This chapter focuses mainly on travel writing from inside Wales, describing some of the ways in which these narratives record encounters that challenged and often transformed regional and parochial identities. Such travel narratives written from the inside place more emphasis on geography – on the landscape, the contours of the regions, the topographical boundaries and markers – than on the people within. The more frequent and more specific the place-names mentioned in a text, the more familiar the region is to the writers who map the terrain of their own homelands. In contrast, examples of accounts of travel into Wales from the outside exemplify the kinds of stereotypical and colonialist thinking about Wales and the Welsh people that kept it subject to the hegemonic power of England. From the outside, Wales is an undifferentiated land typically constructed as mysterious, even rebarbative, hostile to outsiders and difficult to navigate, while the Welsh themselves are untrustworthy and belligerent rebels whose very existence threatens the unity of the English kingdom.

Gerald of Wales was one of the greatest British writers of the Middle Ages, writing extensively on politics, literature, ethnography, and on himself. A man of many interests and linguistic competence in a number of languages, he felt himself sidelined in his desire to gain high office within the Church. His Speculum Ecclesiae and Gemma Ecclesiae hold a critical mirror up to the Church of his day, and contain much satirical humour. His works on the culture of Wales and Ireland, drawing on his own experiences and travels, are classics in their field. Gerald was also very learned in classical and patristic writings, often quoting St. Jerome who, like Gerald, suffered from a chip on his shoulder.

The book’s final chapter argues that the various elements of fairy belief as we might recognise it, including belief in an underground otherworld inhabited by sometimes pygmy-sized otherworlders, the connection between fairies and fate, and the sexual aspects of fairy activity, were brought together as a direct result of the Norman Conquest. The key role played in the Conquest by Breton nobles who felt a cultural affinity with the Cornish and Welsh, combined with the Normans’ desire to escape the English past, resulted in the crafting of a new ‘British’ identity for the whole island of Great Britain by authors with a Brittonic cultural background such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald of Wales and Walter Map. These authors united elements of English and Brittonic folklore to fashion a new fairy world that was subsequently adopted as the setting for literary romances and became the background to late medieval popular belief.

This chapter seeks to provide an explanation for the earliest Insular cult of St Katherine of Alexandria, which grew in popularity despite the absence of primary relics or an Insular pilgrimage site. Knowledge of St Katherine likely arrived in England prior to 1066, but her cult achieved widespread appeal following the Norman Conquest. This chapter proposes that this appeal was rooted in the congruencies between aspects of St Katherine’s character, which can be conceived of as generally ‘civilised’, and descriptions of ‘Englishness’ that rested on a conception of a cultural, rather than biological, national community. These depictions are evident in the circulating historical chronicles written during the twelfth century, which amalgamated English and Norman identities and differentiated the ‘English’ nation from its ‘barbarous’ neighbours. These same characteristics find expression in the vita of St Katherine and were highlighted liturgically, through music and text, testifying to their valence.

Because Christian history has distinct stages hinging on the Incarnation, the term “pagan” drafts non-Christians into particular temporal relationships with Christianity. This essay explores the ways that pagans are historically solicited for their virtue, beauty, rhetorical skill, knowledge, and capacity for engendering Christian self-reflection. It launches from the idea that pagan-ness in medieval writing performs a politics of historical othering, but it argues that many narratives that engage in such confessional border-keeping are tormented by contradictory responses of mourning and loss. As a result, in a variety of historical writings, pagans are overtly damned in order to be underhandedly “saved.”