Dr Jenny Day BA, MA, PhD

As a member of the ‘Sacred Landscapes of Medieval Monasteries’ project team, Jenny has been editing the poems addressed by Gutun Owain to two fifteenth-century abbots of Valle Crucis, and investigating what these and other poetic sources reveal about this important Cistercian abbey.

Jenny has worked on several other research projects at the Centre. She edited and translated Lives of St Martin of Tours, St David and St Mary of Egypt for the ‘Cult of the Saints in Wales’ project (2015–17), and for the ‘Flood and Flow’ project (2017–18) she collected and analysed water-related place-names from the Book of Llandaf, using these and literary sources to explore the ways in which water resources were exploited and perceived in medieval Wales.

Previously Jenny worked on a pilot project on neologisms for Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, and on the websites of the Poetry of Guto’r Glyn project, also at the Centre. She began her career as a scientist but, after studying part-time for a BA in Welsh at Aberystwyth University, she went on to complete a PhD there in 2010 on ‘Weapons in the Hengerdd and the Works of the Poets of the Princes’.

Jenny has an ongoing research interest in medieval Welsh poetry and in what it can reveal as a source for various aspects of life in the Middle Ages. She has published a variety of articles on the depiction of weapons and armour in poems ranging in date from the ‘Gododdin’ to the works of the late-medieval cywyddwyr, and is currently investigating the depiction of monastic life and the monastic estate in the poems of Gutun Owain and his contemporaries.

She has experience of editing and translating medieval prose and poetry, and a particular interest in the later textual history of saints’ Lives and how they were adapted for different audiences.

• ‘Buchedd Martin’ [a new edition and translation of the Welsh Life of St Martin], ‘The Cult of Saints in Wales’ website. (2020)
• ‘Ewin o ddur, onn a ddwg: y rhest gwaywffon a’r beirdd’, Dwned, 25 (2019), 11–45
• ‘Llachar fy nghleddau, lluch ydd ardwy—glew: rhai agweddau ar ddelweddaeth y cleddyf ym marddoniaeth yr Oesoedd Canol’, Dwned, 23 (2017), 41–77
• ‘Agweddau ar gwlt Martin o Tours mewn llenyddiaeth Gymraeg hyd c.1525’, Llên Cymru, 40 (2017), 3–39
• ‘Weapons and fighting in Y Gododdin’, Studia Celtica XLIX (2015), 121–47
• ‘Brigandines in two fifteenth-century request poems’, Studia Celtica XLVII (2013), 167–82
• ‘ “Arms of stone upon my grave”: weapons in the poetry of Guto’r Glyn’, in Dylan Foster Evans, Barry J. Lewis and Ann Parry Owen (eds.), ‘Gwalch Cywyddau Gwŷr’: Essays on Guto’r Glyn and Fifteenth-century Wales (Aberystwyth: Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, 2013), 233–81
• ‘Shields in Welsh poetry up to c.1300: decoration, shape and significance’, Studia Celtica XLV (2011), 27–52