Sources and References
The original manuscript of Historia Divae Monacellae has not survived, but later copies from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exist and are the main source of the story today.
The effigy of Saint Melangell in the church is datable to c.1400 which takes her story back before the manuscript sources.
A scholarly edition of the text of the Historia with discussion by Huw Pryce appeared in Montgomeryshire Collections 82 (1994) pp. 23-40. This volume also contains articles about the church and older historical deposits in the valley.
Huw Pryce concludes that the unknown author of the Historia was "familiar with medieval texts in both Latin and Welsh and had access to local traditions, and perhaps even documents, at Pennant Melangell."
He is of the opinion that is was composed in the area.
A text of the Historia is available online HERE
Melangell is also listed in later versions of Bonedd y Saint (thirteenth century).
There are references to Melangell in the poems of Lewys Glyn Cothi and Guto'r Glyn (poets writing in Welsh in the fifteenth century).
References to hares as 'Melangell's Lambs' and the fact that they were not hunted in the valley occur in a letter of Thomas Price in the seventeenth century and in Thomas Pennant's Tours Through Wales in the eighteenth century.
Cewri Cymru /Welsh Giants ed Chris grooms (1993) includes the valley of Pennant Melangell as a location of a giantess and the flat rock on which Melangell slept as the the giantess's bed.
The effigy of Saint Melangell in the church is datable to c.1400 which takes her story back before the manuscript sources.
A scholarly edition of the text of the Historia with discussion by Huw Pryce appeared in Montgomeryshire Collections 82 (1994) pp. 23-40. This volume also contains articles about the church and older historical deposits in the valley.
Huw Pryce concludes that the unknown author of the Historia was "familiar with medieval texts in both Latin and Welsh and had access to local traditions, and perhaps even documents, at Pennant Melangell."
He is of the opinion that is was composed in the area.
A text of the Historia is available online HERE
Melangell is also listed in later versions of Bonedd y Saint (thirteenth century).
There are references to Melangell in the poems of Lewys Glyn Cothi and Guto'r Glyn (poets writing in Welsh in the fifteenth century).
References to hares as 'Melangell's Lambs' and the fact that they were not hunted in the valley occur in a letter of Thomas Price in the seventeenth century and in Thomas Pennant's Tours Through Wales in the eighteenth century.
Cewri Cymru /Welsh Giants ed Chris grooms (1993) includes the valley of Pennant Melangell as a location of a giantess and the flat rock on which Melangell slept as the the giantess's bed.