Bardic Poetry Research Articles

Michael Tippett: Specification of the Work for Orchestra and Soprano "Byzantia"

The purpose of the research is to reveal the deep image-sound layers and features of the Irish bardic tradition in the work of M. Tippett through the prism of the work for orchestra and soprano "Byzantium". The methodological basis of the research is historical-conceptual, hermeneutic method and comparative analysis of factual data based on the works of Thomas Weiskel, David Clark, Edward Venn, and Meirion Bowen. Scientific novelty. For the first time in the Ukrainian art history segment, M. Tippett's work for orchestra and soprano "Byzantium" was analysed with an emphasis on the dramaturgy of the composition, cyclical elements, metaphorical sound images, symbolism and characteristic features of the musical and poetic tradition of Irish bards. Conclusions. Biographical collisions of M. Tippett influenced his creative aspirations and attitude to the surrounding world. M. Tippett's aesthetic views are a dialogue between romantic aspirations and sceptical realism of the modern era. Michael Tippett's musical language absorbed both tradition and the entire palette of accumulated world musical experience, as well as duality of meanings, symbolism, imagery and conflict. The work analyses the composition for orchestra and soprano "Byzantium" by M. Tippet, which is based on the mosaic of images, the logical sequence of musical motifs, and cyclicity. It is necessary to highlight the fragmentary nature of musical sections, variable motifs, the presence of contrasting material, the symbolism of magical, changing life force as secular ephemerality, the destruction of the musical text using the technique of expansion and fragmentation. Thus, the composition "Byzantium" is a reincarnation of Irish cultural nationalism in the aspect of traditional forms of bardic poetry. The musical language of M. Tippett in the work "Byzantium" is based on the forms crystallised by the work of L. Beethoven and updated by the musical context of modern and postmodern.

Retiring Bards: The Motives Behind the Professional Bards’ Religious Compositions

About one-fifth of the extant corpus of Bardic poetry consists of poems on religious themes. Why did professional Bardic poets, who made their living from praising worldly patrons, expend so much effort on religious verse? This paper offers some possible explanations.

Retiring Bards: The Motives Behind the Professional Bards' Religious Compositions

Abstract: About one-fifth of the extant corpus of Bardic poetry consists of poems on religious themes. Why did professional Bardic poets, who made their living from praising worldly patrons, expend so much effort on religious verse? This paper offers some possible explanations.

Networking early modern Irish women

AbstractOver the last decade, network analysis has developed as an approach within digital humanities as a wider array of tools has become available to humanities scholars, and these approaches are now beginning to make an impact on the disciplines of history and English. This article presents an overview of different ways of approaching network analysis. It assesses recent projects to see how they accounted for gender in their datasets and what can be learnt about early modern women from these projects. It then looks at how projects in Ireland are engaging with network analysis, discussing the approaches used by RECIRC and introducing MACMORRIS's analysis of the Dictionary of Irish biography (D.I.B.) and the Bardic Poetry Database (B.P.D.), looking at how the latter is attempting to overcome the unconscious gender bias inherent in the D.I.B.'s selection of early modern lives from the period between 1541 and 1660. Finally, it points to some of the wider issues we as scholars face when engaging with this methodology, such as access to the required training and collaboration, arguing that while these are not unique challenges to the study of gender history in Ireland, they are important debates that can enhance scholarship in the field.

A Man of No Mean Standing: The Career and Legacy of Donnchad mac Briain (d. 1064)

This article offers a sympathetic appraisal of the career of Donnchad mac Briain, an overlooked eleventh-century king of Munster. In addition, it is argued that his association with the Crown of Ireland and position as a genuine and supposed ancestor of various Gaelic and Anglo-Irish families (as portrayed in bardic poetry and genealogies) suggests that he possessed a positive legacy during the medieval and early modern periods.

Negotiating across Legal and Cultural Borders: Aífe, Daughter of Diarmait Mac Murchada, King of Leinster, and Marriage, Motherhood and Widowhood in Twelfth-century Ireland and England

This article offers a sympathetic appraisal of the career of Donnchad mac Briain, an overlooked eleventh-century king of Munster. In addition, it is argued that his association with the Crown of Ireland and position as a genuine and supposed ancestor of various Gaelic and Anglo-Irish families (as portrayed in bardic poetry and genealogies) suggests that he possessed a positive legacy during the medieval and early modern periods.

Medieval Powys. Kingdom, principality and lordships, 1132-1293 by David Stephenson (review)

North American journal of Celtic Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (November 2018) Copyright © 2018 by The Ohio State University REVIEWS David Stephenson, Medieval Powys. Kingdom, principality and lordships, 1132–1293. Studies in Celtic History xxxv. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2016. ISBN 978–1–78327–140–5. 258 pp. $99.00 (hardback). Catherine McKenna Harvard University David Stephenson has made many contributions to the study of medieval Welsh history. Many Celticists will be familiar with his book on Political power in medieval Gwynedd (2014; an earlier edition, The governance of Gwynedd, was published in 1984). In the volume under review here, he has turned his attention to the kingdom of Powys, supposed site of the court of Cynddylan at Pengwern, home of the great twelfth-century poet Cynddelw, setting of Breuddwyd Rhonabwy. The introduction quite literally frames the medieval territory of Powys, establishing the particularity of its geographical situation, bordered as it was by Gwynedd, the March, and Deheubarth. As Stephenson shows, geography was the principal determining factor in the shifting alliances that have made Powys the favorite whipping boy of some nationalist historians of medieval Wales. His overview of the historiography of medieval Powys is telling, tracing the development of a prevailing narrative in which Powys was, at best, insignificant in the thirteenth-century drive toward a Wales united under the leadership of the princes of Gwynedd, and, at worst, a traitor to this cause, anachronistically conceptualized as ‘patriotic’. He concludes his introduction with a survey of the sources for the history of medieval Powys—chronicles, acta, charters, laws, and bardic poetry. The book is divided into two parts, the first providing an eight-chapter chronological narrative of the political history of Powys from the mid-eleventh through the end of the thirteenth century. Stephenson’s account of the fortunes of the descendants of Madog ap Maredudd brings into sharp focus the fact that the family of his nephew Owain Catherine McKenna [cmckenna@​ fas​ .harvard​ .edu] is Margaret Brooks Robinson Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Her research focuses on medieval Welsh poetry and narrative prose, and on Irish hagiobgraphy. She is one of the editors of the Cyfres beirdd y tywysogion. Reviews 187 Cyfeiliog and Owain’s son Gwenwynwyn, although reviled by nationalist historians for their failure to support the ambitions of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, was, in some ways, the most successful of the Welsh aristocratic families, as it survived the Conquest in possession of some of its lands. Although Powys re-appears in the historical record in the eleventh century after falling into obscurity in the ninth, Stephenson situates its emergence as a kingdom in the twelfth under Bleddyn ap Cynfyn and his son Maredudd; he regards accounts of eleventh-century Powys as likely reflecting the retrospective historiography of the thirteenth century. It was during the nearly thirty-year reign (1130–1160) of Maredudd’s son Madog that Powys took its place along with Gwynedd and Deheubarth as one of the three principal polities, to use Stephenson’s term, of medieval Wales. Madog built churches and castles, and, significantly, retained the services of the great poet Cynddelw. Cynddelw celebrated Madog and his court in two surviving eulogies and lamented his death in two marwnadau. In the latter part of his reign, Madog made a canny alliance with Henry II, but also shored up bonds with other Welsh princes by marrying a number of his daughters to their sons. The death of Madog’s designated heir at about the same time that he himself died led to the fragmentation of his realm. Whereas most historiography has focused on that fragmentation and the decline of Powysian glory, however, Stephenson emphasizes the stability and achievements of two of the successor polities, especially of southern Powys under Owain Cyfeiliog (ca. 1160–1197). He calls attention to the continuation of the ongoing ‘cultural flowering’ of Powys in the court of Owain Cyfeiliog, who is admired as the author of Hirlas Owain, a poem celebrating the members of his teulu in terms that vividly evoke Y Gododdin. Owain also established Strata Marcella, the first Cistercian monastery in Powys, and it is likely to have been during his reign that Cynddelw composed...

Guaranteeing what cannot be guaranteed. Defending and adapting bardic patronage in <em>Ag so an chomairce, a Chormaic</em> (ca. 1585) by Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn

This paper offers a historicized close reading of Ag so an chomairce, a Chormaic ‘Here is the guarantee, Cormac’ (ca. 1585) by Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn (ca. 1550–ca. 1591), a 27-quatrain appeal to loyalist Sligo lord Cormac Ó hEadhra to be the master-poet's guarantor under the legal mechanism of booking (a form of legal registration or recording of dependents or followers of a given lord). The paper argues that the poem richly repays close literary-critical attention of the kind not usually accorded bardic poetry, displaying a remarkable rhetorical and political artistry in its deeply traditional, yet simultaneously richly innovative, defense of the patronly relationship, the native nobility that upheld it, and the bardic institution itself, as all were under threat from the transformations wrought by the expanding Tudor state.

Eric Gidal, Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age (Univ. of Virginia Press, 2015) 240 + $39.50

Previous articleNext article No AccessEric Gidal, Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age (Univ. of Virginia Press, 2015) 240 + $39.50PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 48, Number 4Autumn 2017The Annual Review Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC48042412 Views: 4Total views on this site © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

History Repeating Itself: Men, Masculinities, and "His Story" in the Fiction of Micheál Ó Conghaile

History Repeating Itself:Men, Masculinities, and "His Story" in the Fiction of Micheál Ó Conghaile Sorcha de Brún (bio) The status of Irish as a minority language and recognition of its broken and often traumatized past give it a distinctly alive, almost virtual sense of reality in contemporary Irish-language letters. This recognition prompts the feeling that, in language as in life, in the words of the poem by Seamus Heaney, "Anything can happen, the tallest things … / Be overturned, those in high places daunted, / Those overlooked regarded" (10). Yet despite its minority status the Irish language is far from overlooked: Irish, or an Ghaeilge, is a feminine noun, and thus it should come as no surprise that in contemporary Irish criticism the female experience and the feminine—in terms of both writers and characters—have been the subject of exploration. To be sure, a number of Irish-language women prose writers and dramatists who began publishing in the 1950s and 1960s have not yet received the critical attention that their works deserve, and this absence of critical attention is all the more striking in an era of Irish-language feminist criticism.1 Nevertheless, writing in 2005, Brian Ó Conchubhair ("Novel in Irish" 227) noted that in the period since 1984 "a little improvement has occurred" with regard to a greater [End Page 17] proliferation of women fiction writers in Irish. Since the publication of his essay the "improvement" mentioned has continued, and there are increasing numbers of women fiction writers in Irish. For all of this slow-growing visibility of female writers in Irish, however, the fact remains that the majority of contemporary Irish-language fiction writers active since the 1980s—in particular, novelists from Irish-speaking regions—have been male. More importantly in the context of this essay and masculinities studies, the writing of these individuals has focused to a large extent on the male subject, on men's life experiences, on their interactions with women, and on various expressions and themes related to masculinity. Among contemporary Gaeltacht fiction writers who explore different versions of masculinity and the male subject, one finds works by Micheál Ó Conghaile, Pádraig Ó Cíobháin, Joe Steve Ó Neachtain, Pádraig Standún, and Pádraig Breathnach. Yet apart from Sarah McKibben's comprehensive study of masculinities in bardic poetry, Endangered Masculinities in Irish Poetry, 1540–1780 (2010), there have been no critical studies of masculinities in contemporary Irish-language prose writing. This absence of criticism contrasts with interdisciplinary critical studies by scholars on Irish masculinities in English-language literature and culture in Ireland (Magennis and Mullan 2011). For instance, Debbie Ging (2013) has carried out critical research on masculinities in Irish cinema, and Brian Singleton (2011) has done work on masculinities in the contemporary Irish theatre. The dearth of critical work on masculinities in Irish-language literature also stands in contrast to critical studies carried out internationally on both the male-authored novel, such as Alice Ferrebe's 2005 study, Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction, 1950–2000, and on masculinities and men in other genres. The writer and scholar Alan Titley ("Saol is A Thuistí" 329) has described much of the feminist critique of Irish-language literature that took place in the 1990s and its focus on the dearth of female prose writers in Irish as concerning itself with "cad-nach-bhfuil-ann" (that which does not exist). It is highly contestable whether the dearth of female prose writers in Irish precludes examination and debate about the subject or discussion as to the possible reasons for the lack of female authors. Nevertheless, differences in the representations of men and women in Irish literature have prompted comment in other [End Page 18] studies. For example, Máirín Nic Eoin and Aisling Ní Dhonnchadha (12) noted in 2008 in a study of emigration in Irish-language literature that there was a marked difference between the portrayals of women's and men's experiences of emigration in modern Irish literature: "Tá sé suimiúil freisin go dtagann léiriú na litríochta le fianaise na staire a dhearbhaíonn nárbh ionann meon na mban agus meon na bhfear i dtaobh na...

Eric Gidal . Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age. Under the Sign of Nature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 226. $39.50 (cloth).

Eric Gidal . Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age. Under the Sign of Nature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 226. $39.50 (cloth). - Volume 56 Issue 1

Mac Cárthaigh, Eoin, (ed.): The art of bardic poetry. A new edition of Irish grammatical tracts I.

Mac Cárthaigh, Eoin, (ed.): The art of bardic poetry. A new edition of Irish grammatical tracts I.

Myth and Historiography: One Hundred and Sixty Years of Madog and the Madogwys

This essay examines texts in both English and Welsh from the period 1580–1740 which present versions of the ‘history’ of Madog, the Welsh prince who was believed to have sailed to America in 1170 and whose venture supposedly led to the creation of a Welsh-American colony or nation. One main line of inquiry focuses on ways in which early modern writers referenced and adapted various aspects of the medieval Welsh literary tradition, including bardic poetry, prophecy and the historiographical tradition of the Brutiau. Also of concern is the manner in which the Madog legend was used to articulate the relationship between the Welsh language and national identity.

Ossianic unconformities: bardic poetry in the industrial age

In Ossianic Unconformities Eric Gidal introduces the idiosyncratic publications of a group of nineteenth-century Scottish eccentrics who sought to establish the authenticity of the epic poetry of Ossian, created by James Macpherson and presented as genuine translations of a fictionalized thirdcentury Caledonian bard. Through promotion, evasion, and confrontation, these writings indirectly came to record the massive changes being wrought upon Scottish and Irish lands by British industrialization. Combining environmental and industrial histories with the reception of the poems of Ossian, Ossianic Unconformities unites literary history and book studies with geography, cartography, and geology to present and consider imaginative responses to environmental catastrophe.

Gnosis, a Spark

Ihad started to write poetry around fourteen or fifteen years of age and latched onto it like a limpet in the light of my being otherwise a fair to average student- with the occasional flare for something that approximated to an originality of expression. Here was archaeology of the spirit and i had uncovered ancient avenues and the past came welling up to meet me in parallel time. it was like standing upon the horizon and feeling the transports of an illuminated vision sweeping 360 degrees. this world was sacred, yes-but peopled by a multitude of possibilities that might be gods, a pagan world and a belief or gnosis that is free f lowing. We are as living-beings the sum of primal atmospherics and visions coterminous with our temporal and present lives.Each poet, working within the tradition must, given the allotted time-span, locate and make sense of it all for as long as the poet is functioning and prescient, and must continuously return that which is received from the world back into the world, but charged, reality invigorated by vision. ego-based reportage (beware the presiding i) has nothing to do with poetry-if anything, it is visigothic and destructive of one's ability to appreciate and recognize the genuine article. Any third-rate pretender with a few party tricks can draw a crowd. there are many examples of where this seeking is evident and original; i sought intimations of what i felt, mortal or otherwise, in the more obscure works of david Lindsay, The Devil's Tor, for instance, and George Macdonald's Lilith, though these symbolist works came some time later. earlier, however, i had looked at the meditations of Thomas a Kempis, the essays of Francis Bacon, the dialogues of plato, and most of the plays of George Bernard shaw.At this time, the most inf luential book that truly effected me with its rare piquancy of thought was the WWi letters of teilhard de Chardin; his The Making of a Mind: Letters from a Soldier-Priest, 1914-1918. For an eighteen- or nineteen-yearold, this was the lifting of a veil and was quickly followed by his Phenomenon of Man-including his plangent poem, Hymn of the Universe-and Le Milieu Divin. this led me onto a sampling of Henri Bergson and his Dreams, and a text on Mariolatry and faith, from which i appreciated his definition of an agnostic as one who walks an intellectual tightrope. then H. G. Wells's The Anatomy of Frustration: A Modern Synthesis, published in 1936, which in an inverted sort of way, probably owes something to Robert Burton's three-volume treatise, Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1893, and this i had also read-plus a smattering of the metaphysical writings of Francis Herbert Bradley (1846-1924) and his work, Appearance and Reality, probably via t. s. eliot, who by 1916 completed a dissertation on the British philosopher titled Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley.All through this process, i was reading the poems (more bardic than beatific) of Gerald Manly Hopkins and thomas Hardy. thomas Merton's Elected Silence (his title borrowed from the Hopkins poem) and Seeds of Contemplation were a few early influences. i followed the scent where other such coincidences are famously explored as a coded system (The Battle of the Trees) in Robert Graves's The White Goddess, and early irish bardic poetry, but that came much later and has remained a continuing interest. And i tracked with fascination the ancient lineage of the chromosome with J. B. s. Haldane back to wheat seeds found in 4,000-year-old egyptian tombs, whose work i had discovered (ignoring the communist tomes of Lenin, etc., party interpretations of shakespeare, etc., and dialectical materialism) in my father's old chest of books stored in the old weatherboard bach out the back.And caught up in this drag net of Russian, principally socialist literature-i discovered the folk tales of Gogol and the poems of Aleksandr Blok and Vladimir Mayakovsky. i still possess the last-Mayakovsky and His Poetry, compiled by Herbert Marshall, the pilot press, London, 1945. …

Varia III. Some corrigenda to A Bardic miscellany

VARIA III Some corrigenda to A Bardic miscellany The texts of ABM were lightly edited by me over a number of years, and when I visit them today I am occasionally confronted with errors based on my own (not my co-editor’s) misunderstanding of the material. I am happy to see that these errors are being corrected by editors of the poems, or of extracts of the poems, contained in the volume. While working on the article in this volume of Ériu on the celebration of the wife in Classical verse (see pp 13768 above), I noticed a number of such errors which it will be appropriate to correct here. For the most part they involve failure on my part to identify a woman’s father’s name, or her maiden name, which research for that article showed was the standard way of referring to, or introducing, married women in this poetry (see pp 1436). In the iargcomharc which is ABM 90.19, for example, as it stands, there is no identification, beyond the name Caitilı́n, of the wife of Éinrı́ (mac Briain) Ó Néill ($1471), and the internal rhyme with cuachmı́n in the first couplet is absent; the text of the first line should read Ingen Ruaidhrı́ nár char cisti, and this both satisfies the metre and meets the convention of identifying the woman by her father’s Christian name. The otherwise unintelligible tuirrı́ of ABM 334.10b should read Tuirrı́ (Siobhán tuigseanach Tuirrı́) that is, Joan Terry, first wife of Sior Doimnic Sairséal (Dominick Sarsfield). Again, the mudhar of ABM 88.30a, 221.34b and 396.27b, and the diúidigh, mugharaigh and dealbhnuigh of ABM 191.9b and d, should all be upper-case, as in the Mughar in ABM 426.1a and the Mughor in Gabhaidh mo shuirghe, a Shior Lúcáis (RIA 744 (A/v/2), ‘Dillon Duanaire’, 20a, q. 31a). The woman in question, Siobhán Mudhar, or Jane Moore,1 was wife of Lúcás Dı́olmhain/ Lucas Dillon and mother of the Roibeard who is said in ABM 191 to be descended from Dı́olmhainigh and Diúidigh (Tuites) and Mugharaigh (Moores) and Dealbhnaigh and Brianaigh and Búrcaigh and Carthaigh and Gearaltaigh.2 The same Roibeard Dı́olmhain’s wife is identified in the iargcomhairc to ABM 191 and 433 as Róis Dı́olmhain, but as she was a Dillon by birth, these references are not in breach of the convention in Bardic poetry of using the wife’s maiden-name, as argued in the paper. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3318/ERIU.2015.65.6 Ériu LXV (2015) 177178 # Royal Irish Academy 1 Note that the form Mudhar distinguishes her surname from the Irish surname Ó Mórdha, also anglicised Moore. I am assuming that the form reflects the vocalisation of internal lenited d and g; see the discussion in SNG 352.2.12. In Classical verse, of course, the internal consonant is to be pronounced and the name is disyllabic. 2 Siobhán herself is celebrated in ABM 426, which may be a detached iargcomharc, in which she is said to be related to every noble Irishman (read do foighreadh a fuil in 426.2c) and every earl in Ireland; similar statements will be found in the iargcomhairc to her in the other poems referred to. In 426 her mother’s name is Máire; her father is Seón in ABM 396.28a. In ABM 408.34d, fáoiteach should be read Faoiteach, the reference being to Frances White, wife of Tomás Dı́olmhain, fourth Viscount Dillon of Costello-Gallen. DAMIAN McMANUS Department of Irish, Trinity College Dublin 178 DAMIAN MCMANUS ...

The Political Context of <i>Cath Muighe Tuireadh</i>, the Early Modern Irish Version of the Second Battle of Magh Tuireadh

Two versions of the Second Battle of Magh Tuireadh are extant: an Old Irish version in British Library Harleian MS 5280 and an Early Modern Irish version in RIA MS 24 P 9. Through an analysis of the latter text and its manuscript context, and drawing on the evidence of Bardic poetry and other historical sources, this paper attempts to identify the political context in which the Early Modern Irish version was composed. It is argued that it was produced c. 1398 for a branch of the Mac Diarmada family and that it reflects the contemporary political struggles in which they were involved.

THE POLITICAL CONTEXT OF "CATH MUIGHE TUIREADH", THE EARLY MODERN IRISH VERSION OF THE SECOND BATTLE OF MAGH TUIREADH

Two versions of the Second Battle of Magh Tuireadh are extant: an Old Irish version in British Library Harleian MS 5280 and an Early Modern Irish version in RIA MS 24 P 9. Through an analysis of the latter text and its manuscript context, and drawing on the evidence of Bardic poetry and other historical sources, this paper attempts to identify the political context in which the Early Modern Irish version was composed. It is argued that it was produced c. 1398 for a branch of the Mac Diarmada family and that it reflects the contemporary political struggles in which they were involved.

Surnames and Scions: Adjectival Qualification of Christian Names and Cognomina in Classical Irish Poetry

Given the importance attached in Bardic poetry to the nobility and genealogy of the patrons addressed, it is perhaps not surprising that surnames and words denoting 'descendant', whether remote or recent, figure largely in the genre. This paper will explore some unique or unusual features of the meaning and morphology of the words mac 'son' and o 'grandson', and will move on to an examination of adjectival qualification of these words and the personal names with which they combine to form surnames, sept-names and loose designations of remote ancestry. A survey of the combination of preposition + surname (the ris O nDomhnaill construction) is also included.

‘Y Ganrif Fawr’? Piety, Literature and Patronage in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Wales

This essay offers a reconsideration of the idea of ‘The Great Century’ of Welsh literature (1435–1535) and related assumptions of periodization for understanding the development of lay piety and literature in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Wales. It focuses on the origins of these ideas in (and their debt to) modern Welsh nationalist and Protestant and Catholic confessional thought, and their significance for the interpretation of Welsh literature and history. In addition, it questions their accuracy and usefulness in the light of contemporary patterns of manuscript production, patronage and devotional content of Welsh books of poetry and prose produced by the laity during and after this ‘golden age’ of literature. Despite the existence of over a hundred printed works in Welsh by 1660, the vernacular manuscript tradition remained robust; indeed, ‘native culture for the most part continued to be transmitted as it had been transmitted for centuries, orally or in manuscript’ until the eighteenth century. Bardic poetry’s value as a fundamental source for the history of medieval Ireland and Wales has been rightly acknowledged. However, more generally, Welsh manuscripts of both poetry and prose must be seen as a crucial historical source. They tell us much about contemporary views, interests and priorities, and offer a significant window onto the devotional world of medieval and early modern Welsh men and women. Drawing on recent work on Welsh literature, this paper explores the production and patronage of such books and the dynamics of cultural and religious change. Utilizing National Library of Wales Llanstephan MS 117D as a case study, it also examines their significance and implications for broader trends in lay piety and the nature of religious change in Wales.