"Entirely outside the world": Rhetoric, legitimacy, and identity in the biography of Gruffudd ap Cynan.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This thesis studies the twelfth-century biography of a Welsh king as a source for understanding rhetorical constructions of political identity and cultural values in medieval Wales. Previous critical approaches to the Historia Gruffudd vab Kenan have focused more on establishing its accuracy as a historical source than on its rhetorical and narrative strategies. My study begins by locating the Historia within the literary genre of secular royal biography as it developed from classical and Carolingian models. I take as my starting point the assumption that biographical writing did not necessarily record history or document the psychological development of a subject, but instead belonged to the class of rhetoric called epideictic. Aristotle defined epideictic as a type of persuasive speech that moves an audience through emotional appeals and displays of eloquence rather than logical argument. I suggest that viewing Gruffudd's biography as an example of this mode of rhetoric raises the possibility that it was more than a literary memorial, an encomium, or a life history. I argue that the Historia should be viewed as a dynamic political text that lends insight into the specific ways that its authors and audiences defined and understood their communal identity and cultural values. After establishing the Historia's debts to the genre of medieval biography and exploring some of its general rhetorical techniques, I focus on the question of how epideictic strategies of identification and dissociation work in the narrative. I analyze the way group identity and values are developed through leitmotifs of legitimacy and foreignness, and note the changes in emphasis that pertain between the Latin and vernacular Welsh versions of the narrative. The final chapter examines the context of the biography's reception in the twelfth century, soon after Gruffudd ap Cynan's death. Documentary evidence for the reign of Gruffudd's son, Owain Gwynedd, suggests that the biography was part of a larger strategy in which Owain actively promoted a new sense of Welsh communal identity and fashioned a new political role for himself during a period when Wales faced significant political and military pressure from Henry II of England.