The geopolitics of incest in the Age of Conquest: Gerald of Wales through Geoffrey Chaucer

Shortly after the conquest of 1066, Norman royalty and baronage launched an assault on the political sovereignty of the princes of Wales. For the next three and a half centuries, the kings of England strove to establish themselves as high kings of Britain. One platform in the ideology of English imperialist control involved an accusation: the Welsh were guilty of practicing incest or, more precisely, they married within the prohibited degrees; they therefore deserved exile or, at the very least, conquest. Canterbury and its clerical delegates constituted the spiritual right arm of the military assault. Repeatedly charging the Welsh with incestus, church authorities brandished the rhetorical battering ram with which Normans, Anglo-Normans and Cambro-Normans (those of mixed Welsh and Norman blood) might conquer and govern the Welsh. This dissertation argues that certain pieces of literature mediated the charge of incest in such a way as to strengthen or undermine the English Crown's claims of overlordship. Using conciliar and epistolary documents to unpack the political context of Gerald of Wales's Itinerarium Kambriae and Descriptio Kambriae, the Middle Welsh Math Vab Mathonwy, the Middle Welsh and Middle English Seven Sages of Rome, and Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, I argue that incestus in medieval Britain was a heterogeneous, colonialist discourse through which the Welsh border materialized as a provocation to English conquest or as a limit on English power. Further, I trace the function of medieval sex-gender ideology within the discursive, geopolitical relation, arguing that the feminization of sexual excess either entrenched the Welsh further in political exile or, in redirecting the charge of incest from Welsh men to women, agitated for certain modes of Welsh political independence.