Title: Latinity, Manuscripts, and the Rhetoric of Conquest in Late-Eleventh-Century Wales
Description: This dissertation explores the complex interactions among written text, language choice, and political context in Wales in the late-eleventh and early-twelfth centuries. I argue that writers in medieval Wales created in both their literary compositions and their manuscripts intricate layers of protest and subversion in direct opposition to the authority of the Anglo-Norman political hegemony and the aggrandizing spread of the Canterbury-led church. These medieval literati exploited language and script as tools of definition. They privileged Welsh or Latin when their audience shifted, and they employed the change from early Insular script to the Caroline script of the Normans as not just a natural evolution in script development, but as a selective representation of mimicked authority. The family of Bishop Sulien at Llanbadarn Fawr has been the focal point of this study, as they were active during a time of Anglo-Norman intervention in their community that is reflected in the shifting script of their manuscripts and the apprehensive though proud tone of their compositions, which include the vitae of saints David and Padarn and the poetry of Ieuan and Rhygyfarch ap Sulien.