Giraldus of Cambrai

GIRALDUS OF CAMBRAI. - Ecclesiastic and writer, also called Giraldus of Barri. Born at Manorbeer (Pembrokeshire), of a noble Welsh family, and died at the end of 1222 or in 1223. He studied in Paris and, having returned to England around 1172, became archdeacon of Brecknock in 1175. A first election as bishop of St. David's was not confirmed by King Henry II.

Giraldus returned to Paris to devote himself to the study of law; in 1185 he accompanied Prince John on the expedition to Ireland, during which he wrote his works Topographia Hibernica and Expugnatio Hiberniae. In 1188, together with Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury, he preached the Crusade in Wales with great success. A second appointment of Giraldus as bishop of St. David's was opposed by Hubert, archbishop of Canterbury, despite Giraldus's appeal to Innocent III, for which he came expressly to Rome. Disappointed by these conflicts, Giraldus in 1203 gave up the office of archdeacon to devote himself solely to literary activity.

Besides the aforementioned works on Ireland, and the Itinerarium Cambriae, his juridical work Dialogus or Distinctiones VII de iure et statu Menevensis Ecclesiae, written in 1199 during the controversy aroused by his second election as bishop, is worthy of mention. Among the many others that he wrote and of which he himself gave a catalogue (De libris a se scriptis catalogus brevior, ed. J. S. Brewer, I, London, pp. 421-23): Gemma ecclesiastica (a kind of Summa of disciplinary moral theology); Speculum Ecclesiae sive de monasticis ordinibus et ecclesiasticis religionibus; Distinctiones IV (describes, with exaggeration, the corruption of the ecclesiastics of his time); Libri de rebus a se gestis (1204-1205); Vitae episcoporum Lincolnensium; Vitae sex episcoporum coetaneorum, etc. Although full of erudition, Giraldus's writings are often little reliable because of the partiality that animates them.