Welsh Journals

justifiable to cut a few trenches here and there: this only creates difficulties. Greater efforts are needed on larger areas. This means more co-ordination of effort by all those concerned, so that such resources as are available for research are used with the greatest efficiency. The new edition must at least make one pause before making any judgements, but it should do much more in inspiring and directing more effort towards unravelling these difficult problems. GRAHAM WEBSTER Birmingham THE MATTER OF BRITAIN AND THE PRAISE OF SPAIN. By Stephen Reckert. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1967. Pp. 37. 3s. 6d. Those who listened to Professor Reckert's inaugural lecture, delivered at University College, Cardiff, in 1959, will remember it as a notable academic performance, a brilliant display of learning which spanned many languages, literatures and centuries. After his departure from Cardiff for London he has published it as 'a valedictory'. It has also been substantially rewritten, various references and footnotes have been added, and all the quotations are given in full in the original languages. Professor Recker's subject is 'the history of a panegyric' or, to be more exact, of two panegyrics. These are, respectively, the praise of Britain in the opening passage of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae ('Britannia, insularum optima .), and the praise of Spain found in the Historia de Regibus Gothorum, Wandalorum et Suevorum of Isidore of Seville and, six centuries later, in the works of Lucas, bishop of Tuy, and Don Rodrigo, archbishop of Toledo. The two traditions of panegyric, though parallel, developed separately and independently. In this lecture Geoffrey's debt to his predecessors Bede and Gildas is explored and the ultimate source of the tradition which he exemplified is shown to lie in the praise of Italy in the second book of the Georgics. The laudes Italiae are then shown to be also the source, through Pliny's Natural History, of the praise of Spain, for Isidore 'begins his Historia de Regibus with a eulogy of Spain, consisting of a direct graft of Pliny's double panegyric on to the rootstock of Virgil's praise of Italy, and destined to found an enduring tradition in Spanish letters'. Thus the two traditions, though separate, are linked in their origins. In the thirteenth century a further link, which completed the circle, was provided by the incorporation in the Grande et General Estoria, compiled under the direction of Alfonso X, of the greater part of the first three chapters of Geoffrey's Historia. Curiously, the. only substantial section excluded was precisely the passage in praise of Britain. But Professor Reckert feels certain that, in writing of Spain, the compilers had Geoffrey (and Gildas) as well as Isidore very much in mind.