Wales and the Wider World

Here is an offering to the memory of two fine Welsh historians: Sir Rees Davies (1938–2005) of Oxford, and Sir Glanmor Williams (1920–2005) of Swansea. By a trick of fate, the latter appears in his own memorial volume. He died after presenting a contribution for R.R. Davies, so the editors chose to commemorate not one scholar but two. Nevertheless, there is something slightly curious about the book in question, since Festschriften to both men already exist. Power and Identity in the Middle Ages, edited by Huw Pryce and John Watts (2007; rev. ante, cxxiv [2009], 390–92), was published as a tribute to Rees Davies, while Glanmor Williams had his long before as Welsh Society and Nationhood, edited by R.R. Davies, R.A. Griffiths, I.G. Jones, and K.O. Morgan (1984). There are some odd consequences of that: R.R. Davies was famous as Wales's chronicler from the eleventh century to the fifteenth, and in particular for his studies of its Marcher lordships. Yet we find almost nothing on this in Wales and the Wider World, which contains few references to Davies's writings. Similarly, Glanmor Williams was an authority on sixteenth-century Wales, but there is not much on that either. Nor are we given bibliographies of writings by the dedicatees. So this book hardly attends to the actual work of those it honours, instead presenting papers on Wales from Roman times to the present

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