Translating Cambrensis : the history of the late medieval English Conquest of Ireland

Abstract

This thesis examines the fifteenth-century English translation of Giraldus Cambrensis’s twelfth-century Expugnatio Hibernica. Interrogating the extant manuscript corpus of this narrative, the Conquest of Ireland, allows us to explore the reception and dissemination of this hugely significant text in the historiography of medieval Ireland. Examining the cultural context for the translation and the political and social circumstances of some of its known readers provides us with an opportunity’ to uncover various ways that late medieval and early modern readers of this corpus could understand Ireland’s past. The translation of this historical text into the English vernacular in Ireland allows us to glimpse the articulation of English community' identity in Ireland in the late middle ages.