Welsh Journals

ship. A great deal of care has gone into its making and one approaches it in grateful mood. But gratitude is quickly cooled by the preface. Intensive search for articles 'in a wide range of periodicals' was, we are told, con- ducted 'up to and through the volume for 1958'; examination of issues for the next five years was confined to a smaller (but unspecified) list of journals. 'For books, the emphasis has been on those published before 1961 or 1962, although a few later titles have been inserted'. The bibliography, on its appearance in December 1970, was thus at best eight, at worst twelve, years out of date. Many of the later works are given in small print, as addenda to a previous book, and the selection of those works appearing after 1961 is capricious. Thus, Christopher Hill's Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965) appears as a subsidiary to his English Revolution (1940), which marks a very eccentric sort of emphasis; neither his Century of Revolution (1961) nor his Society and Puritanism (1964), so far as I can tell, appears at all. As an aid to research or to teaching this volume is of very restricted value; of the books and articles that I set my pupils on the period 1603-42 only a very little over half appear here. Compared with Conyers Read's bibliography of the Tudor period this enterprise looks distinctly dilatory. The second edition of Conyers Read appeared in 1959, based on 'an exhaustive survey of the material in print to 1 January 1957', with some later entries. The editor and the Clarendon Press can be congratulated on a large, handsome, finely-printed volume, and on little else. But they may deserve sympathy more than censure. In the present condition of academic life, with the scholarly harvest growing year by year until the problem of its storage and disposal rivals that of the American grain surplus, any bibliography is bound to be hopelessly incomplete. We now need an altogether different approach. The Royal Historical Society, which has sponsored this series, should consider some other possibilities: the frequent production of duplicated abstracts or the annual issue and sale of bibliographical cards might serve the purpose. At the very least we might hope for supplementary lists similar to those printed at intervals in the Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies. Welsh historians are now excellently provided with aids to scholarship and they might well teach some lessons to their English colleagues. At any rate, we need to find something to replace this type of ceremonious volume. PENRY WILLIAMS New College, Oxford DADLEUON METHODISTIAETH GYNNAR. Gan Griffith T. Roberts. Gwasg John Penry, Abertawe, 1970. Tt. 135. 65 c.n. Ymdrinia'r gyfrol hon a chyfnod cyfyngedig, sef blynyddoedd cynnar y Ddiwygiad Methodistaidd yn Lloegr a Chymru. Canolbwyntia'r awdur