Programme: Summer Term 2025
Literary Culture in the Welsh Marches: Networks, Places, Politics
The ‘Welsh Marches’ is a name often coupled, in present-day popular culture and discourse, with images of idealized rusticity, of rural provinciality, of ‘blue remembered hills’. In the Middle Ages, however, the Marches were a vibrant zone of cultural contact and literary activity. This paper presents some of the key arguments and approaches developed in my recently published monograph, Literary Culture in the Medieval Welsh Marches: Networks, Places, Politics (OUP), in which I argue that the medieval Marches are ill-served by peripheralizing models of cultural-political geography and propose instead a networked mode of reading Marcher manuscripts and texts. Using this work as a springboard, the paper also suggests some future lines of enquiry, looking not only at the literary evidence that does survive from the medieval Marches, but also at that which does not.
Matt Lampitt
is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Bristol, working on the ERC/UKRI-funded project, Mapping the March: Medieval Wales and England, c. 1282–c. 1550. Matt gained his PhD in 2019 from the Department of French at King’s College London and was a Research Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge, prior to joining the Bristol project in 2023.
Wednesday 25th June, 7.30pm.
Postponed – new date to be advised
Dr Emma Cavell
The link will be updated once the recording is available ☛☛
Gender, aristocracy and (self-)belief in the relationship between Matilda de Saint Valéry and King John
Matilda de St Valery, French-born wife of the Marcher lord William III de Braose, is chiefly remembered today for her alleged starvation, with her son, in one of King John’s dungeons. The lurid tale of Matilda’s death, penned by the Anonymous of Bethune in his History of the Dukes of Normandy and the Kings of England, is perfect grist for the mill of those (medieval and modern) persuaded of John’s capacity for extreme cruelty. Matilda’s death, like her husband’s persecution, was the catastrophic end to an enduring and sometimes fractious, but far from perpetually hostile, relationship between the king and the lady of Hay. This talk examines Matilda’s activities as wife and lord in the context of her relationship with the volatile king. Much of the evidence places Matilda squarely within the ‘man’s world’ of the Marcher lordships (and lordly society more broadly) and yet what stands out is not simply that she appeared at ease in this world, but that few people, much less the king in his written defence of own behaviour toward the Braoses, questioned her right to conduct herself as she did.
Emma Cavell
is a Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at Swansea University. She specialises in the study of aristocratic women and the Welsh borderlands, law and litigation in England and Wales, and Jewish women in medieval England – all between c. 1066 and 1300. Emma won the MHS Essay Prize in 2017, and her essay was published in the MHS Journal vol 2, 2018. She contributed a chapter on Mortimer women in The Mortimers of Wigmore 1066-1485: Dynasty of Destiny (Logaston Press, 2023), and an article on medieval marriage in Mortimer Matters.