Professor Helen Fulton has had a profound influence on the various fields that come together to study medieval Britain. She has promoted the need for scholars to engage deeply with Celtic literature, and especially Welsh, to greater understand the literary, cultural, linguistic, and political contexts. One of her core arguments is that Welsh, as one of the four main languages of medieval Britain, should be placed in a European context. In doing so, she has shown the fundamental importance of a multicultural and multilingual approach to medieval Britain. We know now that literary cultures and communities in Britain were deeply interconnected. Recently, Fulton has revealed how medieval towns along the Anglo-Welsh border and the March were multicultural and multilingual spaces with various people from Britain and Europe cohabiting a shared urban space. Her work benefits greatly from the appreciation that people all have their unique experiences and do not fit well with generalizations, especially in a multicultural and multilingual context.
Connected to this, Fulton has been a strong advocate for transculturalism, meaning that cultures can transcend geographical and linguistic boundaries, and interact with each other. To this end, she has shown how Welsh literature was engaged with European culture and literature. Wales to her is not some isolated backwaters cut off from Europe, wider civilization, and cultural currents. Rather it is an active participant in the developments of the day, with its own unique contribution to these developments. This was a key theme in her seminal study Dafydd ap Gwilym and the European Context (1989), which argued that Welsh-language literature’s most celebrated poet, Dafydd ap Gwilym, was profoundly influenced by European culture. It set the tone for a career that has broadened the field of Celtic Studies, and simultaneously encouraging English language scholars to appreciate the influence of Wales on a broader scale.
It is more than appropriate that a scholar such as Helen Fulton has a festschrift. These essays edited by Victoria Flood, herself influenced by the honorand and having a deep appreciation of the Welsh influences on English Arthuriana, pay tribute and reflect on Helen’s scholarship. The title is inspired by Helen Fulton’s influential study Dafydd ap Gwilym and the European Context (1989). It draws on the main themes of Fulton’s research, including the relationship between Celtic Britain and Europe, literature, urban life, place and identity, multilingualism, and borders, and several chapters engage with Wales, Welsh literature, and the Welsh language.
Catherine McKenna provides a study of “Rhieingerdd Efa ferch Madog ap Meredudd” a medieval poem addressed to Efa, the daughter of a twelfth century prince of Powys. This chapter argues that the playfulness of Cynddelw’s poem and its “dazzlingly rich ambiguity” leaves it rife with paradoxes, including locating the poet both near and far from power (19). Staying in Wales, Marged Haycock analyzes the literary portrayal of alewives in Welsh poetry. By studying these poems for the first time, this chapter shows that Welsh poems complicate the image of the alewife as a figure universally hated. Some of the poems acknowledge that alewives have important skills. This chapter provides a strong case for studies that go beyond an Anglo-centric approach, and how Welsh sources provide further nuance to the understanding of literary cultures in Britain. Indeed, Haycock shows that there was not one approach to alewives in late medieval and early modern Wales.
Inspired by Fulton’s work on the relationship between the natural world and magic, Stephen Knight analyses how nature is portrayed in the middle Welsh and middle English versions of Yvain. This chapter argues that there are blurred lines between nature and society, with nature becoming a part of society and society becoming a part of the natural world. Staying with prose, Daniel F. Melia attempts to locate the branches of the Mabinogi within a wider European context of legendary medieval narratives, drawing some inspiration from the honorand’s work on Dafydd ap Gwilym. In addition, Melia argues that the Mabinogion were an attempt to further the territorial claims of the kingdom of Deheubarth in south Wales attempting to gain legendary authority in Wales against the kingdom of Gwynedd, an interesting argument that needs to be further developed by detailed study. Legendary origin stories are also the focus of Joseph Falaky Nagy’s chapter which analyzes the Irish translation of the Dares history of Troy. This text, he argues, is used to portray the Irish as mighty warriors and peace seekers and combines Greek heroism with the peacemaking of their Asian enemies. These two paradoxical traits come together, according to Nagy, as the basis of Irish identity in Cath Maige Tuired. Cambro-Irish connections in hagiography are investigated by Jonathan Wooding’s chapter. This chapter investigates the cult of the Irish Saint Brendan in Wales, who was well known across Europe due to the popularity of Navigatio Sancti Brendani abbatis, which discusses his journey to the promised land. However, the evidence of his cult is lacking in Wales, and Brendan is therefore an absent saint, despite there being some short references to Saint Brendan in some Cambro-Latin and Welsh texts. Focusing primarily on texts discussing south Wales, Wooding suggests that Saint Brendan might have only been an important saint for monastic audiences. The chapter provides an important reminder that interest in saints did not end with Protestant opposition to saints’ cults, as there is an invented twentieth-century tradition associating Brendan with Bleddfa, Powys and a later Catholic Church dedicated to him in Newtown. Work on medieval saints need not end in studies of the sixteenth century.
Claudio Cataldi investigates linguistic connections between Irish and English in the dissemination of the Lorica of Laidcenn, a Hiberno-Latin text. This text, Cataldi shows, existed within a multilingual context and had a profound influence on those studying Old English in the modern era, particularly with regard to rare words for body parts. The relationship between literary cultures is also the focus of Victoria Flood’s chapter. Her analysis of English Romance is predicated on the belief that Welsh elements are important to understanding this genre. She argues that lines 601-701 of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in which Gawain travels across England and Wales, are indebted to Welsh sources. However, this “Welsh debt” is mediated through Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin De gestis Britonum,which was claimed as a Welsh source during the period.Although there is a Welsh element present in the text, it is from a Latin source. However, this chapter furthers an important argument about power and dominance. Wales was colonized, but it was not mute and powerless: Wales had a voice and significant influence on the makeup of power during the period. This comes to the fore in how English kings and the aristocracy attempted to portray themselves and attempted to marry Welsh princes and rulers to claim ancestral validity to their territories.
The next chapters draw on Helen Fulton’s work on borders and the Marches. Liz Herbert McAvory reflects Fulton’s interest in the Marches and argues that as violence between men was prominent, female spirituality was turned to as “solace, solution, or salvation” (133). The female spirituality analyzed here is anti-militaristic and attempts to move beyond war, violence, and death by focusing on nurture and growth. Continuing this line of inquiry beyond the medieval Welsh March and regions of comparable peace could shed significant light on female spirituality or spiritualities. It could also lead to powerful diachronic discussions about the “manosphere.” Staying in the Marches, Catherine A. M. Clarke’s essay discusses Adam of Usk, or “Adda Brynbuga,” as he is called in Welsh. By asking what Adam’s self-written epitaph says about his complicated relationship with Wales, the Welsh language, and Welshness, this chapter problematizes any attempts to place Adam into a neat national box. Drawing on numerous theories about identity and performance, this chapter shows that Adam of Usk’s epitaph rooted his identity in his Welshness. Borders in literature is the focus of Jan Shaw’s essay, which argues that the middle English translation of the FrenchMélusine uses different types of borders, including imperial, temporal, and geopolitical. These borders are adapted in translations, with the English translation ignoring Geoffroy’s visit to Jerusalem, and leaving the French empire in and unreachable past. Here borders are shown to have been exploited and changed for political ends in the battle for authority between England and France.
Ad Putter’s chapter is inspired by Helen Fulton’s work on languages neglected by scholars of medieval Britain, and more particularly her work on the Welsh speakers in Calais. This chapter argues that Dutch is also a medieval British language, unjustly understudied by Anglophone scholars studying medieval England and Calais, which is perhaps surprising, as he shows that Dutch was the vernacular in Calais before it was conquered by the English in 1347. In Calais, which was a multilingual town with French, Dutch, English, Welsh, and Italian speakers, Putter shows that Dutch language skills were important for merchants. This chapter suggests further avenues for a study of Dutch speakers in mainland Britain, and Anglo-Dutch relations into the early modern period. The final chapter by Geraint Evans investigates the relationship between Percy Bysshe Shelley, a renowned romantic literary figure, with Wales and the Welsh language. He argues that Shelley once owned a Welsh Bible published in 1746, in which his name is written in 1811. Emphasizing Shelley’s desire to live in Natgwyllt in Wales, he also complicates our understanding of his atheism and emphasizes that British languages and literatures should not be considered as isolated phenomena in modern Britain.
This collection of essays, varied in genre, linguistic corpus, geographical location, is a worthy testament to Helen Fulton’s work, which is still ongoing. Fulton’s work is important to numerous fields, and now, as ever, it is important to remember that we live in a multilingual world, and that we are connected to each other in a variety of ways.