This is a most welcome addition to the Cambridge Histories, and one which fills an obvious and long-standing gap. We have here an excellent multi-author volume, concise, stimulating and provocative, ranging in period from the earliest written records to the verbal art of today. The book has six main sections, each introduced by a historical overview of the period covered, and followed by a series of short articles: c.600-1450 has six articles, c.1540-1700 and c.1700-1850 each have four, c.1850-1945 has six, c.1945-2000 has seven, and post-1997 has two. These are all usefully book-ended by an introduction and afterword by the editors. As well as to literature written in Wales, attention is necessarily paid to works from other areas: there is of course the earliest Welsh-language poetry considered to have been composed in the early medieval "Old North" beyond Hadrian's Wall, but later centuries saw important works emerging from Italy (Angharad Price), London (Geraint Evans), and the extensive diaspora of the Americas and Australia (Melinda Gray). Thematically, the volume ranges wide and probes deep, with detail and depth increasing as it moves towards the living concerns of the present.
A notable decision has been made to treat literature in English and Welsh side-by-side, not only in the same volume but often in the same chapters: here we see the adoption of a methodology glimpsed also in the Cambridge History of Irish Literature, one whose positive aim is to give, in theory at least, equal status to the senior language currently minoritised. The "literature of Wales," we read in the editors' introduction, is "Welsh literature in both languages," and it is stated unambiguously that "[t]his book aims to identify a new modern canon...in both languages" (2). There is much to be lauded in this approach, and it may even be progressive: is not an act of deminoritisation a welcome one of decolonisation? The problem with such a position is that it may remain the position of the contemporary majority: there are--and have been--no "both languages" in Wales, unless a host of other languages are teleologically ignored. A further problem with the "two languages" approach is the classic problem of "bilingualism," in that writers in--and critics of--Welsh by now all have facility in English, whereas the reverse is regrettably not always true. This would not be the case in a truly bilingual (and fully post-colonial) culture. While one may occasionally feel that contributors neglect Welsh-language scholarship, it is to be noted with relief that Welsh-language material is almost without exception cited in the original, with translation. The majority audience of this book may not read Welsh, but those who do will also need to use it.
Such issues are raised, demonstrated and often tackled head-on in many of the chapters, and the introduction and (perhaps especially) the afterword do provide a good theoretical frame. Indeed, the important polemics surrounding the definition of central terms such as "Welsh literature" itself, or even "Welsh" at all, both culturally and politically, have been front and centre in both fiction and criticism since long before Romanticism and after post-colonialism. Indeed, two quite different articles concern the origin of Welsh writing in English: Geraint Evans, with a linguistic and historical focus, discusses "Tudor London and the Origins of Welsh Writing in English," while Diana Wallace in "Inventing Welsh Writing in English" looks rather to the abandonment of the term 'Anglo-Welsh' in the mid-twentieth century. In other chapters of clear and related importance, Andrew Webb investigates "R.S. Thomas, Emyr Humphreys, and the Possibility of a Bilingual Culture," and Alice Entwistle's concluding chapter considers "Writing the Size of Wales."
With apologies to those authors among the 30-odd not given an explicit mention, I devote the rest of this review to areas probably of most interest to readers of The Medieval Review. Scholars of Welsh--and medievalists in particular--might perhaps feel short-changed by this volume, given that the Cambridge Histories afford English literature of the Early Middle Ages almost exactly as many pages as the entirety of Welsh literature. This is indicative of the constraints placed on the current project, but when the CHWL is taken on its own merits the glass may be found to be even more than half full. Few scholars of the Mabinogi will be uninterested in the recent developments of the tradition (even if they may become frustrated by doing so), and medievalists working in all languages will be fascinated to see the continuation of central elements of pre-Norman poetic culture at the heart of today's literary aesthetics and even ideologies. The side-by-side presentation in a single volume like this of languages, periods and genres is a metaphor in itself for the Benjaminian "shooting through" of each by the other in the Welsh literary tradition. This will not please everybody, but perhaps it should. There is certainly much to discuss.
The medieval section is successful and energetic, sending a near-millennium flashing by in six succinct 20-25-page chapters with a historical introduction by Euryn Rhys Roberts. "Britain, Wales, England, c.600–1450" provides a succinct summary of key social and political changes during these turbulent centuries, being on the one hand the swelling and shattering of hopes of an independent Welsh polity, and on the other the continuation of a characteristic long arc of cultural identity. The sixth-century historiography of Gildas echoes, Roberts reminds us, in the post-Glyndŵr poetry of Guto'r Glyn, the soldier-poet whose floruit bridged the Wars of the Roses. Readers may consult Angharad Price's later chapter on "Welsh Humanism after 1536" to witness how the arc of historiographical traditions continues beyond the Renaissance.
Helen Fulton's "Britons and Saxons: The Earliest Writing in Welsh" gives necessary consideration to Latin material (a language of Wales, we must remember, even if not one of the putative "both"), and summarises a number of major manuscripts. Written with consideration for students of English, milestones and comparisons are carefully accessible, and while this chapter is more historical and descriptive than specifically literary or palaeographic, good final use is made of Rosenwein's concept of "emotional community" to suggest profitable interpretative directions. The most explicitly interpretative contribution to the section is Mark Williams' excitingly provocative "Magic and Marvels," in which he broadly surveys references in the literature to acts of natural, demonic and divine supernatural acts, before swiftly moving focus to the Mabinogi, and specifically the Fourth Branch. Williams emphasises that the author "was not merely rehearsing themes from traditional orally transmitted stories, but had brooded upon literary magic with his characteristic sober thoughtfulness" (61). This "sober thoughtfulness," argues Williams, in a manner reminiscent of his treatment elsewhere of Irish legends, allows the probing author to give Math nothing short of divine agency, thus "presciently anticipating [theological] anxieties which were to become widespread among European men of learning in the twelfth century" (68). Whether the author is in fact "anticipating" these anxieties depends on the date of the texts--a controversial issue far from solved--but even an "echoing" would not detract from the literary power Williams identifies here.
Diana Luft discusses the Mabinogion stories as a group, giving a useful summary of the current (lack of) consensus. Sensibly, she operates sceptically, reminding us that "[s]cholars do not agree on how to read these texts at the most basic level" (74). Consideration of the manuscript contexts of the tales leads to a focus on the threads of historiography seen here, concluding tantalisingly with similarities and differences found between the broadest vision of these texts and Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. Neatly, the next article explicitly treats of historiography: Catherine McKenna's "Court Poetry and Historiography Before 1282" provides an illuminating study of the importance of the native monastic institutions--and then especially the thirteen Welsh Cistercian houses--to the compilation and transmission of vernacular history. McKenna's article quickly and effectively outlines the numerous multilingual threads drawn together at centres across Wales, and explores the composition, transmission and compilation of the ideologically-central poetry sung at the royal courts. The explicitly historical documents, notes McKenna, "[t]ogether with the poetry and the narrative prose that were gathered in the great manuscript books of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries...would serve the citizens of the post-conquest principality as an essential constituent of sustained Welsh identity" (100). This identification of a multifaceted "Welsh identity"--often multilingual, and in many complex ways transpolitical, sustained by organised cultural networks and subject to creative fragmentation--is a note present throughout the volume, and held by Dafydd Johnston and Helen Fulton in the final two chapters of this section.
Johnston's "The Aftermath of 1282: Dafydd ap Gwilym and his Contemporaries" naturally looks to the Hendregadredd manuscript (NLW MS 6680B) as a symbol of continuity between the Age of the Princes, terminated by the Edwardian conquest, and that of a cultural world where literary patronage was sought in the houses of the landed nobility. The manuscript, compiled initially at Strata Florida, c.1300-c.1330, is in its various stages of compilation both a conscious, monastic gathering of the high art of the newly-ended royal age, and a private collection of contemporary literature, often in autograph. Johnston effectively describes the fusion of French, Welsh and English in the literature of the period, in lexical borrowings, original compositions and translation, from Bown of Hampton and the Charlemagne cycle, to Grail stories, the Elucidarium and Vitae. In poetry, the highly complex and ornate awdl metres used by the Poets of the Princes continue alongside an explosion of creativity in terms of form, genre and treatment of material. The apparently inexhaustible flexibility and undeniably beauty of the newcywydd metreprovides continuity for the next four centuries, and even beyond the decline of the traditional bardic order (issues treated well in later chapters by Katherine K. Olson, Gruffydd Aled Williams, Robert Rhys and Llŷr Gwyn Lewis). It is perhaps a shame that the CHWL lacks a detailed description of the unique metrical systems used in poetry from the medieval period to the present day: the "Glossary of Welsh Literary Terms" provided by the editors is somewhat frustrating, and occasionally misleading.
While not explicitly announced as such, Helen Fulton's final essay of the section, "Literary Networks and Patrons in Late Medieval Wales," is a very useful consolidation of issues raised in previous chapters concerning changing modes of literary production amid shifting political and ideological attitudes. Fulton here returns to the interest in manuscripts somewhat delicately brushed upon in her earlier article (and others), to explore how "poets, patrons, manuscript books, and the buildings in which they were made interacted in a social network that resulted in a particular form of cultural production" (129). This is a rich and illuminating chapter providing valuable insight into both the materiality and propaganda of the professional bardic culture. While it is unlikely that most readers will read sequentially, essay to essay, as reviewers often do, this is a productive movement. Picking chapters at whim will also be an enriching experience, as the individual vignettes each cast a lot of light; however, it is often true that inescapable gaps in one chapter which are filled in elsewhere in the volume, are not always clearly signposted either in the texts or in the footnotes. The index, while useful, is not always entirely reliable, and thus while there are rich paths through the sections, many will be discovered by chance. Repetition of material between chapters occasionally makes the linear journey a little circular, but often serves as useful recapitulation and will certainly not trouble the magpie reader, who will certainly find treasures.
There are also unfilled gaps in the book: this is unavoidable in a relatively small volume, and different readers will find various absences more egregious than others. I will not be the first to note the uneven treatment of key female writers: in a particularly problematic omission for readers of The Medieval Review, the inestimably important work of Gwerful Mechain is left undiscussed, and there are very strange absences in other periods (e.g., Cranogwen). I have no desire to list complaints, though: had the medieval literature of Wales been given the space afforded that of England--or even of Ireland--we might have more cause to bemoan lacunae. Clearly the map may not be equal in size to the territory, and as I have already emphasised, we have here a volume full of excellent and extremely useful material, which will take readers along new and fascinating paths.