University of Wales Press – förlag

When one thinks about medieval animals, snails rarely come to mind. Just as history has long had its biases, so has the study of animals – both have long focused on the ‘crowned heads’. A focus on the seemingly insignificant, on the small and the frail, offers a fresh point of view. This book studies the uses and representations of medieval snails, spanning material culture, medicine and gastronomy as well as a great variety of texts and images – taking into consideration bestiaries, sermons, poems and insults, as well as marginalia, sculpture, paintings and painted ceilings. Observing the Middle Ages from the viewpoint of a snail can be surprising, and lead us to delve into material everyday life as well as the core of culture-building. This study concludes with a novel reading of the famed ‘snail-combat motif’, in which a knight cowers faced with a ferocious mollusc, making a connection between Gothic marginalia and a new, most malleable cultural expression: the meme.

After Dunkirk the British Army was broken, the country isolated and invasion imminent. German Military Intelligence was sat the task of recruiting collaborators from among Welsh nationalists to sabotage military and civilian installations ahead of the landing. Strategic deception was one of the few weapons left. To fool the Germans into believing Britain was ready and able to repel invaders when in fact it had only the weapons salvaged from Dunkirk, MI5 invented an imaginary cell of Welsh saboteurs led by a retired police inspector.

A comprehensive study of the medieval tale Peredur, comprising six articles in Welsh and one in English by renowned scholars exploring the history of the manuscript, its language and style, together with the social and European context of the text, thus throwing new light on the tales of the Mabinogion in general.

Queer for Fear analyses the relationship queer people have to horror film, building upon decades of theory that previously emphasised horror’s queerness as being subtextual, allegorical and figurative. This groundbreaking interdisciplinary empirical study of the LGBTQ+ community not only offers the first inclusive understanding of the horror-loving queer spectator’s opinions, habits and tastes, but also evidences how and why queers have a distinctive relationship to horror. Leveraging original survey data, in-depth oral histories and theory, Petrocelli evidences that queer people have ontological connections to the horror genre, and concludes that horror is queer to the queer spectator. This study also establishes that queer spectators actively engage with horror to work through their trauma, knowingly have a camp relationship to horror, and joyously commune through horror screenings featuring drag performance. Queer for Fear is an overdue contribution to the fields of queer, film, horror, trauma, camp and live cinema studies.

This book explores how monsters articulate questions about the sacred in nineteenth-century Irish Gothic literature. The relationship between religion and Gothic literature has traditionally been approached through denominational readings, but this study proposes how Irish Gothic texts from Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer to Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ and Bram Stoker’s Dracula resist being inscribed into particular doctrinal frameworks. Abandoning allegorical interpretations, Theological Monsters proposes that real-life theologies do not translate into the fictional ones articulated across these texts. The focus is on revealing how the bodies of monsters make real and tangible otherwise abstract concepts associated with God and the afterlife, and on identifying monstrosity as a valuable way to uncover knowledge of the divine in nineteenth-century Irish Gothic literature. What follows is an original reassessment of three canonical writers – Maturin, Le Fanu and Stoker – highlighting their fictional theological exercises.

This is the first comprehensive study of St Fagans Castle, an Elizabethan country house in Cardiff which is of twofold significance as a Grade I-listed building, and home to St Fagans National Museum of History since 1948. The house was built by a local lawyer named Dr John Gibbon in about 1580, and was one of the first symmetrical country houses in Wales influenced by the Italian Renaissance. This study takes a multi-period and cross-disciplinary approach to telling the story of St Fagans, with chapters spanning the twelfth to the twentieth century, and interrelated sections on architectural history, garden history and ownership. Key themes explored in the work include the impact of the Italian Renaissance on country houses in Wales; the architectural distinction of country houses in Wales, especially in comparison with English country houses; the contribution of women to architectural and garden developments at St Fagans; and the colonial connection at St Fagans.

This study of Bram Stoker focuses on Stoker as a Gothic writer. Identified with Dracula, Stoker is largely responsible for taking the Gothic away from medieval castles and placing it at the center of modern life. The study examines Stoker's contribution to the modern notion of Gothic and thus to the history of popular culture and demonstrates that the excess generally associated with the Gothic is Stoker's way of examining the social, economic, and political problems. His relevance today is his depiction of problems that continue to haunt us at the beginning of the twenty first century. What makes the current study unique is that it privileges Stoker's use of the Gothic but also addresses that Stoker wrote seventeen other books plus numerous articles and short stories. Since a number of these works are decidedly not Gothic, the study puts his Gothic novels and short stories into the perspective of everything that he wrote. The creator of Dracula also wrote The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, a standard reference work for clerks in the Irish civil service, as well as The Man and Lady Athlyne, two delightful romances. Furthermore, Stoker was fascinated with technological development and racial and gender development at the end of the century as well as in supernatural mystery. Indeed the study demonstrates that the tension between the things that can be explained rationally and the things that cannot is important to our understanding of Stoker as a Gothic writer.

Crime writers from the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) have become some of the most widely read authors of the 1990s and 2000s. Yet books by such authors as Henning Mankell, Liza Marklund, Karin Fossum, and Anne Holt have also tantalized readers, because many of them do not know the cultures of the Nordic countries. As the first study in English of Nordic crime fiction, "Scandinavian Crime Fiction" spells out the context into which Nordic crime fiction fits through thirteen articles on the history, aesthetics, and film and television adaptation of Nordic crime fiction.

This book adopts an Eastern or Chinese perspective on Alexis de Tocqueville’s political thought, highlighting the ‘aristocratic’ nature of his theory of freedom; and, as it does to, it takes the great traveller of nineteenth-century Europe to the East. What would that traveller see in China? What kind of freedom would be identified in Chinese social contexts? And how would Confucianism figure in today’s politics? This book departs from the usual present-day distinction between democracy and authoritarianism, to analyse how ‘equality of conditions’ has affected both China and the West, albeit in different forms. It rejects the ‘End of History’ perspective as both false and dangerous, arguing in the Tocquevillian spirit that ‘democracy’, although inevitable for human societies, it is not an ‘end’ but rather a condition according to which we must adjust ourself in order to stay free, whether in the West or in the East.

This book is an entertaining, informative and enchanting introduction to its subject – just as those medieval banes of the farmyard, the Fox and the Vixen, were enchanting in escapades from fables and funny tales, from beastly epic poems and bestiaries, and from medieval material culture (in Danish wall-paintings and Dutch manuscript illustrations and statues, stained-glass and Italian mosaics). There exist books on medieval fox stories and on the animal’s iconography, which are important themes in this study, but this book is the first holistic approach to all types of manifestations of foxes in medieval culture – from medical recipes and fur trade, to Bible commentaries and hunting manuals.

This study ranges R. S. Thomas’s career, and includes a study of unpublished early notebooks; a comparison of his Manafon poems with a contemporary sociological account of a similar region; reflections on his interest in Native American history; an exploration of his poetic relationship with Geoffrey Hill; and a survey of his enduring image in Welsh poetic culture. One of the book’s recurrent themes is Thomas’s role as cultural warrior representing a marginalised nation – a crucial aspect often overlooked, not least because readers may lack the relevant historical, cultural and political context to appreciate it. With a consideration of his influence on one major Welsh contemporary religious poet, the volume concludes with a reflection on the revealing light thrown on his poetry by Thomas’s lifelong interest in Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life.

Brittany presents a paradox: the region was incorporated into France in 1532, and has never known a substantial nationalist movement. Yet, in recent years, signs of a sense of separation from France are growing clearer. This paradox raises some fundamental questions about the processes of nation formation. This work provides an introduction to identity politics in Brittany, analysing its special status within France: the region forms at once a western border and a potential rival centre to Paris. These themes are explored through a discussion of representations of Brittany: in published forms, such as in literature, in political debates, but also in popular forms such as through religious pardons, through republican festivals and through popular protest.

Ranging from studies of the influence of desert eremiticism upon a variety of expressions of religious enclosure in England to the sexualized spirituality of the high Middle Ages, this book contains essays that demonstrate how discourses of anchoritic enclosure were utilized to different ends at different periods throughout the Middle Ages.

A translation of Sophocles's play Electra, from the Greek into Welsh. Electra tells the story of the revenge Orestes and Electra take on their mother, Clytemnestra, for the murder of their father Agamemnon, after he returns from the Trojan War. Reprint; first published in January 1984.

At the present day the science of geology is being studied more thoroughly and by more people than ever before, its advance has never been more significant. Obviously it is of the first importance that its nomenclature and terminology - growing all the time - should be clearly understood and appreciated; yet it is just here that study and publication have not kept up with the general progress. A book of this kind is therefore needed, and the present one has claims to be a pioneer. Some fifteen hundred names and terms have been carefully selected for critical consideration, a special feature being the copious quotations and references which are scattered over the whole field of geological literature (chiefly British), ancient and modern. Many of the more significant works in the history of British geology are thus brought into prominence. The "Dictionary" is meant not so much for occasional reference or for the seeking of the meaning of every out-of-way word; its aim, rather, is to be useful companion', ever ready for consultation and for the provoking of lines of thought and investigation.

Welsh Surnames is the first full-scale study of Welsh surnames and is both a classification and a dictionary. Based on Welsh, Latin and English texts, on parish registers and local histories, it traces the growth of a Welsh surnaming pattern in Wales and the Border at the end of the Middle Ages. This historical picture is completed by evidence taken from modern sources such as electoral registers from Wales and western England, surnames from Welsh and London newspapers, and telephone directories.The book opens with a classification of the various kinds of Welsh surnames besides the innumerable examples of the well-known Welsh patronymic surname; surnames from hypocoristic forms, from anglicisations and approximations of Welsh names, from the forenames of women, from place-names, and many others. This is followed by a dictionary of Welsh surnames which also gives attention to variations and corruptions of the original names. Welsh Surnames is aimed both at the specialist and the general reader as an invaluable tool not only for the historian or the genealogist but also the geographer and sociologist.

Christine Pagnoulle's commentary provides a detailed study of eight among David Jones's more accessible poems: those pieces in fact which he reluctantly detached from his work-in-progress and released for publication between 1955 and his death in 1974. It elucidates difficult passages, relates them to his other works, whether poems, essays, or drawings, and shows how David Jones's vision of the world in the middle of our century bears on our present concerns. While developing orignal interpretations this commentary also integrates previous critical approaches into a comprehensive overview. It will thus be welcome reading for specialists of David Jones's poetry, and will also be of interest to those readers who are discovering or still have to discover his work.

Gerald's own testimony is used extensively in this book to introduce various themes from medieval life, especially in relation to Wales. The book looks at twelfth-century Wales - its land and society, the Norman invasion of Ireland, the Third Crusade, the troubled reign of Henry II and the Welsh Church. Gerald himself was a vitally important figure in the story of the Welsh Church at this time.

The second volume of a dictionary of the Welsh language. It presents in alphabetical order the vocabulary of the Welsh language from the remnants of old Welsh, through the abundant literature of the Mediaval and modern periods.To order parts of the Second Edition visit our Librarians page.

Gwent is sometimes presented as the most Anglicized county of Wales. This book corrects the perspective by tracing the Welsh cultural tradition of the county. The author recounts the work of the Cymreigyddion Society of the mid-1800s; the contribution of Gwent's poets, authors and publishers; and the events of the National Eisteddfodau held in Newport (1897), Abergavenny (1913), Pontypool (1924), and Ebbw Vale (1958). Finally, she discusses the language and culture in Gwent today.

The proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Celtic Studies held at Swansea in 1987.

The pace and extent of England's conversion to protestantism between 1530 and 1570 is a subject of lively controversy among historians. In this study the reader is guided through the interpretations of rival scholars, and the complex events of those years. The English Reformation grew out of political action, the existing tensions between secular and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and the indigenous heretical tradition, namely Lollardy. The dramatic events of the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland also introduced radical and unfamiliar ideas, which were then adapted to the circumstances of the English Church. The establishment of these ideas down to 1570 is analysed in detail with documentary illustration.

The subject of the origins of the French Revolution is one of the most important and controversial themes in European history. This fresh critical appraisal begins with a masterly exposition and assessment of recent scholarly debate on the subject, followed by a lucid analysis, supported by documentary evidence, of the multiple stresses which undermined the Old Regime. The author concludes that a revolution was unavoidable because the Old Regime was incapable of reforming fundamental defects in its political structures, but it was the contingent circumstances of 1788-9 that made the Revolution unexpectedly radical.