Anita Guerrini: "The Land of True Britons: Edward Lhwyd’s Survey of Wales"

Hybrid (in person and on Zoom, to register for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se)

Abstract:

In 1695, after completing the chapters on Wales for a new edition of Camden’s Britannia, the Welsh naturalist Edward Lhwyd (1660-1709) published A Design of a British Dictionary, Historical and Geographical; With an Essay, Intituled, Archaeologia Britannica: and a Natural History of Wales, outlining a multi-volume project for which he sought patronage. Two years later Lhwyd distributed 4000 copies of ‘Parochial Queries’ for potential informants. Predecessors for such queries included Robert Boyle’s ‘General Heads’, Lhwyd’s mentor Robert Plot, the Scottish physician Robert Sibbald, and queries from the 1650s on Irish resettlement. Lhwyd argued that the Welsh were the indigenous inhabitants of Britain, which had been colonized over time by the Romans and others. The first volume of Archaeologia Britannica (1707) compared Welsh with other Celtic languages to make this case. Lhwyd’s project was one of preservation and documentation against English cultural and linguistic hegemony.