Welsh Journals

REVIEWS A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ENGLISH HISTORY TO 1485. Based on The Sources and Literature of English History from the earliest times to about 1485, by Charles Gross. Edited by Edgar B. Graves. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975. Pp. 1,103. £ 20. For many years the 'Bibliography of British History' issued under the direction of the American Historical Association and the Royal Historical Society had the look of a monumental torso which flouted Aristotelian conventions in being all middle and no beginning or end. But now, with the near-simultaneous addition to the three volumes covering the period 1485-1789 (first published in 1928, 1933, 1951) of three further volumes concerning the period 1789-1914 and the period before 1485, the series has taken on a more classically monumental style. The volume under review, although designed to take its place in that series, is in certain respects a special case, as its title signals. It is the product of a long though interrupted enterprise, beginning with the bibliography published by Charles Gross in 1900, revised and reissued in 1915 after Gross's death by his colleagues at Harvard. In 1935 an editorial board was appointed under the joint auspices of the Royal Historical Society and the Mediaeval Academy of America to conduct a further revision aimed at integrating 'Gross' with the larger scheme launched in 1909 under the stimulus of his achievement. In 1956, when the American Historical Association (thanks to the Ford Foundation) was able to re-activate the scheme, Edgar B. Graves was appointed to continue the project of revamping Gross on a financial and organizational footing which held out greater hope of accomplishment. The hope has now been realized. In a number of ways this protracted gestation has moulded the outcome. Gross set himself the task of remedying a lack in the apparatus of scholarship which the work of German and French nineteenth-century bibliographers made increasingly obvious, and he aimed to do so by providing a survey of both 'sources' and 'literature'. The fact that, throughout the twentieth century, the big battalions of scholarly effort and resources have been directed towards extending and revising, but not radically remodelling, Gross's work has given our historical biblio- graphy a shape different from that of some other countries. The fact that there is for medieval England no equivalent to such continuing enterprises as the Wattenbach Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen or the Molinier Sources de VHistoire de France may be one consequence of the Gross tradition, and one to be weighed against the strong arguments for as close a bibliographical juxtaposition as possible of secondary writing to the sources (a juxtaposition which Professor Graves has tightened). Another consequence, to which attention may appositely be drawn in these pages, is the adjective English, not British, in the title. On this Professor Graves writes thus: 'Like previous editions [the volume] includes for the pre- Norman period some fundamental studies on Welsh and Irish history; but it comprises for the period from 1066-1485 only those studies about non-English areas which relate directly to England. The Bibliography of