverstein, T., ‘Daniel of Morley, English Cosmologist and Student of Arabic Science’, Mediaeval Studies, x (1948).

———, ‘The Fabulous Cosmogony of Bernard Silverstris’, Modern Philology, xlvi (1948-9).

Smalley, Beryl, The Becket Conflict and the Schools (Oxford, 1973).

———, ‘Sallust in the Middle Ages’, in R. R. Bolgar (ed.), Classical Influences on European Culture 500-1500 (Cambridge, 1971).

Southern, R. W., Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford, 1970).

Stenton, F. M., The First Century of English Feudalism (2nd edn., Oxford, 1961).

Stiefel, Tina, ‘The Heresy of Science: A Twelfth Century Conceptual Revolution’, Isis, lxviii (1977).

Stock, Brian, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: a Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, 1972).

Strayer, Joseph R., ‘France: The Holy Land, the Chosen People, and the Most Christian King’, Medieval Statecraft and the Perspectives of History (Princeton, 1971).

Stubbs, William, ‘Learning and Literature at the Court of Henry II,’ Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History (3rd edn., Oxford, 1900).

Syme, R., Tacitus (2 vols., Oxford, 1958).

Tatlock, J. S. P., The Legendary History of Britain (Berkeley, 1950).

Thompson, E. A., The Early Germans (Oxford, 1965).

Thurneysen, R. (ed.), Studies in Early Irish Law (Dublin, 1936).

Tooley, Marian J., ‘Bodin and the Medieval Theory of Climate’, Speculum, xxviii (1953).

Türk, Egbert, Nugae curialium, le regne d'Henri II Plantagenêt, 1154-1189, et l'éthique politique (Geneva, 1977).

Viarre, Simone, La Survie d'Ovide dans la littérature scientifique des XII^e et XIII^e siècles (Poitiers, 1966).

Wallace-Hadrill, J. M., Early Germanic Kingship (Oxford, 1971).

Warren, W. L., Henry II (London, 1973).

———, King John (London, 1961).

Watt, J. A., The Church in Medieval Ireland (Dublin, 1972).

———, The Church and the Two Nations in Medieval Ireland (Cambridge, 1970).

———, et al. (eds.), Mediaeval Studies Presented to Aubrey Gwynn (Dublin, 1961).

Wetherbee, Winthrop, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century (Princeton, 1972).

Williams, E. A., ‘A Bibliography of Giraldus Cambrensis’, National Library of Wales Journal, xii (1961-2).

Williams, Glanmor, The Welsh Church from Conquest to Reformation (Cardiff, 1962).

Williams, J. R., ‘The Quest for the Author of the Moralium Dogma Philosophorum, 1931-56’, Speculum, xxxii (1957).

Williams-Jones, Keith, ‘Thomas Becket and Wales’, Welsh History Review, v (1970-1).

Worstbrock, F. J., ‘Translatio Artium’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, xlvii (1965).

Wright, J. K., Geographical Lore at the Time of the Crusades (New York, 1925).

Young, Charles C., Hubert Walter (Durham, N.C., 1968).

Zirkle, C., ‘The Early History of the Idea of the Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics and of Pangenesis’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, xxxv (1946).

D. Secondary Works—Unpublished

Best, Edward E., ‘Classical Latin Prose Writers quoted by Giraldus Cambrensis’ (Univ. of North Carolina Ph.D. thesis, 1957) (synopsis only consulted).

Humphreys, Dorothy, ‘Some Types of Social Life as Shown in the Works of Gerald of Wales’ (Oxford Univ. B. Litt. thesis, 1936).

Hunt, R. W., ‘Alexander Nequam’ (Oxford Univ. D. Phil. thesis, 1936).

Ryan, Mary T., ‘The Historical Value of Giraldus Cambrensis' Expugnatio Hibernica as an Account of the Anglo-Norman Invasion of Ireland’ (University College, Dublin, MA thesis, 1967).

Sullivan, Gerald J. E., ‘Pagan Latin Poets in Giraldus Cambrensis’ (Cincinnati Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1950).