Medieval Welsh Manuscripts

Citation

James, S. (2001), "Medieval Welsh Manuscripts", Library Review, Vol. 50 No. 3, pp. 146-159. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2001.50.3.146.9

This is not a carefully planned overview of its subject, but a bringing together of articles and lectures by the foremost scholar of his subject. The preface indicates that the five general articles in Part 1 were intended “for particular non‐specialist audiences”, so that there is some repetition: “they will emerge in the best light if not read in quick succession”. That said, Daniel Huws is the leading authority on Welsh medieval manuscripts, a former keeper of manuscripts at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, so that an extensive collection of his papers (two translated from Welsh into English) gives a still pretty comprehensive overview.

Part 1, “General”, comprises six items ranging from a general survey through Welsh vernacular books (1250‐1400) to the transmission of the poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym. To give an example of the attractions of Huws’s own writing, the opening sentence of this paper is worth quoting: “Kowloon Park on a spring morning may be as good a place as any to begin writing a paper about the transmission of the poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym, which is to be published in a Festschrift for one whose heart has found a home in Byzantium.” The subject may be scholarly, but that does not preclude accessible, even attractive, writing. Part 2 carries eight studies of single manuscripts, among them a Welsh manuscript of Bede’s De Natura Rerum, the Tintern Abbey Bible and Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch (the White Book of Rhydderch). The final section comprises two articles on collectors (Robert Vaughan and Sir Thomas Mostyn). An appendix lists other publications on Welsh medieval manuscripts by Huws not included in this volume (the majority, naturally, in Welsh), and an index of manuscripts is followed by a comprehensive general index.

Scholarly, of course, it is, and often detailed, but the scholarship is generally worn lightly enough. Palaeography and codicology are the core of the book (the illustrations of scripts are reproduced actual size, even though that necessitates cropping page images), but the literary and historical contexts are always present. Obviously this is a volume of great significance to Welsh studies but, as the concerns and identities of smaller nations within greater Europe (and within its major political units) take on greater contemporary significance, so too these studies also illuminate wider discussion of the medieval book.