The Cult of Saints in Wales: medieval Welsh-language sources and their transmission

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This project is concerned with medieval Welsh-language literature devoted to the veneration of saints. Saints, holy men and women who offered believers a direct link between heaven and earth, were central to the culture of Christian societies in pre-Reformation Europe and beyond, and study of the origins, nature and development of saints' cults is flourishing internationally. The Welsh sources, however, are at best partially known: some texts have never been edited, others languish in inaccessible publications, and many are available only to Welsh-speakers. By producing a freely available online digital resource, with editions and English translations of the 100 or so texts which make up the corpus, we aim to delineate a significant tradition, and to make it widely available for comparative study.The Welsh tradition is a particularly interesting one. Any visitor to the country knows that it is a 'land of saints' - Padarn, Dewi, Illtud and the rest crowd onto the map in a way quite unlike most parts of Europe. Native Welsh saints are numerous and their stories often colourful and compelling: Beuno, skilled in replacing severed heads; Collen, who holds talks in the castle of the King of the Underworld; Cynhafal, renowned for the slaying of the famous giant Benlli Gawr and praised for his help in soothing rheumatism. Moreover, as elsewhere, international saints are accepted and sometimes given a local setting: Margaret of Antioch suffered martyrdom in Monmouthshire according to one fifteenth-century poet, for instance. Such tales give an insight into the tastes, beliefs, concerns and fears of those who wrote and read or heard them. They also bring to life a detailed medieval landscape because the deeds of the saints tend to be tied to particular churches, landscape features and place-names, many of which can still be recognised.The body of Welsh-language material consists of three main genres, two of which are highly unusual from an international perspective. The 60 or so poems addressed to saints are apparently a unique response to the phenomenon of cults from within the strongly rooted Welsh institution of praise poetry. Similarly the collections of saints' pedigrees - lists, usually regionally arranged, giving family relationships and occasional further associations - are paralleled in western Europe only in Ireland: again their development must be linked to a pre-existing tradition of secular genealogical collections in both Wales and Ireland. The third text-type is much more international: prose lives of saints, some 34 of which survive in Welsh, many, if not all of them translated or adapted from Latin originals, though in a good number of cases the originals either do not survive, or have not been identified. Here is an opportunity to study in detail how the Welsh tradition assimilated a genre, and indeed individual texts, well-known from elsewhere.This project, then, aims in the first place to present editions of all of these texts, with extensive bilingual notes and full translations into English (and also, in the case of the verse, into modern Welsh). The introduction to each text will discuss its date, authorship, manuscript context(s), and its relationship to other texts and traditions both in Wales and elsewhere. There will be digital images of many of the manuscripts and separate discussions of the more important codices.The greater aim is to raise awareness of the interest and importance of these Welsh sources both inside and outside Wales. The website, which will host the digital edition, will also hold a range of related material (such as medieval and modern images of the saints and maps that show dedications and place-name patterns) designed to be of interest to a wide range of audiences. The work will be further advertised by a programme of conferences, open days around the country and an exhibition at the National Library of Wales.