Welsh Journals

Gerald of Wales's View of Music PHILIP WELLER Giraldus Cambrensis to give him the Latin name by which he is known from his own writings is almost certainly the first writer to make more than passing comment on music in Wales. He was a prolific and active man who pursued a career in the church and in politics, while still finding time both to acquire a formidable intellectual culture and to exercise it creatively throughout his life. His literary and scholarly output is considerable, and is remarkable for both its range of subject matter and its directness of utterance. But of the diverse group of writings by him which have survived, it is arguably the descriptive works about Wales and Ireland that represent the peak of his achievement. They, more than anything else, single him out among the writers of his time, in both intellectual and literary terms.2 But it is equally remarkable that he should have left us a record of the events of his own life, a true autobiography, bearing the title De rebus a se gestis. This is a book which presents itself as an account of 'the things done by himself' or, we might say more idiomatically, 'concerning the actions and achievements of his life'.3 As its title implies, it is more concerned with action than reflection, and relates the different aspects of Gerald's life with varying degrees of emphasis. The political and ecclesiastical actions he was involved in are given in far greater detail and elaboration than the more personal and reflective moments. This is only to be expected of someone writing in the early thirteenth century, but the absence from the De rebus of what might have been a vivid evocation of his Welsh childhood or of the atmosphere of medieval Lincoln (where he lived in scholarly retirement from 1196 and again from 1207),4 is a real loss. None the less, although Gerald does not seem to have been much given to introspection or self-revelation, the directness with which his personality emerges from many passages in his writings is striking, and, in its way, unique for the time.