External Grants
National Endowment for the Humanities, Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant, with Joshua Byron Smith, 2024-2026
Brut y Brenhinedd: Translating the Welsh Reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth
This project will provide scholarly editions and translations of the three earliest versions of the Middle Welsh text known as Brut y Brenhinedd (The Chronicle of the Kings).
American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 2021-2022
Memory on the Margins: Reimagining the Past in the Anglo-Welsh Borderlands
During this fellowship, I undertook the research and writing necessary to finish the monograph Reimagining the Past in the Borderlands of Medieval England and Wales.
Books
Challenging the standard view that England emerged as a dominant power and Wales faded into obscurity after Edward I’s conquest in 1282, this book considers how Welsh (and British) history became an enduringly potent instrument of political power in the late Middle Ages. Brought into the broader stream of political consciousness by major baronial families from the March (the borderlands between England and Wales), this inventive history generated a new brand of literature interested in succession, land rights, and the origins of imperial power, as imagined by Geoffrey of Monmouth. These marcher families leveraged their ancestral, political, and ideological ties to Wales in order to strengthen their political power, both regionally and nationally, through the patronage of historical and genealogical texts that reimagined the Welsh past on their terms. In doing so, they brought ideas of Welsh history to a wider audience than previously recognized and came to have a profound effect on late medieval thought about empire, monarchy, and succession.
Reviewed in The Review of English Studies
Imagination and Innovation in Medieval Celtic Literatures: Studies in Honour of Catherine A. McKenna (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2025). Editor, with Helen Fulton.
Brut y Brenhinedd: The Peniarth 44 Version of the Middle Welsh Brut (forthcoming, Liverpool University Press). Editor and translator, with Joshua Byron Smith.
Annales Cambriae: The Latin Chronicles of Medieval Wales. Boydell Medieval Texts (forthcoming, Boydell & Brewer). Editor, with Henry Gough-Cooper, Ben Guy, Owain Wyn Jones, and Paul Russell.
The Chronicles of Medieval Wales and the March: New Contexts, Studies and Texts. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe 31 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020). Editor, with Ben Guy, Owain Wyn Jones, and Rebecca Thomas.
Reviewed in Journal of British Studies, The Medieval Review, Journal of the Mortimer History Society, The Medieval Chronicle, Parergon, North American Journal of Celtic Studies
A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth. Brill’s Companions to European History 22 (Leiden: Brill, 2020). Editor, with Joshua Byron Smith.
Reviewed in Speculum, The Medieval Review, Parergon
Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age. Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities (London: Routledge, 2020). Editor, with Elaine Treharne and Benjamin Albritton.
Gerald of Wales: New Perspectives on a Medieval Writer and Critic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018). Editor, with A. Joseph McMullen.
Reviewed in Speculum, Review of English Studies, North American Journal of Celtic Studies
Articles
“Geoffrey of Monmouth in Medieval Ireland? Cambro-Norman Identity, Political Prophecy, and an Irish Sea Network.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 40 (2021) [2023]: 74-99.
“Chaucer’s Vision of the British Past: Literary Inheritance and Historical Memory in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.” Neophilologus 106 (2022): 331-47.
“Transnational Book Traffic in the Irish Sea Zone: A New Witness to the First Variant Version of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De gestis Britonum.” North American Journal of Celtic Studies 4:2 (2020): 131-62.
“Reading Geoffrey of Monmouth in Wales: The Intellectual Roots of Brut y Brenhinedd in Latin Commentaries, Glosses and Variant Texts.” Viator 49:3 (2018) [2019]: 103-28.
“From ‘The Matter of Britain’ to ‘The Matter of Rome’: Latin Literary Culture and the Reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth in Wales.” Arthurian Literature 33 (2016): 1-28.
“The Use of English Annalistic Sources in Medieval Welsh Chronicles.” Haskins Society Journal 26 (2015): 229-47.
“The Intersection of Ethnicity and Material Culture: Manuscripts, Book Shrines and Political Realities in Late Medieval Gaelic Ireland.” Studia Celtica Fennica 12 (2015): 21-34.
“Quotation, Revision, and Narrative Structure in Giraldus Cambrensis’s Itinerarium Kambriae.” Journal of Medieval Latin 24 (2014): 1-52.
“Rhetoric, Translation and Historiography: The Literary Qualities of Brut y Tywysogyon.” Quaestio Insularis 13 (2012): 78-103.
“Source Material, Mirabilia and the Bestiary Genre in Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica.” Fons Luminis 2 (2012): 39-67.
Book Chapters
“Practices of Translation and Adaptation in the Welsh Chronicle Brut y Tywysogion.” In Imagination and Innovation in Medieval Celtic Literatures: Studies in Honour of Catherine A. McKenna, ed. Helen Fulton and Georgia Henley (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2025), 203–14.
“The Reception of Gerald of Wales in Welsh Historical Texts.” In Memory and Nation: Writing the History of Wales, ed. Rebecca Thomas, Sadie Jarrett, and Katharine K. Olson (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2025), 37–55.
“The Uses of French in Medieval Wales.” In Medieval French Interlocutions: Shifting Perspectives on a Language in Contact, ed. Thomas O’Donnell, Jane Gilbert, and Brian Reilly (York: York Medieval Press, 2024), 237–52.
“Networks of Chronicle Writing in Western Britain: The Case of Worcester and Wales.” In Constructing History through the Conquest, Worcester c.1050-c.1150, ed. Francesca Tinti and David Woodman, Writing History in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2022), 227-70.
“Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Conventions of History Writing in Twelfth-Century England.” In A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Georgia Henley and Joshua Byron Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 291-314.
“The ‘Cardiff Chronicle’ in London, British Library, Royal MS 6 B. xi.” In The Chronicles of Medieval Wales and the March: New Contexts, Studies and Texts, ed. Ben Guy, Georgia Henley, Owain Wyn Jones, and Rebecca Thomas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 231-87.
“Gerald’s Circulation and Reception in Wales: The Case of Claddedigaeth Arthur.” In Gerald of Wales: New Perspectives on a Medieval Writer and Critic, ed. Georgia Henley and A. Joseph McMullen (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018), 223-42.
“Gerald of Wales: Interpretation and Innovation in Medieval Britain,” with A. Joseph McMullen. In Gerald of Wales: New Perspectives on a Medieval Writer and Critic, ed. Georgia Henley and A. Joseph McMullen (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018), 1-16.
“Through the Ethnographer’s Eyes: Rhetoric, Ethnicity and Quotation in the Welsh and Irish Works of Gerald of Wales.” In Rhetoric and Reality: Studies in Medieval Celtic Literature in Honor of Daniel F. Melia, ed. Paul Russell and Georgia Henley, CSANA Yearbook 11-12 (Colgate, NY: Colgate University Press, 2014), 63-74.
Forthcoming Book Chapters
“The Reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth as Political Influence.” Forthcoming in Pseudo-History Among the Celtic-Speaking Peoples: Medieval Propaganda? ed. Ben Guy and Patrick Wadden (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies).
“Digital Research in Medieval Celtic Studies: Successes, New Directions, and Opportunities.” Forthcoming in Digital Humanities Beyond Modern English, ed. Joseph Dexter and Pramit Chaudhuri.
“Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald of Wales, and Welsh Latin Writing.” Forthcoming in Teaching Celtic Literature in the General Education Classroom, ed. Matthieu Boyd and Melissa Ridley Elmes (Teaneck, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press).
“Gerald of Wales and Welsh Society.” Forthcoming in The Handbook of Medieval Wales, ed. Emma Cavell and Kathryn Hurlock (Leiden: Brill).
Journal Issues
Rhetoric and Reality: Studies in Medieval Celtic Literature in Honor of Daniel F. Melia, CSANA Yearbook 11-12 (2014). Colgate, NY: Colgate University Press. Editor, with Paul Russell.
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 33 (2014). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Editor, with Liam Brannelly and Kathryn O’Neill.
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 32 (2013). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Editor, with Deborah Furchtgott and Matthew Holmberg.
Quaestio Insularis 12 (2012). Cambridge, UK: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. Editor, with Simon A. Patterson and Joanne Shortt-Butler et al.
Short Pieces
“Gwerful Fychan.” In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages, ed. Michelle M. Sauer, et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
“Introducing Gerald of Wales: A Twelfth-Century Writer and Cleric.” In Mortimer Matters, a newsletter of the Mortimer History Society, 52 (2023): 8–9.
“Geoffrey of Monmouth.” In Routledge Resources Online – Medieval Studies, gen. ed. Hannele Klemettilä (London: Routledge, 2023).
“Welsh Writing Before 1500.” In Oxford Bibliographies in British and Irish Literature, ed. Andrew Hatfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
“Aneirin.” In The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, ed. Siân Echard and Robert Rouse et al. (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).
Translations
“The Burial of Arthur.” Single-manuscript edition, translation, and introduction, Global Medieval Sourcebook (Palo Alto: Stanford University, 2019).
Book Reviews
David Stephenson, Patronage and Power in the Medieval Welsh March: One Family’s Story. Speculum 99:3 (2024): 962-64.
Gerald of Wales, Instruction for a Ruler. De principis instructione, ed. and trans. Robert Bartlett. Speculum 95:3 (2020): 831-32.
Arthur in the Celtic Languages: The Arthurian Legend in Celtic Literatures and Traditions, ed. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan and Erich Poppe. Arthuriana 30:2 (2020): 126-28.
Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Prince of Wales, by J. Beverley Smith. Speculum 90:2 (2015): 586-88.
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3506-6179
Georgia Henley 