Out on the fringe: Wales and the history of science

Iwan Rhys Morus

doi:10.1017/s0007087420000655

Abstract

Imagine a scene sometime in the 1750s in the depths of west Wales. This was wild country. Even a century later, George Borrow called it a 'mountainous wilderness … a waste of russet-coloured hills, with here and there a black craggy summit'. Through this desolation rides the Reverend William Williams. As he rode, he read-and the book in his saddlebags on this occasion was William Derham's Astro-Theology, first published some twenty years earlier. Williams was a leading figure in the Methodist revolution that had been sweeping through Wales for the past two decades. Disenchanted with an Anglican Church that seemed increasingly disconnected-culturally and linguistically-from their everyday lives, and attracted by powerful and charismatic preachers like Williams himself, men and women across Wales turned to Methodism. They organized themselves into local groups worshipping in meeting houses rather than in their parish churches. Leaders like Williams usually had a number of such groups under their care, and spent much of their time on horseback, travelling between widely scattered communities to minister to their congregations. That Williams read in the saddle is well known. As shall become clear, he had certainly read Derham's book as well. It is not too much of an imaginative leap, therefore, to picture him reading about God's design of the cosmos as he rode through the Welsh hills-and it is a good image with which to begin a discussion about Wales, science and European peripheries.

Highlights

88 Iwan Rhys Morus just how fine-grained is the spatiality of science
Mainly known as a highly prolific writer of hymns, he was a key figure in Welsh Methodism and an important protagonist in Welsh religious history.[6]
His hymns played a vital role in the broader eighteenth-century revival of Welsh literature.[7]. While his religious and literary contributions are well known, historians of Welsh culture, and Williams’s biographers, have had rather less to say about his concern with natural philosophy

Summary

Iwan Rhys Morus*

Imagine a scene sometime in the 1750s in the depths of west Wales. This was wild country. Just as the territory he covered on horseback was marginal land on the periphery of empire, so have his scientific interests been regarded as being on the margins of Williams’s broad range of concerns It is this apparent marginality – both of science to the main thrust of William Williams’s ambitions, and of the space he traversed to cement those ambitions to the mainstream of natural-philosophical culture – that makes his horseback readings such a good place to start thinking about how to think about Wales, the history of science and peripheries. Mid- and west Wales, for example, might appear peripheral from the perspective of an imperial metropolis, but its inhabitants might just as plausibly regard the imperial metropolis as peripheral to their own preoccupations.[12] Williams, in that terrain, was himself a vector for the circulation of knowledge He played a key role in the ways in which his congregations and readers encountered natural philosophy. It was a reminder of just how central to the world’s affairs and God’s creation they really were

Assimilation and distinction

The matter of Wales